Noelah Lugongo spent a decade finding fault with bank systems. Today, she is responsible for keeping them running.
On a Monday morning, before the rest of the office has properly settled in, Noelah Lugongo is usually already in a meeting with her IT team. Every week, without fail, she sits down with the people managing Ecobank Tanzania’s technology infrastructure to hear what has changed and what is coming. For a woman who spent more than a decade as an auditor, the habit makes sense.
“Technology keeps on changing every day, so they need to keep you up to speed. I need to know what is happening in the IT space. If I get the chance to attend forums for IT-related topics, I attend them,” she said.
The question people tend to ask her is how does an accountant end up running technology? Noelah trained as a chartered accountant and spent nearly 11 years in audit, serving for five years at Deloitte before moving to KPMG. During those years, her clients were almost exclusively financial services companies: commercial banks, microfinance institutions, and, on two occasions, the central bank. By the time she joined Ecobank Tanzania in 2016 as senior internal auditor, she had spent years asking the same questions she would later be responsible for answering.
“I moved from managing audits to now needing to address the risk. The risk is mine now. I need to sit down and ask myself how to address this. That shift was the biggest thing,” she said.
In 2018, Noelah was promoted to head of internal audit, running the department for four years. She used her knowledge gain and ISACA membership throughout this period, sitting in on audit assignments that covered IT systems directly. By April 2022, when the promotion to head of operations and technology arrived, she had spent 11 years on the other side of the table from the people she would now be managing.
Learning all the time
The new role brought a long list of things Noelah had never done. She had never negotiated with vendors, supervising customers’ transfers, cards services & digital platforms support, projects & integrations execution, cyber security services, overseeing business continuity, cash management & branch operations, physical channels like ATM cash replenishment, Point of Services (POS) operations for instance.
“I believe that everything is possible. What I do is ask myself whether there are people who can do this. If so, then I should be able to do it. I just need to strategise and see what I can do differently. I have to identify what I was not learning that I am supposed to learn now,” she explained.
Her first move was an attachment at Ecobank Ghana, one of the group’s largest affiliates. She spent a month with both the operations team and e-Process, the group subsidiary that provides technology services to all 33 Ecobank country operations. In May 2023 and October 2025, she participated in Ecobank Zimbabwe and Ecobank Ghana audits respectively, with the group audit team, this time as the guest reviewer at the position of head of operations and technology, benchmarking her counterparts rather than auditing them. Through the reviews she installed a rhythm of close contact with her IT team that she has maintained ever since.
Part of what drives this urgency is Tanzania’s banking environment. The central bank is constantly updating its requirements, all with regulatory deadlines. The banks that respond fastest move on, while those that lag behind play catch-up.
“You need to talk to other banks to get to know what they are doing. Maybe I want to implement a project in two months. But another bank has done it in three weeks. It’s important to find out what they are doing differently that I am not doing,” she said.
The people management dimension of the transition was more demanding than the technical one. Noelah’s response has been to invest heavily in the 30 people she manages. She now runs seven units: IT, card and digital operations support, retail operations, cash management, trade and treasury operations, information security and business continuity, and Ecobank Business Services (procurement & logistics). For this reason, she introduced a rotation plan within units so that no function depends on one individual. She also arranged exchange programmes so that staff returned with a broader frame of reference.
Building management skills
The head of her card unit spent nine months on assignment in Ecobank Kenya and one month in Ecobank South Sudan working alongside the operations team. When she came back, she had a wider frame of reference and exuded confidence from having operated in a larger market. Noelah treats these placements as a deliberate investment. She expects people to return with something concrete to apply. The risk she was guarding against was one she had seen many times as an auditor. In her experience, a unit that runs well only because one person is in it falls apart the moment that person leaves.
“I can now go on leave for two or three weeks and I am okay, because I know things will continue. As I mentioned I spent three weeks in Ecobank Ghana for the audit assignment and operations were running smoothly. I have tried so much to build management skills in these people, in terms of decision-making, managing people, ownership and accountability. If I develop them to be strong, some things will end under them without needing to come to me,” she said.
Alongside her operational and technology units, she supervises a transformation squad tasked with identifying customer pain points and designing solutions. Most of what it produces, she reveals, is tech-related.
“The customer wants to come to the branch and open an account in one or two minutes, not 30 or 40 minutes the way it used to be. We are looking at how we revamp our technology space for our systems to accommodate and address customer needs very quickly. How are we using our systems to identify customer behaviour?” she said.
One area where this is already taking shape is automation. The bank has deployed Artificial Intelligence (AI) companions across its staff tools like Copilot and uses a chatbot on its mobile app to handle routine customer queries. In back-office processing, robotic process automation now handles reconciliations that previously required daily manual work. A reconciliation that takes a person a full day should take a machine thirty minutes.
Staying active
In October 2023, Noelah was selected and admitted to the Women’s Leadership Programme at Uongozi Institute, which operates under the President’s Office. The six-month programme attracted more than 700 applications from across Africa and brought together Tanzanian and non-Tanzanian professionals from government institutions, banking, tourism, construction, oil and gas, and other sectors. The programme included both in-person and online training sessions, as well as coaching and mentoring. Each participant was paired with a coach and a mentor. Noelah’s coach was a director of a consulting firm, while her mentor was her Managing Director. The experience also, quite unexpectedly, introduced her to books.
“I never used to like reading books. It wasn’t part of my DNA, to be very frank. But when I joined this programme, one of the things they introduced us to was book reading. From there I started building interest. I would borrow one book from my colleague, read it, return it and take the next one,” she noted.
Noelah approaches self-development with the same curiosity she applies to everything else. She has since worked through a Harvard Business School series on emotional intelligence cover to cover, Daily Leadership insights etc. She creates time to read before the day starts or during the working day, reads on planes and in airports instead of watching films. Immediately after completing the Uongozi Institute programme, she also decided to enrol in an MBA.
“I had various sessions with my MD as the mentor to understand what was going on and to bring me up to speed on the leadership side. That is when I identified that I also needed the business fundamentals. That is why I registered for an MBA at the University of Wolverhampton. I am doing that programme currently, just to bring me up to speed on the business side,” she explained.
She is keen to understand the commercial side of the decisions she is now expected to make. She is also enrolled in a personal development app she found on Instagram that shares content on leadership presence, teaching skills such as communication etc. Her goal is 80 percent engagement.
Noelah also prioritises personal wellbeing, finding ways to stay active despite a demanding schedule. Ecobank Tanzania has a runners’ club with a target of 100 kilometres a month, and Noelah is a member, carrying her kit in the car for evening walks along Dar es Salaam's streets and attending gym. Although she used to participate in marathons, work schedules have made that harder.
“I also participate in community activities. We have women groups outside where I contribute every month and I used to be the leader in one of the groups. In our community church, I serve as the treasurer for the parish segment and also as the treasurer for the Catholic women’s group in our community. In all these things I am doing outside, I am also using my knowledge. The community activities, the church. So the work I have done is not only in the office.”
