Safaricom and the Kenya Bankers Association have floated a strategic plan that positions Pesalink as the leading fast payment system in Kenya, aimed at unifying the fragmented digital payment space by bringing several financial platforms together under one efficient system.

Pesalink, operated by KBA’s fintech subsidiary Integrated Payment Services Limited, currently supports digital transactions worth $8.5 billion. With already laid-down infrastructure, the platform is ideally positioned to act as the backbone of Kenya’s national payment system and a less costly and more efficient avenue than building a new system from scratch.

The current payment ecosystem in Kenya forces banks, SACCOs, and fintech firms to negotiate separate agreements in order to link their services with mobile money platforms. Building a brand-new fast payment system would require an estimated $200 million and take about four years to complete. Upgrading Pesalink, however, would be faster and cheaper, hence the best way to renew the financial sector.

Improvements such as this on Pesalink would be hefty developmental work: scaling its system to 6,000 transactions per second, advanced security protocols, and an end-to-end risk management system to facilitate seamless transactions across financial platforms such as M-Pesa, traditional banks, and fintech services.

Ali Hussein Kassim, chairman of the Association of FinTechs in Kenya, illustrated the economic benefit of such a system-one in which transactions are simplified and improve Kenya’s digital economy. Further, the standardization of payment infrastructure may reduce costs of transactions and distribute equal benefitting in the service across financial networks.

While other countries, like Colombia, have been able to thrive with several payment switches in play, Safaricom and KBA are positioning an upgraded Pesalink as a centralized solution for the country. This would rationalize regulatory supervision and leverage economies of scale in operations. The proposition currently sits with the Central Bank of Kenya, with support for the initiative building across the industry.