How Safaricom Is Building for Automated Commerce
What began as targeted bundles is extending into real-time, behavior-driven recommendations across everyday commerce.
At Safaricom Decode 4.0, the discussion around agentic wallets and personalized payments in Kenya moved beyond product demos into the structure of how digital commerce is being rebuilt. Executives from Safaricom PLC, Visa, and Cellulant described a system where payments no longer begin with user action, but with intent interpreted and executed by software.
The session was moderated by Gertrude Bandari, who leads business planning for financial services at Safaricom, and brought together four distinct perspectives. Peter Gichangi spoke from the platform layer, Henry Thuku from the global payments network, Mike Muruki from infrastructure, and Stella Muraguri from the legal and regulatory side.
“We are moving to a world where agents speak to each other,” said Gichangi, outlining a model where the user defines intent and systems handle execution.
That model builds directly on Kenya’s mobile money foundation. M-PESA established payments as a utility for moving value. What is being proposed now extends that into decision-making. Payments become the final step in a chain that begins with context, moves through machine reasoning, and ends in automated action.
In practice, this reduces the number of decisions a user needs to make. Rent payments can be triggered based on historical patterns. Transport choices can be selected based on real-time pricing. Purchases can be made without a search process. The wallet becomes persistent, operating in the background rather than waiting for input.
Safaricom’s role in this transition is framed around enablement. With more than 3 million businesses connected to its network, the company is positioning itself as infrastructure rather than a closed platform. Its existing API layer already allows developers to initiate payments, verify transactions, and connect merchants. Extending that into agent-driven systems follows the same logic. Safaricom provides the rails, identity layers, and data environment, while developers and businesses build on top.
Personalization is where users will encounter this change first. Today, personalization is visible through telecom services such as tailored data bundles and voice offers. Gichangi described a deeper layer, where every user interface adapts to individual behavior and preferences. Recommendations become continuous. A customer moving through Kisumu could receive merchant suggestions aligned to past choices, location, and pricing conditions without initiating a search.
That level of automation depends on a coordinated technical stack. Muruki broke it down into a sequence that begins with intent, moves through an AI system that translates that intent into tasks, applies policy constraints to limit how far the system can act, and ends at the settlement layer where payments are executed. Cellulant operates at that final stage, connecting over 200 payment methods across 24 markets and enabling transactions to move across different systems.
From a global perspective, Thuku described how Visa is approaching the same problem through standardization. The network supports more than 16,000 financial institutions across over 200 countries, and the challenge is to ensure that intent-driven payments remain secure across that scale. Tokenization and identity verification systems are being extended so that each transaction, even when initiated by an agent, can be tied back to a verified user and a defined set of permissions.
The infrastructure is advancing, but parts of the model remain in development. Agent-to-agent commerce, where systems transact directly with each other, is still emerging. The technical capability exists in fragments, supported by APIs and evolving protocols, but adoption depends on whether businesses are ready to allow systems to operate autonomously on their behalf.
Muraguri placed that transition within a legal context that is still taking shape. Kenya does not yet have a single law governing artificial intelligence, but existing frameworks such as the Data Protection Act and the National Payment Systems Act already apply. She pointed to data exposure, liability, and financial crime as immediate areas of concern. Systems that rely on extensive data must adhere to principles of minimization and purpose limitation. At the same time, assigning responsibility becomes more complex when decisions are delegated to software.
Automation also introduces new financial risks. Systems capable of splitting and moving funds at scale can be exploited for fraud or money laundering if controls are not clearly defined. Kenya’s proposed AI bill begins to address this through risk classification and approval requirements for systems operating in sensitive sectors such as finance.
What emerges is a system that reduces friction while redistributing control. Users define intent, but execution shifts to software. Platforms enforce boundaries, and developers determine how those systems behave. The balance between convenience and oversight will depend on how those layers are designed and governed.
The opportunity extends beyond payments. The same infrastructure can be applied across sectors including agriculture, healthcare, commerce, and transport. The constraint is not technical capability. It is how quickly businesses digitize, how regulation evolves, and how much trust users are willing to place in systems acting on their behalf.
Safaricom’s position, as outlined during the session, is to build the underlying structure. The pace and direction of adoption will depend on how the ecosystem uses it.
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