Kenya’s digital economy faces fresh disruption as PayPal, Sendwave, Hurupay and Twitch change services used to earn and move money across borders.
One by one, the digital services many Kenyans use to earn and move money across borders have changed the rules. Over the past year, PayPal restricted accounts, Hurupay stopped its US dollar banking service, Sendwave paused its digital dollar wallet, and Twitch ended creator monetisation. The companies have given different explanations, ranging from banking problems and technical difficulties to routine compliance checks.
But the changes expose a growing vulnerability in Kenya’s digital economy. Freelancers, creators and businesses depend on a small number of foreign platforms and financial companies to receive income from abroad, leaving them exposed whenever a provider changes its products, banking relationships or risk policies.
Between August 2025 and July 2026, the disruptions cut across creator income, cross-border banking and digital wallets, with no evidence of a single trigger behind them. What connects the cases is the disruption faced by Kenyan users when decisions made by foreign platforms or their banking partners suddenly change how they can earn or move money.
Twitch and PayPal did not respond to TechCabal’s requests for comment. Hurupay, Zepz, Sendwave’s parent company, and Wise responded and pushed back against some of the explanations circulating around their decisions.
Hurupay and Sendwave notified Kenyan customers of changes to their wallet and USD banking services.
Twitch told Kenyan creators in August 2025 that it would suspend monetisation. Streamers could keep broadcasting but would lose access to the Partner and Affiliate programmes from September 30, cutting off a revenue channel without removing access to the platform itself.
Twitch is not a payments company, but its decision produced a similar problem for affected users. The audience remained, but the programme that allowed creators to earn from it was gone.
In June 2026, PayPal froze an unknown number of Kenyan accounts and permanently restricted others after requesting documents proving employment and residence from affected users. The restrictions were concentrated among freelancers and remote workers paid by foreign clients.
Hurupay, a cross-border payments fintech offering virtual US dollar, euro, and sterling accounts, stopped offering US dollar banking services to Kenyan customers in July. It told users that incoming payments would be rejected and returned to the sender. The company later rebranded as Kolan in August.
Hurupay, now Kolan, rejected suggestions that Kenya’s position on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list or concerns about money laundering drove the decision. It told TechCabal in August that its choice “had nothing to do with grey-listing or the money laundering assumptions” but was instead about “slow processing times and unreliability from our banking partners.”
That explanation shows a problem separate from regulation: a company can face a demanding compliance environment while also relying on banking partners whose systems make transactions too slow or unreliable to sustain a product.
Zepz, the payments group behind Sendwave and WorldRemit, paused the Sendwave Wallet, a stablecoin-backed product for sending, storing and spending money across borders, in early July, citing technical difficulties. Customers were told by email to withdraw their funds by July 27.
“Our Sendwave Wallet service in Kenya has been paused since early July due to technical difficulties, impacting only the digital dollar functionality. We’ve already successfully contacted affected customers directly and supported them in withdrawing their balances, and our support teams remain available to any customers who need help, ” Zepz told TechCabal in August.
Zepz added that its core remittance services in Kenya “are operating as normal,” with the suspension limited to the wallet product.
Hurupay and Sendwave notify Kenyan customers of changes to their wallet and USD banking services. Image: TechCabal
Wise has also disputed suggestions that it restricted its services in Kenya. The company said customers can open accounts as normal, and global customers can still send money to Kenyan shilling accounts and wallets such as M-PESA.
Wise does not offer cards or local top-ups in Kenya, and individual accounts may still face restrictions due to routine know-your-customer checks. But the London-based company told TechCabal that “it would be inaccurate to say that Wise restricted its services.”
“Customers in Kenya can use Wise to send money only, but we don’t offer other services, like getting a Wise card or doing local top-ups,” Wise said.
The recent changes do not share a single explanation. They are also taking place as international financial companies face a more demanding operating environment in Kenya, with changes in tax and licensing rules, as well as transaction monitoring and reporting requirements.
Kenya has spent the past two years expanding its tax rules to tax digital businesses that generate revenue from Kenyan customers without a large physical presence.
