Kenya Proposes New Payments Bill That Could Make Financial Data Portable

Kenya is preparing to change how financial data moves around the country.

Banks, mobile-money providers and other payment companies could soon be required to build systems capable of securely sharing customer data with third parties for open-finance purposes.

Your financial life is split across different systems

Today, different parts of your financial life sit in different places. Your bank sees what happens in your bank account, Safaricom sees your M-Pesa activity, and Airtel sees what happens on Airtel Money.

A fintech that wants the full picture has to piece that information together across separate systems, even though the data already exists and is simply held by different providers without a common way to share it.

Open finance is designed to loosen that separation. A customer could authorise a third party to pull information from one of those providers without moving the underlying account, allowing a fintech to work with a broader view of that person's finances.

That could let a fintech build a service around a customer's finances as a whole rather than what happens inside a single platform. The idea itself is not new.

Payments would have to open up too

The Bill would also require payment service providers and payment system operators to use interoperable systems, while giving CBK the power to require providers to enter interoperability arrangements with other providers and their agents.

In practice, that could make the boundaries between bank accounts, mobile-money wallets and other payment services less important, even if the customer never sees the infrastructure making that possible.

The government says the wider reform is intended to support interoperability, competition, innovation, financial inclusion and consumer and data protection, while replacing the existing National Payment System Act.

For customers, some of that may eventually show up as features rather than legislation, with payments working across providers with less friction. The infrastructure would be doing more of the work in the background.

The financial system gets more visible

Making financial systems more connected also makes financial activity easier to trace across providers. That is relevant to regulators, but it should not be confused with the open-finance provision itself.

Open finance is built around customer-directed data sharing with third parties. It does not, by itself, give KRA an automatic window into everyone's M-Pesa account.

The wider payment framework also gives CBK powers to oversee a financial system that is becoming increasingly interconnected. The Bill includes requirements around data protection and gives the central bank powers over payment systems, while leaving important details of open finance and interoperability to regulations.

The organisations that have spent years working on open finance have also identified reasons to be careful. Their consultations found concerns around data security, particularly for smaller players, as well as the incentives for large institutions to share data and the risk of slow regulatory implementation.

The industry's preferred approach was a phased rollout, with mandatory participation for certain players at the beginning.

Supporting the idea of portable financial data is one thing. Deciding who participates, what data can be shared, how consent works and how those systems are secured is another. Those details are still being worked out, and they will determine how much of the promise of open finance actually reaches customers.

The public can submit comments on the draft Bill and National Payment System Policy until October 9, 2026.

So who gets the value?

Kenya has spent years building a financial system where money can move quickly between people and businesses. The next step could be making the information around that money easier to move too.

If the proposal becomes law, customers could gain more control over financial information that has historically remained inside individual institutions. Fintechs could gain access to information they previously had to negotiate for, while banks and mobile-money providers would have to operate in a more interoperable market.

The harder part comes next. The Bill establishes the direction, but regulations and technical standards will determine what customers actually see, what they can consent to and how that data moves.

If financial data becomes portable, who ultimately gets the most value from making it portable: the customer who owns it, the fintechs that want to use it, or the institutions that have spent years holding it?