Kenswitch launches a Kenyan bank card network
Kenya’s main independent payment switch now lets banks issue their own cards, physical or virtual, on a local network.
- Kenswitch launches a national card scheme for Kenyan banks.
- 2,200 ATMs, 50,000 payment terminals and 80,000 agents from day one.
- The aim: rely less on foreign networks. Pricing has not been made public.
Kenswitch, Kenya’s largest independent payment switch, launched a national bank card scheme at Strathmore University on 24 September 2026. Banks and financial institutions can use it to issue physical and virtual cards.
The network covers more than 2,200 ATMs, 50,000 payment terminals and 80,000 agent points. Virtual cards are issued instantly and can be frozen and unfrozen by the user; online payments are protected by a dynamic security code.
A local rail against Visa and Mastercard
Kenswitch presents its scheme as a way to route domestic transactions through a local circuit and to depend less on foreign networks. Its fees have not been made public.
The market is still dominated by mobile money: in July 2026, Kenya had 94.4 million mobile money accounts, compared with 11.16 million debit cards, 2.26 million prepaid cards and 340,852 credit cards.
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