iGaming payments in Kenya

M-Pesa carries somewhere around 90 to 95% of deposits and withdrawals here. That concentration is usually described as a convenience: one integration and you have the market. It is more useful to read it the other way round. One integration is also one thing that can be taken away, and in Kenya the regulator does not have to go anywhere near your website to take it.

When the regulator moved against 58 illegal betting sites, it did not only write to the Communications Authority. It wrote to Safaricom as well, and the paybill numbers went down alongside the domains. An operator whose site is still reachable but whose paybill has been withdrawn has no cashier, and in this market a cashier without M-Pesa is not a degraded cashier. It is no cashier.

Safaricom exposes M-Pesa through the Daraja API. An operator can integrate it directly against a dedicated paybill or till, or ride an aggregator that already holds one. The difference shows up in three places at once, and only one of them is price.

1. 1

   Cost per deposit

   An aggregator's markup sits on top of Safaricom's own fee on every single transaction, in a market where average deposits are small and frequency is high. The markup compounds in a way it does not in card markets.

2. 2

   Payouts, not just deposits

   B2C disbursement is a separate Daraja capability. Plenty of providers can collect and cannot pay out, which turns withdrawals into a manual process and withdrawals are what players judge an operator on.

3. 3

   Whose relationship is it

   Approval, throughput limits and uptime all run through whoever holds the shortcode. Holding it yourself is slower to set up and is the only version where the relationship is actually yours.

• M-Pesa (Safaricom)dominant

  mobile money

  ~90-95% of deposits/withdrawals; direct Daraja API with a dedicated Paybill/Till (no aggregator markup, B2C payouts, better uptime) is the single biggest cost/approval lever; Safaricom's gambling Paybill policy is the gatekeeper.

• Airtel Moneymajor

  mobile money

  #2 (~10%), rising on lower fees; added for redundancy.

Kenya has rewritten betting taxation two years running, and the second rewrite partly undid the first. The Finance Act 2025 looked like relief: excise fell from 15% on every stake to 5%, and the point of taxation moved from the bet to the deposit. It also replaced the 20% withholding on net winnings with a flat 5% on every withdrawal, profit or not.

The Finance Act 2026, in force since 1 July 2026, kept the 5% rate but widened what it applies to: any value made available for gambling, chips and tokens included, with horse racing pulled back into scope. It also revived the 20% withholding on winnings, but only for lottery and prize-competition payouts; a bettor's payout stays under the flat 5% withdrawal withholding. The stack a bettor actually faces is the one below.

The Betting Control and Licensing Board no longer exists. The Gambling Control Act 2025 came into force in August 2025 and replaced it with the Gambling Regulatory Authority, which took over by the end of February 2026. Anything written about Kenyan licensing before that transition names a body that cannot issue you anything, and a good deal of it is still circulating.