The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has outlined a new path for the country’s payment capabilities with the launch of its National Payments Strategy 2022 – 2025.
‘The Strategy’ seeks to realise the vision of “a secure, fast, efficient and collaborative payments system that supports financial inclusion and innovations that benefit Kenyans,” said the Central Bank.
The initiative is to be anchored on five core principles, namely trust, security, usefulness, choice and innovation, and builds upon an existing foundation to deliver key initiatives, including full-scale interoperability, fostering customer-centric innovation and supporting the emergence of an around-the-clock economy.
While Kenya’s leadership on mobile money is widely acknowledged, much more remains to be done. The Strategy seeks to consolidate the gains made so far and mark out the path towards a new chapter in Kenya’s payment journey.
Since the advent of mobile money almost two decades ago, Kenya has achieved important milestones in its journey of modernising and strengthening the payments system. Kenyans made 1.9 trillion mobile money transactions in the first 11 months of 2021, worth more than $55billion, whilst transactions in the first 11 months of 2021 were up 20 per cent on the whole of 2020.
While cash remains an important means of payment, Kenyans make over 37.6 million transactions of about Ksh.176billion every day through various non-cash channels, including mobile money, cards, electronic bank transfers and cheques.
The launch of The Strategy brought together representatives of key domestic, regional and international institutions that are connected to the payments space.
The Chief Guest at the launch was Dr. Julius Muia, CBS, Principal Secretary of the National Treasury and Planning.
Keynote addresses were also delivered by Dr. Alfred Hannig, Executive Director Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), Agustín Carstens, General Manager for Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Malangu Kabedi-Mbuyi, Governor of the Banque Centrale du Congo, and Chairperson, Association of African Central Banks (AACB); and Dr. Patrick Njoroge, Governor of the CBK.
Several Governors, Deputy Governors and senior officials of Central Banks in the region also attended the event virtually.
