Co-operative Bank of Kenya has entered a formal partnership with Paymenta, a fintech platform operating under the DSSC Global Group, in a deal that both parties say will accelerate the adoption of Banking as a Service infrastructure across East Africa’s rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.
The agreement positions Co-operative Bank — one of Kenya’s largest lenders by asset base, with strong roots in the country’s cooperative movement and a customer network that spans rural saccos and urban professionals — as a regulated banking backbone for Paymenta’s suite of digital financial products. Under the arrangement, Paymenta will leverage the bank’s licensing, settlement infrastructure and compliance framework to deliver embedded financial services to businesses and consumers through its platform.
Banking as a Service, known in the industry as BaaS, has gained traction globally as a model that allows non-bank companies to offer financial products by integrating directly with a licensed institution’s core systems via application programming interfaces. In Kenya, where mobile money penetration is among the highest in the world following M-Pesa’s transformative launch in 2007, the model finds fertile ground in a market already comfortable with non-traditional financial service delivery.
The Central Bank of Kenya has been incrementally updating its regulatory framework to accommodate emerging fintech models, including the National Payments System Act and guidelines covering payment service providers. Both entities will be expected to operate within these parameters, and analysts say clear regulatory compliance will be a critical factor in determining how broadly the partnership can scale.
DSSC Global Group describes itself as a technology conglomerate with operations spanning financial services, logistics and data infrastructure. East Africa’s payments sector has attracted growing international interest, with transaction volumes on regional networks rising sharply as cross-border trade digitalises and intra-African commerce expands under the African Continental Free Trade Area framework.
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