The Significant Economic Presence tax replaced the Digital Service Tax (DST), and changes introduced in July 2025 expanded its scope to include income from digital marketplaces. Kenya also applies a 20% withholding tax on certain digital marketplace income and 16% VAT on taxable digital services.
The regulations do not explain the companies’ decisions, but form part of the wider calculation international platforms make when deciding how much local infrastructure, compliance and support they can justify in each market.
Beyond tax, payment companies must navigate licensing, transaction monitoring and reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions. They must decide which transactions fall under local rules, what customer data to collect and how to report suspicious activity.
The same companies also depend on banking relationships to move and settle money. Maintaining those relationships and the systems around them can be expensive, particularly when a product serves a relatively small customer base or relies on partners with slow or unreliable processing.
Kolan’s case shows why regulation should not be assumed to explain every change. The company has directly attributed its decision to problems with banking partners, not to the cost of compliance.
FATF placed Kenya under increased monitoring in February 2024 over weaknesses in its anti-money-laundering framework. Kenya remained under monitoring in February 2026 while pursuing reforms to financial sector supervision, beneficial ownership disclosure and virtual asset controls.
Being grey-listed does not mean Kenya is cut off from international finance. FATF does not tell financial institutions to leave a country or impose blanket enhanced due diligence requirements. Individual banks and companies still decide how much risk they are willing to accept.
With such stringent requirements, costs can increase across multiple jurisdictions, especially for products involving foreign currencies, wallets, or crypto assets. But grey-listing is a background risk, not proof that it caused a specific product change.
A bank or payments company may tighten controls under its own risk policies, without FATF monitoring being the direct reason for a restriction or withdrawal.
Kenya’s payment and crypto networks have also faced greater scrutiny in money-laundering investigations. Business Daily reported that Sendwave was cited in a court case involving an alleged KES 300 million ($2.3 million) money-laundering scheme, in which investigators were tracing funds moved through remittance services, local bank accounts and cryptocurrency networks. Binance has separately frozen an undisclosed number of Kenyan accounts following a government order.
Both cases show the wider scrutiny surrounding payment and crypto networks, but do not establish that the platforms changing their services in Kenya were themselves implicated in wrongdoing.
Hurupay, for one, has explicitly rejected the grey-listing as the reason for its own decision.
“Our decision to pause operations in Kenya had nothing to do with grey-listing or the money laundering assumptions most publications have been making without even reaching out to us first. It was a decision based on slow processing times and unreliability from our banking partners,” Hurupay said in an email to TechCabal in August.
Global fintechs can serve Kenyan customers without making the deeper commitment of building a regulated business in the country. A global company can offer payment routes into the country without incurring the costs and obligations of establishing a full local operation. The approach allows companies to remain accessible to Kenyan users while offering fewer products or building little local infrastructure.
Revolut has chosen South Africa as its first African market, applying for a full banking licence there and saying it plans to expand across the continent afterwards. The remittance platform already supports transfers to Kenya and M-PESA from some markets. But building a regulated banking operation requires a deeper commitment than simply offering a route for money to enter the country.
Caption: M-PESA allows multiple channels for international transfers. Image: TechCabal
This could become more important as global financial companies decide which markets justify local operations and which they can serve from elsewhere.
The changes create room for Kenyan and regional players to build alternatives. Pesalink, Kenya’s instant payments network, is linking local banks and mobile money providers to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), while Tanzania’s Nala has built products for cross-border transfers and infrastructure connecting payment providers to local payout networks.
More payment routes could give Kenyan workers and businesses greater choice when a provider changes its services. But cross-border payments still depend on banking partners, licences and compliance systems that no single company controls. Local and regional fintechs face many of the same regulatory and infrastructure pressures as the global platforms they seek to challenge.
The recent changes do not amount to foreign companies abandoning Kenya, but show the risks of depending heavily on a small number of providers to connect Kenyan users to the global economy. Local and regional alternatives can reduce that dependence, but the real test is whether they create enough routes that the loss of one provider does not leave workers and businesses scrambling for another way to get paid.
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