Pesalink, Kenya’s interbank money transfer platform, has announced a strategic integration with Cellulant, a leading pan-African fintech company, through its business-focused digital payments platform, Tingg. This partnership is set to significantly enhance the ease and efficiency of customer-to-business (C2B) transactions, particularly for online merchants handling high-value payments.
The collaboration marks a pivotal expansion for Pesalink into the digital commerce space, enabling merchants to tap directly into Kenya’s vast network of bank customers. By leveraging Cellulant’s established merchant ecosystem, Pesalink aims to address longstanding challenges in digital payments, such as reconciliation delays and transaction friction, while positioning itself as a real-time, high-value payment infrastructure.
Under the new arrangement, customers purchasing from businesses integrated with Cellulant can now make instant payments of up to KES 999,999 (approximately $7,700) directly from their bank accounts. This transaction limit far exceeds the KES 500,000 ($3,900) cap typically imposed by mobile money platforms, giving Pesalink a competitive edge in handling larger payment volumes.
For businesses, the benefits are immediate and tangible. Each transaction includes a unique reference number, enabling instant reconciliation and faster settlement, which translates to improved operational efficiency. The service is already live for sectors such as airline and travel, where speed and accuracy in payments are critical.
This move is part of a broader strategic shift by Kenya’s banking sector to reinforce and modernize existing infrastructure, rather than build new systems from scratch. It comes in response to earlier proposals by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to develop a new fast payment system, a plan that faced resistance from banks advocating for enhancements to the current Pesalink framework.
Pesalink has historically faced integration challenges with mobile money wallets, a structural limitation it is actively working to overcome. Recent partnerships, including those with M-PESA and TendePay, have focused on improving bulk payment capabilities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), further expanding its utility across Kenya’s digital economy.
With Kenya’s digital payments market projected to reach $9.36 billion by 2025, the Pesalink–Cellulant alliance is well-positioned to capture a larger share of this growth, especially in high-value segments where banks can offer advantages over mobile money platforms.
