Kenya has licensed 281 digital credit providers and written rules against abusive collection. Borowers still face disputed charges, contested repossessions, and errors in credit records. Licensed lenders publish annual rates as high as 4,432%. The test is what happens after the license is granted.
By Precursor · Digital Lending · 17 min read · 1 October 2026
The method
What customers, merchants and informal operators are already doing that product teams haven't understood.
The rails, standards and identity systems that determine who can build, connect and compete.
Draft provisions and appointments that change the probability of what comes next.
Where consumers compensate for a system that technically works but practically disappoints.
Who gains control over data, pricing, identity and access when a technical change lands.
AI agents can now retrieve data, send files and initiate transactions without a person directing every step, creating a new problem for businesses deploying them. Kenyan law already attaches duties to organizations over customer data and automated electronic instructions, even as criminal liability for an agent’s unauthorized access still requires separate proof of intent and knowledge. The emerging governance challenge is therefore not simply what an agent was told to do, but what it was permitted to do, what it actually did and whether the institution can reconstruct the difference.
Policy & Regulation · 12 min read
Uber’s exits from Tanzania, Nigeria and Uganda expose a weakness in ride-hailing that an app cannot solve alone. Fares must cover the full working journey, and a platform that leaves must account for the people who built its market.
Policy & Regulation · 11 min read
Kenya’s draft National Payment System Bill would replace the 2011 law with activity-based licensing, mandatory interoperability, open-finance services and stronger Central Bank powers, while an accompanying policy proposes a national instant-payment switch. But the decisions that will shape competition remain largely unwritten, including who owns the new rail, who gets direct access, what participants pay and how a regulator that may also operate infrastructure separates those roles. Kenya has already digitised payments. It is now deciding who controls the architecture underneath them.
Policy & Regulation · 22 min read
Conversations with the people designing, regulating and operating financial systems
Inside The RailsJames Mwangi grew up watching formal finance exclude families like his. He later left a senior banking career to help rescue an insolvent building society and turn it into a regional group with KSh2.16 trillion in assets. More than three decades later, Equity's hardest task is to preserve its purpose, controls and judgement at a scale that no longer resembles the institution he joined.
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