Standard Chartered Bank Kenya has paid pension dues to 522 of 629 former employees who won a long-running retirement benefits dispute, following a Supreme Court decision delivered in September 2025.
By May 2026, the bank had paid 83 per cent of the claimants, while the remaining cases were pending submission or verification of the required documentation.
The payments follow fresh retirement-benefit demands from former employees who were not part of the original 16-year legal battle that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling.
The lender said in November 2025 that it had incurred Sh7.2 billion in settling the entitlements of the 629 claimants and does not expect to make further provisions for the group.
“Eighty-three percent of the 629 claimants have already been paid, while for the remainder, we are waiting for them to submit the required documentation or are authenticating the documents,” said Birju Sanghrajka, the chief executive officer of Standard Chartered Bank Kenya.
“Within three weeks of receiving the ruling, we were ready to pay, and we have been complying fully with that. We do not expect any further provisions with respect to the 629 claimants.”
The former employees won their case after courts found that the bank had incorrectly calculated their pension benefits when it changed its pension scheme in 1999.
Standard Chartered and its pension fund moved to the Supreme Court after losing at the Court of Appeal in March 2025. The appellate court had upheld a 2023 High Court decision in favour of the employees.
The bank had sought to delay payment, but the Supreme Court declined to intervene, leaving the lower court decisions in favour of the former employees intact.
The bank is now facing similar claims from another group of former workers who were not included in the original case involving the 629 employees.
The new group, which consists of more than 600 former workers, is known as the “Non-629 Former Employees”.
In October 2025, the group filed 21 complaints with the Retirement Benefits Authority (RBA), seeking the same treatment and payments awarded to the original 629 claimants.
Before approaching the RBA, the former employees had asked the bank to extend the same payment terms to them.
In June 2026, the RBA directed the pension fund managers to review the new complaints and determine whether the former employees qualified under the tribunal’s decision.
The fund managers challenged the directive, arguing that reviewing the claims would impose significant costs on the pension fund as they continued to contest the RBA’s decision.
The pension fund managers later obtained a court order temporarily suspending the RBA’s instruction.
“We continue to work with our legal counsel and the RBA. We have seen submissions and claims filed with the RBA and are going through the process as guided. We will see how the process progresses,” Mr Sanghrajka said.
Before filing their complaints with the RBA, the former employees had approached the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in September 2025, asking it to require Standard Chartered Plc, the bank’s parent company, to address their concerns.
– By Salome Thiani
