Payments platform Paykit has entered Kenya’s growing digital finance market with a unified payments platform that allows individuals and businesses to collect payments, manage funds and make disbursements through a single interface.

The digital wallet enables users to send money to peers, pay bills, purchase airtime, and transfer funds to mobile money accounts and bank accounts. It also offers merchant services like paybill collections, bulk payouts and automated settlement into bank accounts.

Beatrice Okeyo, the chief executive of Paykit, said the firm is targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), corporates, saccos, financial institutions, developers and individual consumers.

“We seek to merge collections, wallet management, disbursements, settlement and reconciliation into a single platform, so businesses and individuals don’t have to juggle multiple systems,” she told the Business Daily.

Kenya is among Africa’s advanced digital payments markets, with mobile money penetration exceeding 98 percent of the adult population and more than 51 million active accounts, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya.

Annual transaction volumes surpass Sh8.6 trillion.

Paykit is positioning itself as a lower-cost alternative within this ecosystem dominated by M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Pesa Link and PayPal, seeking to tap into rising demand for integrated transactions across mobile money, banks and digital wallets.

“We’ve gone slightly lower, especially if you’re transacting within the ecosystem. We are about 0.1 percent lower than the other players.”

“We have intelligent systems that can reconcile all these payments and allocate them to the correct customers, so you don’t have the reconciliation headache,” Ms Okeyo said.

Currently, Paykit supports Kenyan shillings and plans to roll out multi-currency support, including regional currencies, in the coming weeks.

The company claims it has already processed about Sh30 million in transactions during a two-and-a-half-month pilot phase.

Okeyo said they are targeting between 50 million and 60 million transactions across its mobile app and merchant portal by the end of the year, alongside onboarding 15,000 merchants.

→ dmusau@ke.nationmedia.com

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