Kenswitch Card Scheme Rekindles Debate on Kenya’s Payments Future

Kenswitch’s launch of a domestic card scheme in Kenya has opened a wider debate about the country’s next phase of payments development, including whether more of the infrastructure supporting local commerce should be controlled domestically.

TechCabal’s analysis presents the scheme as a potential complement to Kenya’s established mobile-money ecosystem, rather than a replacement for international networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

Mobile money remains dominant

Kenya’s payments landscape is strongly associated with mobile money, a position built over years as M-Pesa expanded from peer-to-peer transfers into merchant payments, salary receipt, borrowing, saving and capital management.

Figures from the Central Bank of Kenya, cited by TechCabal, show that the country had 94.35 million registered mobile-money accounts and 575,400 agents by July 2026. The network handled KES 728.7 billion, equivalent to $5.6 billion, during that month.

Other parts of the payments system are also substantial. Kenya recorded 13.76 million payment cards by July 2026, including 11.16 million debit cards, alongside 56,083 point-of-sale terminals. Merchants processed more than 6.2 million POS card transactions worth KES 27.1 billion, or $209 million, during the same month.

Case for domestic infrastructure

According to the TechCabal analysis, Kenswitch’s scheme raises the question of whether domestic purchases should always depend on international payment infrastructure. Global networks remain important for interoperability, particularly when transactions involve international travel or overseas commerce. However, the report questions whether every purchase made within Kenya needs to use the same systems.

A domestic card network could give Kenyan banks and fintech companies additional room to develop products suited to local conditions. The analysis identifies possible areas for experimentation, including local pricing, virtual cards, tokenisation, contactless payments and links with domestic instant-payment infrastructure.

It also cautions that a domestic scheme would require more than a launch announcement to succeed. Its development would depend on reliable infrastructure, bank issuance, merchant acceptance, customer demand, incentives and sufficient scale across the payments ecosystem.

“Yet past success can easily become an intellectual trap,” TechCabal wrote in describing the risk that Kenya’s achievements in mobile money could limit attention to other parts of the national payments stack.

Lessons from other markets

India and Saudi Arabia are cited as examples of countries that developed domestic payment systems alongside global networks. India launched RuPay in 2012 and later built the Unified Payments Interface as a broader domestic payments architecture. RuPay credit cards were subsequently connected to UPI.

TechCabal reports that UPI transactions increased from 5.39 billion in the 2018-19 financial year to 131.13 billion in 2023-24. Their value rose from ₹8.8 trillion, or $91.8 billion, to ₹200 trillion, equivalent to $2.09 trillion, over the same period.

Saudi Arabia’s Mada network is similarly described as part of a broader national payments effort. In 2022, it processed 7.2 billion POS transactions, a 40% year-on-year increase, and 610 million online card transactions, which rose by 76%. By 2025, electronic payments represented 85% of Saudi retail payments, with 14.6 billion electronic transactions recorded.

The report argues that payment infrastructure is increasingly part of the critical infrastructure of modern economies. It also stresses that payment sovereignty would not require Kenya to disconnect from Visa, Mastercard or other global systems.

For now, the available report does not provide details on the domestic scheme’s adoption, participating banks, issued-card volumes, transaction performance or acceptance coverage. Its broader significance lies in renewing discussion about how Kenya can build a more diversified payments system after the success of mobile money.