In early October 2026, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), ICC Kenya and the ICC Digital Standards Initiative convened a high-level workshop on digital trade in Nairobi. Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui said Kenya can become a leading African digital trade hub, but named infrastructure, logistics, financing and regulation as the barriers. TechTrendsKE reported on 8 October that the government estimates the digital economy could add Sh662 billion to GDP by 2028.
The ambition is credible. The harder question is the fourth barrier on the minister's list, regulation. Right now the most consequential piece of it is not a trade instrument. It is a payments bill.
The foundation is already built
Kenya does not start from zero. TechTrendsKE reports almost 88 million SIM subscriptions in June 2026, about 52 million smartphones and nearly 55 million mobile broadband subscriptions. The article notes these count connections, not unique people. Safaricom's global payments revenue rose 22.3% to KSh4.8 billion in the year to March 2026, and M-Pesa Africa reported its first operating profit.
This is the base a digital trade hub would sit on. Mobile money, merchant acquiring and card-linked wallets are the rails that let a Kenyan exporter of software, creative work or goods get paid by a buyer in Kampala or Accra. Kinyanjui cited a global digital trade market of $8.75 trillion in 2025, which he put at about a quarter of global trade in goods and services. Payments are the bottleneck in that chain.
The strongest case for the new bill
The National Treasury and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) have a serious argument. The current National Payment System Act (Cap. 491A) predates today's market of wallets, payment initiators, gateways and open-banking data flows. The CBK published the draft National Payment System Policy and National Payment System Bill, 2026 on 21 September 2026 for public comment. Per the Afriwise and Techweez summaries, comments closed on 9 October. A modern statute could give certainty to new entrants, protect customer funds and close anti-money-laundering gaps. Cross-border payments are where those gaps matter most.
According to Techweez's summary of the draft, every transaction would have to carry information identifying sender and receiver, with more detail for international transfers. The Cabinet Secretary would set the thresholds. Treasury ties this to Kenya's trade links with the EAC, COMESA and the AfCFTA. Traceability of that kind is hard to oppose in principle.
Where the draft risks working against the hub goal
The question is proportionality. The reported design is broad.
- Ten licence categories. Afriwise's analysis counts six categories of payment service provider and four of payment system operator.
- Higher capital floors. Techweez reports minimum capital of KES 250 million for electronic money issuers, KES 50 million for e-wallet providers and merchant acquirers, and KES 30 million for money remitters. A tier at KES 5 million applies to payment initiation and account information providers. Capital rules protect customers, but they also decide how many local fintechs survive to serve exporters.
- Wide discretion for the regulator. Techweez lists powers to restrict business growth, suspend operations, remove directors and appoint managers, plus fines up to KES 20 million. It also reports that the CBK could order providers to interconnect and that it "may require" open-finance data sharing, with the details left to later regulations.
- Delegated cross-border rules. The key thresholds for international transfers sit with the Cabinet Secretary, not in the statute itself.
None of this is unusual for a payments regulator. The risk is cumulative. A fintech that wants to serve cross-border sellers faces licensing, capital, data and reporting duties whose real weight will be set by regulations that do not yet exist. Firms cannot price that uncertainty, and investors discount it.
The continental layer
Kenya also takes part in the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, which TechTrendsKE names without detail. The text is hosted by the African Union. The protocol's value depends on member states aligning their domestic rules on payments, data and e-documents. It was not designed to replace them. If Kenya's payment law sets traceability and licensing duties that differ from its neighbours' and from continental expectations, a Kenyan provider could end up licensed twice for one corridor. I could not confirm Kenya's ratification status from the sources I could read, so that point should be checked against the AU treaty list.
What proportionate looks like
The fix is not to abandon the bill. It is to tighten how the draft is built:
- Put the thresholds and data fields in the Act or in published regulations tabled with it. Operators should know the cross-border information duty before they build to it, not after.
- Scale obligations to risk. A KES 5 million payment initiator is not a KES 250 million e-money issuer. Supervisory and reporting duties should follow the same ladder as capital.
- Write procedural safeguards into the supervisory powers. Suspension, manager appointment and director removal should come with notice, reasons and a route to appeal. That protects both investors and the regulator's legitimacy.
- Align the data rules with the AfCFTA protocol and EAC practice. The goal is one compliance build per corridor.
- Treat open finance as a separate rulemaking with its own consultation. A "may require" clause is a placeholder, not a policy.
The bill is still a draft. The government has not announced what it will change after the 9 October close. That leaves the drafters room, and they have a rare window in which the hub ambition and the payments rulebook are being written at the same time.
Bottom line
A workshop in Nairobi is cheap. A statute that tells payment providers how they may move money across borders is not. If the final National Payment System Act is clear, risk-based and aligned with the continental protocol, it will do more for Kenya's digital trade hub than any further speeches. If it concentrates discretion in the regulator and leaves the hard rules for later, the Sh662 billion estimate will depend on firms willing to carry that uncertainty.