A nicer front end on someone else's monetary policy

Recently I ran a small, unscientific test. In Nairobi I asked everyone I met, developers, traders, a couple of people who work in payments, whether they used a crypto neobank. Kast, RedotPay, the whole card-and-wallet category that raises money on the promise of banking Africa.

I could not find one person. Not one.

This is not because Kenyans avoid crypto. Kenya ranks fifth in the world for stablecoin transaction volume, behind only Ukraine, the United States, Nigeria and Vietnam, and it sits in the continent's top five for on-chain value received in a region that took in more than $205 billion in a year. The demand is real and the rails are busy. What I couldn't find was anyone using the apps.

So I went and read the apps' own marketing. And here is the part nobody says out loud: the sites selling these cards in Kenya admit it themselves. M-Pesa is for domestic payments. Crypto cards are for spending abroad.

Read that again. A card for money you spend overseas. In a country with roughly 6 credit cards per 100 adults. The category is not competing with M-Pesa for the daily economy. It has conceded the daily economy and is selling a product for the fraction of Kenyans who fly.

What the balance is denominated in

Stablecoins are now roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa. Here is how many of them are pegged to a currency anyone here earns. As of March 2026, global stablecoin supply stood at $320.1 billion, 99.76% of it pegged to the US dollar. Every African currency combined accounted for about $665,300 of that. Kenyan shilling stablecoins, including KESm, totalled roughly $145,000. Not million. Thousand.

So the shilling's entire on-chain footprint is smaller than a single decent import invoice. A Nairobi freelancer paid in USDC is holding a dollar balance and spending in shillings. Every transaction crosses a border in denomination even when it never crosses one in geography.

That is the quiet fact underneath the "banking Africa" pitch. These products are dollar accounts with a local cash-out. The value sits in Federal Reserve policy; the user experience sits in Kenya. As a treasury tool for importers, holding dollars between payments is exactly the right instrument, and I've argued that elsewhere. But it is not a retail bank, and nobody should call it infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the thing people actually use

M-Pesa holds about 89% of Kenya's mobile money. Send KES 150 and you pay KES 7. Withdraw your own cash and you can pay up to KES 309. The smallest transactions carry the highest effective rate, which means the poorest users pay the most, which is the exact inefficiency a challenger is supposed to attack.

Nobody is attacking it. The crypto neobanks are studying it, integrating with it, using it as their off-ramp. The stablecoin cashes out to M-Pesa. The card tops up from M-Pesa. Safaricom keeps the domestic economy and the fee schedule, and the challengers get the overseas spend.

The regulator has noticed, even if the founders haven't

Kenya's VASP regulations, gazetted in July 2026, cut the paid-up capital for stablecoin issuers to Sh300 million but gave the Central Bank of Kenya power to suspend issuance or redemption of a token and to direct exchanges and wallets to delist a stablecoin, which lets it limit the circulation of offshore-issued dollar coins even without licensing the foreign issuers. One estimate put that Sh300 million requirement at roughly 26 times the size of Kenya's entire shilling-stablecoin market. The regulator is building a door for a shilling-denominated product. Almost nobody is walking through it, because the product everyone is building doesn't need to.

Localisation is not a language toggle

The word "localised" in fintech usually means a Swahili UI, a Kenyan logo, and a WhatsApp support line. None of that is localisation. Localisation is which currency the balance is denominated in, whose monetary policy the user is exposed to, and whether the product has any opinion about the shilling at all.

A product that holds dollars, spends abroad, and cashes out through the incumbent has not localised anything. It has taken a global dollar-card template and pointed it at a new distribution channel. The interesting version, a shilling-denominated account with a fee schedule designed to undercut KES 7 on KES 150, is harder to build, harder to license, and harder to pitch to investors who want "dollar rails for Africa" on the slide. The $145,000 of shilling stablecoins in existence is the market telling you how few people have tried.

Until that changes, we are not building African financial infrastructure. We are building a nicer front end on someone else's monetary policy.