There’s a New Sheriff in Town | TWIF Africa

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Habari fintech friends,

Every good Western opens the same way. A frontier town booms overnight. Money pours in, M-pesa wakala multiply, and nobody can say who’s really in charge. Then a stranger rides in at dusk, pins a star to his chest, and tells the whole town the rules have changed.

There’s a new sheriff in town.

Fast forward to this week, and Kenya’s frontier is its payments market. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the National Treasury have published the draft National Payment System Bill, 2026, the biggest rewrite of Kenya’s payment rules since 2011. The new star is heavy. The CBK could walk into payment firms with or without notice, open their books and their servers, remove executives it blames for breaches, and install statutory managers to run struggling firms for up to 12 months. Getting into town costs something too. The bill creates around 10 licence categories, with minimum capital running from roughly $39,000 to nearly $2 million for e-money issuers.

Walk with me, because on paper the sheriff has a point. Kenya’s payments market is no longer a row of separate shops. M-Pesa, banks, SACCOs, merchants, and fintechs all share the same rails, so one wallet catching fire can burn down the whole street. Fintechs have also spent years begging for clear rules. Chipper Cash waited on a licence because no law existed to grant one. A sheriff brings what investors crave most: certainty.

The badge isn’t the problem. The trigger finger is. Powers this broad only build trust when the rules for using them are written down. When can the CBK walk in unannounced? Which breach costs a CEO their job? If the answers live in someone’s discretion, founders will price in regulatory risk, and capital will ride off to markets with sharper rules.

Then there’s the $2 million entry ticket. Safaricom pays that without blinking, but a seed stage wallet cannot. Rules written to protect the market could quietly protect its incumbents instead. And Kenyan founders remember 2022, when the CBK ordered banks and mobile money providers to cut ties with fintechs almost overnight. They’ve seen this sheriff draw before.

The bill is still a draft, and Cabinet and Parliament will have their say. But every frontier teaches the same lesson: law and order build towns, while unpredictable order empties them.

See you at high noon.

— Jovin

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Kenya’s central bank has taken over a lender before. Which Kenyan bank was placed under receivership by the CBK in April 2016, after a restatement of its accounts revealed hidden insider loans, and was later rescued by Mauritius based SBM Holdings?

(Find the answer at the signoff below!)

Before we wrap this up…

Did you guess which bank the sheriff shut down?

The answer is Chase Bank Kenya. In April 2016, the bank restated its accounts and revealed large loans to insiders. Days later, depositors rushed to withdraw their money and the CBK placed the bank under receivership. It was the third Kenyan bank to fall in under a year, after Dubai Bank and Imperial Bank in 2015. SBM Holdings eventually took over most of its assets and deposits in 2018.

So when the new payments bill gives the CBK power to install statutory managers in fintechs, remember that this sheriff has drawn before.

That’s all for today, friends. See you next Monday.

Asante.