A year after changing its name from PostBank Uganda, Pearl Bank has crossed UGX1 trillion in lending, giving the government-owned bank one of its clearest growth markers since the rebrand.
The loan book stood at about UGX760 billion at the end of 2025, according to the bank, meaning it has expanded by more than 30% this year. Pearl Bank Managing Director Julius Kakeeto attributes the growth partly to retained earnings and continued shareholder support, which have provided the capital needed to expand lending.
“Capital is like fuel. It keeps you on the road. It has enabled us to keep lending and keep growing our loan book,” Kakeeto says.
The size of the loan book is significant, but perhaps more revealing is where Pearl Bank is directing an increasing share of its money. Agriculture accounts for approximately 35% of the portfolio, and the bank says it is deliberately looking beyond primary production towards agro-industrialisation, processing, value addition and exports.
That is an important distinction in an economy where agriculture remains a major source of livelihoods, but much of the value from what Uganda produces is captured further along the chain. Financing a farmer to produce more is one part of the equation; financing the storage, machinery, processing, packaging, transport and export infrastructure around that production potentially creates a much wider economic effect.
Pearl Bank has participated in government financing programmes including the Agriculture Credit Facility and Small Business Recovery Fund and is increasingly aligning its lending with the government’s ATMS priorities covering agro-industrialisation, tourism, mineral development, and science, technology and innovation.
For the bank, this means trying to position itself not simply as a lender to agriculture, but as a financier of the businesses that can emerge around what Uganda produces.
Banking beyond the branch
The expansion of Pearl Bank’s loan book is happening alongside an equally significant change in how its customers are banking.
Five years ago, branches handled about 80% of the bank’s transactions. Today, that figure has fallen to approximately 8%, even as Pearl Bank says its overall transaction volumes have increased fivefold.
The shift reflects the growing role of mobile banking, agents and other self-service channels, particularly for a bank whose customer base extends well beyond Kampala and the country’s other major urban centres.
Its agency network has grown to more than 14,000 agents, according to the bank, with a target of approximately 20,000 and, eventually, an agent presence in every parish.
Wendi has become an important part of that expansion. The digital platform, which can be accessed by both smartphone and feature-phone users, has facilitated more than UGX3 trillion in Parish Development Model disbursements to over three million households, according to Pearl Bank.
Those figures give Wendi considerable reach, but they also point to the next opportunity for the bank. The long-term value of bringing millions of people onto a digital financial platform will depend partly on whether their relationship with the financial system continues beyond receiving a government disbursement — into saving, payments, borrowing and other financial services.
If that happens at scale, the platform could help Pearl Bank connect its financial inclusion mandate with its growing commercial banking business.
A bigger ambition for a homegrown bank
The transformation is particularly notable given where Pearl Bank has come from. Its heritage stretches back to the Post Office Savings Department before PostBank Uganda was incorporated in 1998 and later became a fully fledged commercial bank.
The Pearl Bank identity, introduced last year, was intended to give the institution a stronger national identity while allowing it to compete more broadly across retail, SME and corporate banking.
Kakeeto says the ambition is to build an indigenous institution that can grow commercially while maintaining a clear connection to Uganda’s development.
“We would like to see an indigenous or homegrown bank with a local identity that is at the forefront of fostering prosperity for Ugandans in real terms with measurable and quantifiable goals that deliver impact to Uganda’s economy,” he says.
That ambition makes the UGX1 trillion milestone more interesting than the number alone.
For Pearl Bank, continued balance-sheet growth will matter, but so will what happens to the capital once it leaves the bank: whether agricultural businesses move further into processing and value addition, whether SMEs grow into larger enterprises, whether more Ugandan businesses reach export markets and whether the millions of people being reached digitally become deeper participants in the formal financial system.
A year into the Pearl Bank identity, the bank has built considerable momentum. The next chapter will be about converting that scale into the kind of economic impact its new identity promises.
