🇰🇪 Payments in Kenya

Kenya invented the mobile-money playbook, and it still runs on it. M-Pesa (Safaricom) handles the overwhelming majority of consumer payments — mobile-money flows in 2024 were equivalent to roughly half of national GDP — with Airtel Money a distant but growing second. Merchants accept it through Lipa na M-Pesa (Buy Goods tills and PayBill shortcodes), and online the standard is an STK Push via Safaricom's Daraja API: the customer just approves a prompt on their phone with a PIN. A Kenyan checkout without M-Pesa leaves most of the market on the table.

Bank rails fill in around mobile money. PesaLink, operated by IPSL for the Kenya Bankers Association, moves real-time account-to-account transfers between 80+ institutions, and the Central Bank of Kenya is building a national Fast Payment System to interconnect banks, wallets and PSPs in one switch. Cards — almost entirely Visa and Mastercard — skew to affluent, urban and corporate spend and to recurring billing; they matter for high-ticket and subscription commerce but are a secondary instrument for the mass market.

Installments are now a regulated, growing category: LipaLater, Safaricom's M-Pesa-embedded Faraja, and device-financing players like M-Kopa lead, with the CBK bringing BNPL under formal licensing in 2024. For an enterprise merchant the work is operational — shilling settlement and FX, mobile-money wallet limits that shape high-value baskets, and the reconciliation differences between Till and PayBill flows — which we handle on the local side.