Not about your books. Not about your inventory. About payments, and how fast the ground under them is shifting
in Kenya right now.
If you run a business here and haven’t checked in on what’s changing in how money moves, you’re already behind.
Here’s what happened just in the last two weeks alone.
The Central Bank just made it easier to pay for government securities from your phone
On 17 August 2026, the Central Bank of Kenya activated a mobile payment feature on its DhowCSD platform,
letting investors settle successful Treasury bill and bond bids of up to Ksh 250,000 directly via M-Pesa. No more
routing through a bank branch to complete a government securities purchase. CBK says more mobile platforms will
be added beyond M-Pesa in future.
Why should a business owner care about Treasury bonds? Because this is a signal, not a one-off. CBK is
systematically moving every layer of financial infrastructure it controls onto mobile rails. If the central bank itself is
prioritizing mobile-first settlement for its own securities market, that tells you exactly where the rest of the
payments ecosystem is heading, and how fast.
Kenya’s fintech sector isn’t slowing down, it’s maturing
Kenya remains Africa’s top fintech hub alongside Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt, and the undisputed leader in
East Africa. Around 85% of Kenyan adults now have access to a formal financial account, up from just 26% in 2006,
largely on the back of mobile money. There are now roughly 450 fintech companies operating across payments,
lending, insurtech, and agritech in Kenya alone.
But here’s the part that actually matters for you as a business owner: the warning signs of falling behind on
payment infrastructure are well documented at this point, manual reconciliation, delayed payouts, poor
permissions control, recurring payment failures, weak audit trails, and a rising number of support tickets about
money. Industry analysts are blunt about it: these aren’t admin annoyances anymore. They’re scaling risks.
Open banking is coming, and it will change how you get paid
CBK has been running open banking pilots that are now heading toward real-world use. Once live, banks and
fintechs will be able to share customer data directly (with consent), enabling direct account-to-account payments
without the friction and cost layers we’re used to today. For a business owner, that eventually means cheaper
transaction costs and faster settlement, but only for businesses whose payment infrastructure is actually ready to
plug into it when it arrives.
What this actually means for you
None of this is abstract policy news. It’s the direct answer to questions every growing Kenyan business eventually
asks:
1. Why did that payment take three days to clear?
2. Why are we still manually reconciling M-Pesa statements against invoices?
3. Why can’t we see, in real time, what’s been paid and what hasn’t?
4. Why does settling with a supplier in another country cost so much and take so long?
The businesses that will handle Kenya’s next fintech shift well are the ones who stop treating payments as a back-
office afterthought and start treating them as infrastructure, something built to scale with the business, not
something patched together with three different apps and a spreadsheet.
Where Marasoft Pay comes in
This is exactly the gap Marasoft Pay exists to close for Kenyan businesses, one platform to manage collections,
payouts, and real-time payment visibility, without the manual reconciliation headaches or the blind spots that
come from juggling multiple disconnected systems.
As Kenya’s payment infrastructure keeps evolving, and it clearly is, the businesses that win won’t be the ones
reacting to each change individually. They’ll be the ones with the right foundation already in place.
Ready to simplify how your business sends, receives, and settles payments? Visit marasoftpaykenya.com to get
started. For more insights on payments and digital finance in Kenya, explore more articles on the Marasoft Pay blog.