At it's onset, the decade that led to the millennium was marked by a very low penetration of financial services in Kenya. Today, thanks to the mobile phone, this is quickly changing. In a country of 40 million people with 75% of it having direct access to a mobile phone, the financial services landscape significantly differs to the one of the nineties.

As a child, my friends and I underwent different phases of the ‘finders keepers’ phenomenon. For a while, we believed that if you found something and nobody claimed it, it was yours. Then one day, a new kid in the neighbourhood told us that lost property was guarded by the powers of witchcraft and that if we kept it, the owner’s ghost would haunt us. Our lawmakers must not have been sent that memo.