Kenya's New Payments Bill Could Force Banks to Share Customer Data
Kenya's legislature is considering a new payments bill that would compel banks and dominant platforms including Safaricom to share customer data with third-party providers. The proposed open-banking requirement could fundamentally alter the competitive dynamics of Kenya's financial services market.
Kenya Open Banking: the law opens the door; the regulations decide who walks through
The most consequential sentence in Kenya's draft National Payment System Bill, 2026, is tucked away almost as an afterthought: the Central Bank of Kenya "shall make regulations to give effect to this section."
Everything that matters — which data M-PESA and the banks must share, on what terms, at what cost — is left entirely to those future regulations. The bill creates the right; it creates nothing else.
We've watched this exact gap play out in West Africa, where open-banking rules landed and legacy banks wrote the commercial terms fintechs now can't rewrite. Kenya's fintechs should be watching the regulation-drafting process far more closely than the parliamentary vote.
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