Cellulant & PesaLink Partner To Enable Instant B2B Payments For Businesses In Kenya

Earlier today, it was announced that Cellulant, through its Tingg platform, has integrated with PesaLink, the national interbank network operated by Integrated Payment Services Limited (IPSL). This collaboration aims to directly address some of the most persistent challenges in high-value digital transactions for both businesses and consumers in Kenya.

By connecting Cellulant’s extensive merchant network with PesaLink’s direct bank-to-bank transfer capabilities, the partnership is set to streamline how businesses get paid, reduce reconciliation errors, and provide a seamless, high-limit payment option for customers directly from their bank accounts. But beyond the immediate convenience, this partnership represents a strategic move with deep implications for Kenya’s financial infrastructure.

Key Drivers Behind The Partnership

The engagement was formalized by Plounne Oyunge, Chief Growth Officer at Pesalink, and Michael Muriuki, VP of Group Innovation and Software Engineering at Cellulant. Their statements shed light on the core motivations driving this collaboration.

For Pesalink, the partnership is about tackling fundamental issues for merchants and boosting the digital economy. “Pesalink was built to simplify life through instant, affordable payments for everyone, everywhere, every time,” said Plounne Oyunge. “Our partnership with Cellulant directly addresses recurring merchant pain points in payment reconciliation, while providing customers with a seamless experience. We believe this will be a catalyst for growth in Kenya’s digital economy, and we are showing how payments can truly move differently.”

Cellulant views the collaboration through the lens of its mission to remove friction from payments and, by extension, transform lives. “At Cellulant, we believe that transforming how money moves transforms lives,” stated Michael Muriuki. “Every time we remove friction from the movement of money, we enable businesses to grow faster, consumers to access more opportunities, and communities to thrive. Seamless and secure payments are a tool for progress: they build trust, drive commerce, and open doors to innovation. This partnership with Pesalink demonstrates our commitment to improving the everyday transaction experience for businesses and the customers they serve.”

This Is Just The Beginning

While it might appear to be just another corporate handshake, to view it as such is to miss the massive shift happening beneath the surface of Kenya’s digital financial services ecosystem. The real story is not just the partnership itself, but the strategic convergence of two fundamentally different, yet perfectly complementary, behemoths of Kenya’s digital payments space.

The central question is whether this is the partnership that finally cracks the code for seamless, high-value B2B payments within Kenya? This is a domain that has remained stubbornly fragmented, a complex puzzle that the consumer-facing mobile money disruption for all its success, has failed to solve. The era of focusing solely on peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions is reaching its natural conclusion. Kenya’s mobile money market has hit a staggering 91% penetration, with Safaricom’s M-Pesa alone commanding a near-total 96.5% market share.

This level of saturation signals a critical maturation point. The key driver for growth is no longer in acquiring new individual users; it is in creating greater value for enterprises. The next frontier is the complex, high-stakes world of business-to-business (B2B) payments, a market characterized by a desperate need for solutions that can handle bulk payroll, supplier disbursements, and automated reconciliation.

Therefore, this partnership is not about capturing more consumers; it is a strategic pivot to this underserved, higher-margin enterprise segment.

Unpacking The Partners

To fully grasp the potential impact of this strategic partnership, one must first understand the unique and powerful capabilities each player brings to the table:

Cellulant

Given that Cellulant has spent nearly two decades building its reputation as a leading Pan-African payments technology business, its roots and operational core in Kenya run deep. Its value proposition is embodied in its single API platform, Tingg, which unifies a fragmented payments landscape.

In Kenya, Cellulant powers payments for thousands of Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) and also enables diaspora remittances and cross-border payments for fintechs as well as provides digital payments for major financial institutions.

In a nutshell, Cellulant acts as the essential connective tissue, solving the complex “many-to-many” digital payments problem by allowing a single business to accept payments from, and send payments to, numerous markets through one integration.

PesaLink

In contrast to Cellulant,, PesaLink represents institutional depth and national authority within Kenya. Operated by Integrated Payment Services Limited (IPSL), a subsidiary of the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA), PesaLink is the official national interbank payment network.

Its mandate is clear: to facilitate real-time, high-value account-to-account (A2A) transfers within Kenya’s formal banking system. It is the backbone for transactions that exceed the typical limits of mobile money, allowing for transfers of up to KES 999,999 per transaction.

Its growth metrics underpin its key role in Kenya’s economy as it processes over KES 4 Billion in interbank transactions daily, and its cumulative transaction value surpassed KES 1.1 Trillion as of 2024, all while maintaining a remarkable 98% success rate.

However, its most strategic asset is not its volume but its technology. PesaLink has undertaken the complex but crucial migration to the global ISO 20022 messaging standard that enables richer, better-structured data to travel with every payment, unlocking sophisticated use cases like Request-to-Pay (RTP) and automated reconciliation.

To fully contextualize the strategic logic of the Cellulant and Pesalink partnership, it is useful to compare the capabilities of the individual players against the undisputed digital payments market leader, M-Pesa, and the potential of their combined offerings.

Strategic Capabilities: Kenya’s Digital Payments Ecosystem Leaders

The table makes the strategy much clearer. It visually demonstrates the gaps that each player individually cannot fill but that their combined offering is purpose-built to address. M-Pesa is limited by its ecosystem, PesaLink by its national borders, and Cellulant by its lack of a deep, bank-owned domestic settlement rail. The new partnership highlights these strengths, creating a value proposition that is formidable and unique in the Kenyan market today.

