PesaLink’s New ID Makes Bank Transfers Easier. The Bigger Question Is Who Owns the Rail

Anthony Gitau sells electronics wholesale. When he pays a supplier, the speed of the transfer can determine when he receives the stock.

Today, Gitau may know the supplier’s phone number but still need to know where the supplier banks. Under PesaLink’s proposed ID, that second piece of information could disappear. A customer would keep an identifier while changing the account linked to it, allowing money to follow the customer rather than the bank account number.

Pesalink chief executive Gituku Kirika told Business Daily on 5 October that the new ID is ready and financial institutions must now begin mapping customers. Businesses would also receive identifiers. PesaLink’s developer documentation describes phone numbers and email addresses as possible aliases and provides for looking up the account attached to them.

The idea is not entirely new. Prime Bank was already allowing customers to link phone numbers to accounts through PesaLink in 2017, although a sender still had to identify the recipient’s bank. ABC Bank also allowed customers to change the account linked to a number. The important change is therefore not the invention of a phone-number alias. It is the attempt to make the identifier useful without requiring the sender to know which participating institution sits behind it.

The rail customers barely see.

PesaLink has operated since 2017 through Integrated Payment Systems Limited, a company owned by the Kenya Bankers Association. It allows participating institutions to move money instantly between accounts.

Its unusual strength is also a weakness in the competition for customer attention. PesaLink normally appears inside somebody else’s interface. A customer finds it within a bank app or USSD menu, while the bank determines where the option appears, how it is described, and what the customer pays.

PesaLink’s own research found that 23.5% of surveyed users did not know they had used the service, although the published information is insufficient to treat that figure as nationally representative. The infrastructure can therefore perform the transfer while the bank retains the customer relationship.

M-PESA developed differently. The phone number itself became the payment address, while Safaricom built the agent and merchant infrastructure around it. In the year to March 2025, Safaricom reported almost 299,000 M-PESA agents and roughly 676,000 active Lipa na M-PESA merchants.

PesaLink does not need to reproduce that network to become more useful. For money already sitting inside a bank account, removing the need to exchange account numbers and bank names solves a genuine inconvenience. Employers would not necessarily need new payment details each time a worker switched participating banks. Customers would be less likely to mistype long account numbers. A familiar identifier could remain while the institution behind it changed.

Price is moving at the same time.

Kirika said 25 banks, microfinance banks and Saccos had joined a campaign offering free PesaLink transfers of up to KSh1,000 and a flat KSh20 for larger payments below KSh1 million. PesaLink says the KSh20 excludes taxes and applies only at participating institutions, with the customer’s bank determining the fee ultimately displayed.

The combination matters more than either change alone. A cheap transfer remains cumbersome if the sender needs sixteen digits and the recipient’s bank name. A memorable payment address has less appeal if using it feels expensive.

Banks are trying to remove both frictions.

Their remaining challenge is distribution. One bank can place PesaLink prominently on its home screen while another can bury it several menus deep. A common rail does not automatically create a common customer experience.

The timing matters.

The portable ID predates the Central Bank of Kenya ’s current payments overhaul.

Phone-number mapping existed in PesaLink’s early years, and a 2023 industry profile described plans to support identifiers including phone numbers and email addresses. The product should therefore not be presented as a response invented for the current policy debate.

But its deployment now gives it new strategic significance.

In October 2024, CBK said Kenya needed an instant-payment arrangement spanning the financial sector. Existing banks, mobile-money companies and payment providers had achieved substantial interoperability, but the system still depended partly on bilateral connections and did not give every participant a common route to every other one.

CBK created an industry working group to design a fast payment system.

PesaLink immediately complicates that discussion because Kenya already has an instant bank-to-bank switch. The policy question becomes whether the country needs to build an entirely new rail, expand an existing one, or combine infrastructure already in the market.

A 2025 World Bank report recorded a proposal from Safaricom and the Kenya Bankers Association to upgrade PesaLink rather than create a separate fast-payment switch. It also described plans for M-PESA to connect to the system. There is no public confirmation that such integration is operational or that an M-PESA wallet can receive money through the new PesaLink ID. That distinction is important. A bank identifier becoming easier to use is an implemented product development. PesaLink becoming a national cross-industry rail remains a proposal.

In September 2026, Treasury and CBK opened consultation on a national payments policy and National Payment System Bill. The draft policy proposes a national instant-payment switch, while the draft Bill would impose stronger interoperability obligations. Neither has settled who should own or operate the eventual infrastructure.

PesaLink is therefore arriving at the policy debate with something valuable. It is not merely presenting a concept. It already has a switch, participating institutions, transaction history and infrastructure that can be extended.

That does not by itself settle whether it should become the country’s common rail.

The difficult part is the directory

A payment alias looks simple because the complexity sits behind it.

Enter a phone number. Confirm the name. Send the money.

But somebody must decide which account that number points to.

If a customer changes participating banks, the directory must move the identifier securely. If a mobile operator recycles the phone number, the old owner’s banking relationship must not follow it to the new subscriber. If two institutions receive competing instructions over the same identifier, somebody needs authority to determine which instruction is valid. A sender also needs confirmation that the money is going to the intended recipient before the transaction becomes final, and customers require a remedy when the directory is wrong.

PesaLink’s public descriptions explain its mapping and lookup functions but provide much less detail about the rules governing those situations.

Those rules become more important if the directory extends beyond banks.

Portability works only inside the network that recognizes the identifier. Moving from one participating bank to another can preserve the address. Moving the same address from a bank account to a mobile wallet requires the wallet provider to join the system and accept its governance.

If Kenya eventually has two directories, one operated through PesaLink and another attached to a national switch, the apparently simple act of entering a phone number becomes a routing decision between competing pieces of infrastructure.

Common infrastructure needs common rules.

A bank-owned switch can serve non-banks. Ownership alone does not make the infrastructure unsuitable.

But a fintech or mobile-money operator joining infrastructure controlled by institutions with which it competes needs more than technical permission to connect.

It needs published eligibility requirements, predictable pricing, service standards, settlement rules and a process for challenging an access decision. A smaller provider should know whether it can reach the same customer on comparable terms before investing in the connection.

The alternative does not eliminate governance problems. If CBK built and operated a national switch while also regulating its participants, it would need to separate its infrastructure role from its supervisory powers.

Brazil’s Pix provides one useful comparison. Its central bank publishes rules governing participation and the registration, transfer and ownership of payment aliases. Kenya does not have to copy Brazil’s institutional model. The relevant lesson is that the directory needs a rulebook as much as it needs software.

Kenya therefore does not face a binary choice between discarding PesaLink and handing it the national payments system.

It could extend PesaLink, build new infrastructure or combine existing rails. The more important question is whether whichever system emerges gives qualified institutions fair access, transparent pricing, and predictable settlement while protecting customers when identifiers move or payments fail.

That is where the PesaLink ID becomes more interesting than another feature inside a banking app.

For Anthony Gitau, the test is much simpler. He does not need to know which switch cleared his transfer or which institution maintains the directory. He needs to enter something he already knows, confirm that it belongs to his supplier and have the money arrive while the stock is still available.

If PesaLink can make that ordinary transaction easier, it has improved the product.

If Kenya wants to build national infrastructure around it, the country must also decide who gets through the door, what they pay, and who writes the rules once they are inside.