National Bank of Kenya has recorded a profit after tax of KSh 2.39 Bn for the full year ended 31 December 2025, more than doubling the KSh 1.06 Bn posted in 2024 and marking the bank's strongest earnings since its KCB-era recapitalization.
- •The results are the first filed under Access Bank Plc, which completed its KSh 13.2 Bn acquisition of NBK from KCB Group in May 2025, priced at 1.25 times book value at end of December 2023.
- •The turnaround is built on cost discipline rather than revenue growth with total operating income rising a modest 2.2% to KSh 12.93 Bn, but total operating expenses falling 13.7% to KSh 10.02 Bn, bringing the cost to income ratio down to 77.5% from 91.7%.
- •Net interest income rose 5.8% to KSh 10.38 Bn, supported by a 33.3% decline in interest expense as the elevated funding cost environment of 2023 and 2024 unwound.
Bad loans provisioning dropped 37.0% to KSh 1.52 Bn as gross Non-Performing Loans halved to KSh 15.66 Bn, the lowest level since 2022.
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The balance sheet tells a more nuanced story with net loans dropping 32.3% to KSh 50.71 Bn, a KSh 24.16 Bn contraction and the sharpest single-year decline in the bank's recorded history, reflecting deliberate portfolio rationalization under the new owner. The capital freed from lending has moved into government securities, which rose to KSh 59.93 Bn, and CBK balances.
- •The liquidity ratio reached 65.3%, more than three times the 20% statutory minimum, an abnormally high figure that signals the bank is not yet redeploying deposits into loans at scale.
- •Customer deposits grew 7.8% to KSh 106.17 Bn while earnings per share more than doubled to KSh 0.88 from KSh 0.39.
- •Shareholders' funds strengthened to KSh 17.02 Bn, the highest equity base in the bank's history, and the core capital ratio improved to 13.7% from 9.0%.
The scale of the collapse that preceded the recovery
The 2025 numbers are best understood against the severity of what came before. NBK traded on the Nairobi Securities Exchange for decades as a state-affiliated institution.
Between 2005 and 2014, it delivered uninterrupted annual profits, growing total assets from just KSh 32.58 Bn to KSh 123.1 Billion, with profit after tax reaching KSh 2.02 Bn in 2010 and a cost to income ratio that touched 62% during that period. Those figures are bank-only and predate the Group reporting format adopted from 2013, but the trajectory was consistently positive.
The deterioration then began in 2015, when a KSh 3.72 Billion loan loss provision produced a pre-tax loss of KSh 1.64 Billion. Gross NPLs also surged from KSh 7.24 Billion in 2014 to KSh 29.99 Billion by 2016, equivalent to roughly half the net loan book at the time, driven by concentrated public sector lending gone bad and governance failures and by 2018, core capital had fallen below every statutory minimum. KCB Group completed a CBK-supervised share swap takeover in September 2019, and NBK was delisted from the NSE on 16 September 2019.
The KCB years brought recapitalization but uneven results. A KSh 3.49 Billion pre-tax loss in 2023, the worst in the bank's recorded history, triggered the sale process that ended with Access Bank.
Exit at a premium, integration underway
For KCB the exit was profitable with a KSh 3.1 Billion gain on the transaction, representing the difference between what KCB paid and capitalized versus what Access Bank paid, funded a special dividend of KSh 4 per share and lifted KCB's total 2025 payout to KSh 7 per share from KSh 3 in 2024.
For Access Bank, NBK provides immediate scale alongside its existing Kenya subsidiary. By September 2025, the two institutions had launched shared services across more than 100 combined branches, with full systems and operational integration ongoing.
