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Pesalink, Kenya’s interbank money transfer platform, has entered into a strategic integration with pan-African fintech Cellulant through its digital payments platform, Tingg. The partnership is designed to enable online merchants to seamlessly accept high-value customer-to-business (C2B) payments, further embedding banks within the country’s fast-evolving digital commerce ecosystem.
By linking directly to millions of bank customers, Pesalink expands its footprint in the digital commerce space while resolving long-standing reconciliation and transaction delay challenges. The move positions the platform to compete more effectively in a market long dominated by mobile money providers.
Through the arrangement, customers making purchases from Cellulant merchants can now transfer up to KES 999,999 ($7,700) per transaction directly from their bank accounts. This significantly surpasses the KES 500,000 ($3,900) cap typical of mobile money transactions, allowing merchants to capture higher-value payments across sectors such as airlines and travel, where the service is already live.
For businesses, the integration promises greater efficiency, as each payment carries a reference number that supports instant reconciliation and faster settlement. This, analysts note, provides a competitive advantage for banks seeking to strengthen their digital rails.
The move also underscores the banking sector’s preference to enhance existing infrastructure over the Central Bank of Kenya’s earlier proposals to establish a new fast payments system. By upgrading Pesalink, banks aim to preserve their central role in real-time transactions.
Pesalink, which has historically struggled to integrate with mobile money wallets, is actively addressing this gap through a series of partnerships, including bulk payment enhancements for SMEs and recent integrations with M-PESA and TendePay.
With Kenya’s digital payments market projected to hit $9.36 billion by 2025, the Pesalink-Cellulant collaboration is set to carve out a bigger share of high-value digital transactions, reinforcing the role of banks as a critical anchor in the country’s payments landscape.
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