From digital to intelligent money: Inside Kenya’s next payments frontier

By Pauline Kairu

When over 140 players across Kenya’s payments ecosystem gathered in Nairobi on March 26 for Visa Connect Kenya 2026, a clear shift came into focus. The next phase of the country’s digital payments evolution will be defined not by access, but depth.

The question is no longer who can pay digitally, but how well and how often they do. Increasingly, the emphasis is on how seamlessly, securely and widely Kenyans are able to transact.

For years, Kenya has been held up as a global benchmark for digital finance, thanks largely to the rapid adoption of mobile money. But according to Visa’s Vice-President and General Manager for East Africa Chad Pollock, the next chapter will be shaped by how “deeply and intelligently these systems are used”.

“Kenya has already achieved something many markets are still working towards: Near universal familiarity with digital payments,” he said. “The next phase is less about access and more about depth and quality of use.”

At the heart of this shift is the push to digitise cash beyond peer-to-peer transactions. While mobile money has transformed how individuals send and receive funds, large parts of the economy, particularly everyday merchant payments and business-to-business transactions, remain stubbornly cash-heavy.

This is where new technologies are beginning to make an impact. The convergence of mobile money, card payments and bank-based systems is accelerating, driven by interoperability and innovations such as tokenisation and tap-to-phone solutions.

Tokenisation replaces sensitive card details with secure digital credentials, allowing payments to move seamlessly across devices without exposing underlying information. Meanwhile, tap-to-phone technology is turning ordinary smartphones into payment terminals, enabling small businesses to accept contactless payments without investing in additional hardware.

For a country where micro and small enterprises form the backbone of the economy, such innovations could prove transformative. By lowering the cost and complexity of accepting digital payments, they bring more informal traders into the formal financial ecosystem.

Yet, even as consumer payments become increasingly digitised, a major gap remains. Commercial payments. How businesses, governments and institutions pay and get paid, are still largely manual, slow and expensive.

Pollock points to this as a critical frontier. “How SMEs, corporates and governments manage payments is still heavily reliant on cash and paper-based processes,” he notes. “Modernising this space, supplier payments, payroll, invoicing and cross-border trade, is where the biggest opportunity lies.”

As digital transactions scale, so too do concerns around fraud and trust. In a market where convenience has driven adoption, maintaining confidence in the system is paramount.

Visa’s approach, Pollock explains, is to embed security directly into the payment experience. Artificial intelligence now analyses billions of transactions globally in real time, identifying suspicious patterns before they reach consumers or merchants. 
Combined with tokenisation and advanced authentication tools, the goal is to make security largely invisible, protecting users without slowing transactions down.

“Trust is the foundation of digital payments,” he says. “Without it, adoption stalls.”
But technology alone is not enough. Kenya’s payments success has been built on collaboration between banks, fintechs, telecommunications firms and global networks, and that model is expected to deepen.

Pollock describes this as “co-creation”. Banks provide stability and trust. Fintechs bring agility and innovation. Telcos offer reach, and global players like Visa enable secure, interoperable infrastructure. The result is an ecosystem where solutions, from low-cost merchant acceptance to cross-border remittances, can be developed faster and deployed more widely.

Emerging technologies are expected to further blur the lines between payments and everyday life, according to Pollock. Transactions will become increasingly “invisible”, embedded seamlessly into digital experiences, while artificial intelligence will personalise services and strengthen fraud detection in the background.

For businesses, this evolution promises faster settlement, richer data insights and more efficient cross-border trade. For consumers, it means greater convenience, but also higher expectations.

The challenge, Pollock emphasises, is ensuring that innovation remains inclusive.

“New technologies must reduce complexity, not add to it,” he says. “They should enable participation across the entire economy, from informal traders to large enterprises.”

The one overarching takeaway from Visa Connect Kenya 2026 was that no single player would define the payments future alone. Rather, the next leap in payments depend on how effectively the ecosystem collaborates to scale innovation, deepen trust and extend digital finance into the most complex corners of the economy. And with this, Kenya’s role is evolving from a global case study in mobile money to a regional testing ground for what intelligent, integrated payments systems can achieve.

“Kenya has already achieved something many markets are still working towards: Near universal familiarity with digital payments. The next phase is less about access and more about depth and quality of use.” 
- Chad Pollock, Visa’s Vice-President and General Manager for East Africa.