The Strategic Implications: Four Reasons Why The Cellulant & Pesalink Partnership Matters

This partnership is not an incremental improvement; it is a fundamental re-architecting of what is possible in Kenyan enterprise payments. Its significance can be understood through four strategic pillars that collectively represent a major leap forward for the entire ecosystem.

The Kenyan B2B Payments Opportunity

The primary target of this alliance is the underserved and operationally complex B2B payments market in Kenya. While P2P and C2B payments have been largely solved, the world of business finance remains mired in friction. According to the IFC, Kenya’s supply chain finance gap is estimated at over US$ 25 Billion. This partnership directly addresses this pain point by providing tools for payroll, supplier payments, and bulk disbursements that are not manual or slow.

The market has already shown a clear appetite for such solutions; the earlier partnership between PesaLink and the fintech TendePay to improve SME payment tools was a clear signal of this demand. The Cellulant and PesaLink partnership can be seen as a massively scaled-up and more powerful iteration of that concept, aimed not just at SMEs but at the largest corporate and multinational clients operating in Kenya.

Connecting Kenyan Businesses To Africa

The true genius of this collaboration lies in the convergence of a Pan-African digital payments aggregator with a national settlement backbone. Consider the implications for a Kenyan business with ambitions to expand across the African continent. Previously, that business would have to manage dozens of disparate payment relationships.

Now, through a single Cellulant API, it can collect payments from customers in 35 different countries, and have those revenues settled instantly, securely, and irrevocably into any Kenyan bank account via PesaLink’s trusted rails.This connects Cellulant’s broad geographical reach with PesaLink’s domestic depth, trust, and finality of settlement, solving a massive operational headache for any Kenyan business engaged in cross-border trade.

Consolidating The Market In Kenya

This move is also a key driver for strategic positioning. Let me explain. The Central Bank of Kenya’s (CBK) National Payments Strategy 2022–2025 explicitly calls for a future defined by greater interoperability, efficiency, and collaboration among payment providers. This partnership is a proactive step to build the very infrastructure envisioned by the Kenyan regulator, rather than waiting to be compelled into action.

It is also a direct competitive response to M-Pesa’s own recent proposal to integrate directly with PesaLink, which would effectively expand its own transaction limits. This is clearly a new era in the market, where dominant players are racing to build the most comprehensive networks, anticipating a future where market share will be won not by closed ecosystems but by open, collaborative platforms operating in Kenya.

The Unseen Advantage — Data Is Everything

Perhaps the most clear advantage of this partnership lies in the data capabilities unlocked by PesaLink’s adoption of the ISO 2022 standard. Unlike older standards, ISO 2022 allows for vast amounts of rich, structured data to travel with each transaction — invoice numbers, purchase order details, and tax information.

For Cellulant’s clients in Kenya, this is potentially transformative. It enables fully automated reconciliation, superior fraud detection, and more accurate cash flow forecasting. This could create a highly desirable service that elevates the offering from simple payment processing to indispensable financial workflow automation.

The Impact On M-Pesa, Banks, & Kenya’s Digital Financial Services Ecosystem

A partnership of this magnitude does not exist on its own as it will send significant ripples across the entire Kenyan financial services landscape, potentially reshaping competitive dynamics and forcing incumbents and challengers alike to re-evaluate their strategies.

A Challenge For M-Pesa’s Enterprise Agenda

This partnership poses a direct and formidable challenge to M-Pesa’s ambitions to move upmarket into the B2B space. Even as M-Pesa’s Paybill and Till Number systems are ubiquitous for C2B payments, its infrastructure was not purpose-built for the complex, high-value, and data-rich transactions that are typical for businesses.

The Cellulant and PesaLink offering, by contrast, is a B2B solution by design, combining high transaction limits, deep bank integration, and rich data capabilities. This could effectively box M-Pesa into its consumer and small-merchant stronghold, making it significantly harder for it to capture the lucrative large-enterprise segment in Kenya.

A Double-Edged Sword for Kenyan Banks

For Kenya’s traditional banks, this development is a classic double-edged sword. On one hand, as the ultimate owners of PesaLink through the KBA, they stand to benefit directly from the surge in transactions that could flow through their network.

On the other hand, Cellulant, is now leveraging the banks’ own infrastructure to offer sophisticated treasury and payment management services directly to their most valuable clients — a domain traditionally dominated by the banks’ own transaction banking divisions. This creates a complex dynamic of “co-opetition,” where banks are simultaneously enabling and competing with their new partner.

Raising The Bar Kenya’s Fintech Ecosystem

For the broader Kenyan fintech ecosystem, this partnership raises the competitive stakes significantly. The combined scale and capability of this partnership could make it much more difficult for smaller, standalone payment providers to compete on major corporate transactions.

This will likely accelerate a trend of market consolidation, forcing smaller players to either find highly specialized niches or form strategic alliances of their own. The Memorandum of Understanding between PesaLink and The Fintech Alliance is an early indicator of this collaborative imperative; this new partnership solidifies it as the dominant strategy for survival and growth in the Kenyan market.

Closing Thoughts

Ultimately, the Cellulant and PesaLink partnership represents the deliberate construction of a critical piece of next-generation digital financial services infrastructure for Kenya.This next phase is defined by a maturation of the ecosystem, with a focus shifting towards enterprise-grade solutions, deep infrastructural integration, and data-rich standards.

The partnership also creates a new rail for commerce, one that is built not just for moving money, but for powering the complex engines of Kenyan business. It is a potent blueprint for the future of enterprise finance in Kenya and years from now this partnership may be seen as a strategic inflection point where digital payments for the complex needs of businesses in Kenya finally took off.