East African regulators keep expanding the fintech licence book as payments go cross-border

NAIROBI — In East Africa, the fintech story that matters to treasurers and regulators is not another app launch. It is the growing list of firms authorised to issue, process, store and send electronic value under national payment-system law — and what that list implies for cross-border settlement.

Kenya’s Central Bank publishes a Directory of Authorised Payment Service Providers under the National Payment System Act, 2011. Successive editions through 2025 and 2026 show a lengthening roster that mixes mobile-money issuers, merchant aggregators and specialist processors. Secondary tallies citing the August 2026 directory put the authorised PSP count in the low forties; AB24 treats the CBK PDF directories as the primary source and any round number as approximate pending a line-by-line audit of the latest file.

What a PSP licence actually covers

Typical approved-service language in the CBK directory authorises institutions to issue, process, store, send and facilitate mobile-money payments, and to provide platforms that process payments on behalf of merchants. That framing covers both household wallets and the less visible merchant-acquiring layer that lets retailers, utilities and digital marketplaces collect value.

Names that appear across recent directories include established mobile operators and a long tail of processors — from Safaricom, Airtel Money and Telkom Kenya to firms such as Cellulant, Pesapal, Paystack and others listed in CBK’s published tables. Inclusion on the list is a regulatory fact, not an AB24 endorsement of product quality or solvency.

Why the licence wave matters regionally

Nairobi remains East Africa’s deepest payments talent pool, but the commercial prize is increasingly regional: diaspora remittances, SME trade settlement, and wallet-to-wallet corridors that bump into different central-bank rulebooks in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and beyond. A thick domestic licence book is necessary infrastructure for that ambition; it is not sufficient. Interoperability rules, foreign-exchange controls and anti-money-laundering expectations still decide whether a payment that clears in Westlands clears in Kampala the same afternoon.

For AB24’s tech desk, the reporting discipline is simple. Count what the regulator publishes. Date the directory. Separate licence status from funding rounds. And avoid inventing “record quarterly highs” without a cited time series.

What to watch next

Three threads will shape the next year of copy: how quickly newly licensed PSPs actually go live with merchant volume; how CBK and neighbouring regulators handle cross-border stored-value products; and whether competition compresses merchant fees enough to matter for informal retail. Those are measurable questions. The directory is the starting document, not the finish line.

Kenya’s payments market is no longer a two-operator story. It is a regulated industry with dozens of authorised intermediaries — and a continental test of whether African digital finance can scale without outrunning the supervisors who keep the rails trusted.

The licensing boom also reshapes risk. More PSPs mean more attack surfaces for fraud, more consumer-complaint channels, and more pressure on CBK supervisory capacity. A long directory is a sign of market depth; it is also a reminder that authorisation is the beginning of oversight, not the end.

Cross-border product design is where Nairobi’s licence book meets Kampala’s and Dodoma’s. A merchant aggregator licensed in Kenya may still need partners or separate approvals to move value into neighbouring markets. That is why “East African fintech” is often a marketing phrase ahead of a legal one — and why AB24 dates every claim to a named regulator’s list.

Investors still crowd into payments because float, data and merchant relationships compound. The sober reading of CBK’s directory is that the easy licences of an earlier era are gone; what remains is competition inside a supervised perimeter. For households, the test is price and reliability. For the desk, the test is whether the PDF matches the product in the market.

AB24 will refresh this file when CBK publishes the next directory edition, and when neighbouring central banks issue comparable PSP or payment-institution lists that can be set beside Kenya’s. Until then, the accurate headline is institutional: East Africa’s payments rails are thickening under licence, one authorised intermediary at a time.

Sources: Central Bank of Kenya Directory of Authorised Payment Service Providers (editions including Feb 2025, Nov 2025 and Aug 2026 PDFs); CBK payment-systems pages. Exact headcounts should be verified against the latest CBK PDF before quoting a single integer as definitive.

— AB24 · Nairobi