What paying for a coffee in Nairobi told me about African finance

I spent more than a decade in investment banking before I built Dawia Family Office. In that world, you learn to read an economy through reports, ratings, and quarterly numbers.

Useful, but slow. And usually written by people who have never set foot in the country they are grading.

These days I read economies differently. I look at how people pay for things.

Last week in Nairobi I walked into a café. Ordinary place, good coffee. Next to the till was a sticker listing the accepted payment methods, the kind of sticker nobody photographs.

Visa. Mastercard. Apple Pay. Google Pay. Samsung Pay. M-Pesa. And running it all, one name most people outside East Africa have never heard: Pesapal.

I stood there longer than the coffee required.

Africa is not a slower version of Europe

The most expensive mistake foreign investors make on this continent is assuming we are simply behind. That Africa is Europe, delayed. That we will eventually arrive at the same place, using the same tools, once the infrastructure catches up.

We are not behind. We are elsewhere.

Europe built its financial system on banks. America built its on credit cards. China built its on super apps. East Africa built its on the mobile phone, and it did so before most Western banks had a functioning app.

Kenyans did not wait for card penetration. Millions of people went from cash straight to mobile money and never queued for a debit card at all. M-Pesa launched in 2007 and became the country’s financial plumbing. Mobile money accounts in Kenya now outnumber traditional bank accounts by a wide margin, and a card-only processor built in Europe or the United States simply does not function in this market.

That is not a gap in development. That is a different architecture. And if you cannot see the difference, you will misprice every opportunity you look at here.

What Pesapal actually solved

Pesapal was founded in Nairobi in 2009 by Agosta Liko, for the least glamorous reason imaginable: he was running an online travel portal, he needed a local way to collect payments, and nothing existed. So he built it.

The problem it solves is unremarkable to describe and enormous in practice. A hotel, a hospital, a café, an online store, each one would otherwise need to negotiate and integrate separately with Visa, Mastercard, M-Pesa, Airtel Money, the banks, and every wallet in between. Pesapal collapses that into one connection. The merchant accepts nearly everything the customer might reach for, through a single relationship.

The results are worth reading carefully, because they contradict most of what is written about African tech. Pesapal is regulated by the central banks of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Zambia, and employs more than 300 people across five countries. It built that position without the heavy venture funding usually treated as a prerequisite.

Then, on 31 October 2025, KCB Group, Kenya’s largest bank by assets, announced it had agreed to buy an undisclosed minority shareholding in Pesapal, subject to regulatory approval. As of March 2026 the bank was still awaiting that approval, with Chief Executive Paul Russo confirming the position at an investor briefing in Nairobi.

Read that again. One of the region’s largest banks did not build a competitor. It moved to buy into the rails. Eight months earlier it had already acquired 75% of Riverbank Solutions for around KSh 2 billion.

Two deals in eight months is not opportunism. It is a strategy. And it tells you where value is settling.

Infrastructure is boring, and that is the point

Nobody photographs a payment gateway. Tourists photograph skylines. Delegations photograph ribbon-cuttings. Investors, too often, photograph whichever startup raised the loudest round that quarter.

But payment systems tell you things a press release never will:

• How much commerce has actually moved into the formal economy
• How fast money settles, and therefore how much working capital an SME really needs
• How easily a small business can collect from its customers without a bank relationship
• How quickly a foreign company can start trading without rebuilding everything from scratch

Good infrastructure has one defining quality: you stop noticing it. The merchant does not care which method you tap or dial. The payment simply works. That invisibility is not a sign it is unimportant. It is the proof that it is finished.

We do not need to copy Silicon Valley

Pesapal is often described as “the Stripe of East Africa.” I understand the shorthand, but it is lazy, and it does the company a disservice.

Stripe solved a card problem for a card economy. Pesapal answered a different question entirely: how do you connect global payment systems to how Africans actually pay?

Different question, different product. Comparing the two mostly reveals which one the writer grew up with.

This is the pattern I keep meeting across the continent, in Lagos, in Nairobi, in Algiers. The businesses that endure are the ones solving an African problem precisely, not the ones importing a Californian solution and hoping the market adapts to it.

And Africa is not one market

The other habit I would like to see retired is “the African market,” spoken as though fifty-four countries share a single regulator, a single currency, and a single way of buying bread.

Kenya’s payment ecosystem does not resemble Nigeria’s. Nigeria does not resemble Morocco. Morocco does not resemble South Africa. Algeria, where I am from, resembles none of them, the regulation, the banking culture, the cash habits and the consumer behaviour are all their own.

Anyone arriving with one African strategy is announcing, quite loudly, that they have not been here. What works is several local strategies held together by one Pan-African view.

That is harder. It is also the only version that survives contact with the ground.

Why this matters to the families we work with

At Dawia Family Office we work with African entrepreneurs and family businesses on structuring, governance, banking access, and transmission across generations. Which means we spend a great deal of time on questions that sit underneath the headline deal rather than inside it.

The same discipline applies to reading a market. The businesses that compound quietly over decades are rarely the loudest ones. They are the ones everyone else is obliged to depend on: payments, logistics, identity, energy, connectivity. Unglamorous, regulated, difficult to displace once established.

Pesapal is a reminder that this layer is increasingly being built here, by people from here, for conditions that exist here. That is a different continent from the one described in most investment committee memos.

Curiosity before capital. Always in that order.

Sometimes it starts with a cup of coffee and a sticker nobody else in the room bothered to read.

Anissa Boulahya is the Founder and CEO of Dawia Family Office, a Dubai-based multi-family office working with accomplished African entrepreneurs and family businesses on structuring, governance, banking, real estate, residency, succession and legacy transmission across generations.

Dawia Family Office – Enlightening the Way