Published by the FinTech Association of Kenya
PRECURSORSubscribe
PRECURSOR

Intelligence on what moves African finance next

Search
Independent

Mortgage math breaks on a seventy-two-hour loan.

Annualising a three-day working-capital fee produces a number designed to shock a parliamentary committee and misprice a market. The metric that actually governs informal enterprise is what the trader keeps after one completed stock turn, and Kenya's 2026 rules finally police the real abuses.

By The Precursor Editorial Team · Digital Lending · 5 min read · 10 November 2026

Mortgage math breaks on a seventy-two-hour loan.

The newsletter

Read it before consensus.

Free. Weekly. Governed by the Editorial Independence Charter.

Latest Analysis

All Analysis
The dollar debt trap on a shilling loan book.
Independent

The dollar debt trap on a shilling loan book.

A decade of celebrated offshore raises taught African lenders a brutal lesson in currency gravity: borrow in dollars, lend in shillings, and one devaluation erases five years of growth. The fix is structural: local-currency funding. The discipline extends to acquisitions.

Investor Corner · 4 min read

The audit trail hiding inside the token.
Independent

The audit trail hiding inside the token.

For a decade the compliance desk killed every digital-asset proposal in five minutes. Kenya's 2026 licensing regime, and the discovery that a token carries a permanent forensic history while cash carries none, are turning the blockers into champions, just as dollarisation raises the stakes.

Policy & Regulation · 4 min read

A voice interface is not proof of understanding.
Practitioner view

A voice interface is not proof of understanding.

Lenders are swapping the ticked checkbox for a talking assistant, and regulators are swapping paper disclosure for proven comprehension. The two trends are on a collision course, and the crash site will be a recorded "Ndiyo" that no one understood.

Consumer protection & Product pricing · 4 min read

The silent architect finds his voice.
Inside the Rails

Conversations with the people designing, regulating and operating financial systems

Inside The Rails

The silent architect finds his voice.

Njuguna Ndung’u helped keep the regulatory door open while M-PESA grew from an experiment into national infrastructure. After serving in President William Ruto’s Treasury, he now says the President overruns institutions and makes officials conform through fear. His life’s argument about strong institutions has become a test of his own public record.

Read the pieceAll of Inside the Rails

The method

Every substantial story begins with something visible and asks what larger system is quietly being revealed.

Behaviour beforeAdoption

What customers, merchants and informal operators are already doing that product teams haven't understood.

Infrastructure beforeScale

The rails, standards and identity systems that determine who can build, connect and compete.

Policy beforeEnforcement

Draft provisions and appointments that change the probability of what comes next.

Friction beforeFailure

Where consumers compensate for a system that technically works but practically disappoints.

Power beforePublicity

Who gains control over data, pricing, identity and access when a technical change lands.

The newsletter

Read it before consensus.

Rain is easy to report once the streets are wet. Our work begins before then.

Free. Weekly. Governed by the Editorial Independence Charter.

Precursor Studio

Partner with Precursor

Reach a concentrated professional audience across African finance, through clearly labelled partnerships that never buy editorial influence.

Download the media kit