Payment methods in Kenya

The market

Kenya is the home of mobile money. M-Pesa, launched by Safaricom in 2007, is how most Kenyans keep and move money, and online it carries about 80% of payments by value (Central Bank of Kenya, 2025): the checkout shows a till or paybill number, or pushes a prompt to the phone, and the payer confirms with a PIN. Settlement to the provider is instant and there is no chargeback. Visa and Mastercard serve the banked part of the market, travel and foreign shoppers, and settle at T+1 through the acquirer. The Central Bank of Kenya licenses payment service providers under the National Payment System Act; the licensed provider is the party in the payment chain.

How Tranzify clients launch

A licensed client asks for the Kenyan integrations and enables Flutterwave or Paystack from the catalogue under its own contracts and licence; the platform runs under the client’s registration and domain, the licensed local provider performs the intermediation, and Tranzify supplies the software and the integrations. Both providers cover M-Pesa, Visa and Mastercard, with payouts; M-Pesa is enabled on a client’s request. The checkout shows M-Pesa first and a card form second; routing by method picks the provider, two providers cover each other on a failure, and a card decline cascades to M-Pesa. Every payment is journaled for five years, and the client’s system receives the final status by webhook.

M-Pesa

An M-Pesa payment is confirmed on the phone, so the orchestration keeps the order open until the provider reports the confirmation and then calls the webhook. The same wallet takes payouts: a withdrawal to a Kenyan phone number runs through Flutterwave or Paystack and arrives in seconds. Refunds are not part of the M-Pesa flow in the catalogue; the provider handles a refund as a payout.