Equity Bank, Kenya’s fastest growing commercial bank with a regional foot print in five East African nations, has made it first acquisition outside the region by buying a controlling stake in a Congolese lender.

The largest bank in Kenya by customer numbers said on Tuesday it had bought 79 percent of ProCredit Bank Congo, the fourth largest bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with more than 170,000 small enterprise customers and a total asset of about $200 million, Bloomberg reported.

Equity Bank’s chief executive James Mwangi told reporters at a press briefing in Nairobi that DRC was one among 10 new markets the bank was looking to expand into. The lender has set aside about $2 billion to enable it triple the number of countries it operates in over the next decade.

“In terms of entry, we have decided this country(DRC) is too big to do a Greenfield. We have decided to acquire a bank,” Reuters quoted Mwangi saying, adding that the bank had allocated $60 million to the DRC project.

The bank also plans to expand to Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria and  Ethiopia. It already operates in Uganda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Rwanda.