Most banks in the region are not short on ambition when it comes to digital payments. What holds them back is more practical: the cost, risk, and disruption of ripping out systems that are still working. It's this exact challenge that TAI FINTECH and Stanchion Payments set out to solve when they partnered roughly a year ago, and the results are starting to show across Kenya and East Africa.
Two Strengths, One Partnership
TAI FINTECH is built specifically to design, integrate, and run mission-critical technology for banks, enterprises, government bodies, and development organisations across the region. Its strength lies in engineers on the ground, a research pipeline through Strathmore University's @iLabAfrica, and years of relationships across East African financial services and government.
What it needed was a globally proven payments platform to plug into that regional delivery muscle, which is where Stanchion Payments comes in. Stanchion's Payment Fabric™ is an overlay platform already live in more than 20 banks worldwide. Rather than replacing a bank's card management system, it sits on top of it, adding capabilities like tokenisation, dynamic CVV, Click to Pay, and ePIN self-service without touching the core.
Together, the two organisations can take a bank from the initial technical conversation through to a working, locally supported deployment without asking that bank to put its core infrastructure at risk.
“Stanchion Payments brings proven, globally tested payments IP; TaiFintech brings the local engineering talent, academic backing and on-the-ground delivery capability to make it work in this market. Between us, banks get to move at fintech speed while staying firmly in control of their infrastructure and their compliance obligations”
— Pat Muthui, Founding Executive Director at TaiFintechTraction on the Ground
In under a year, the partnership has built real momentum: an active pipeline with leading Kenyan banks exploring card modernisation, tokenisation-readiness, Click to Pay, dynamic CVV, and PIN management. Beyond the pipeline, TAI FINTECH and Stanchion have already delivered wearable and tap-to-pay tokenisation pilots in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. TAI FINTECH is scaling up local support through Strathmore's iLabAfrica and Research Scholars programme, building out Level 1 and Level 2 capacity in-region.
What Comes Next
Card modernisation is just the starting point. TAI FINTECH and Stanchion are already in early conversations about payment orchestration, government digital payment platforms, financial inclusion projects, cross-border payments, API ecosystems, and cloud-native, AI-enabled infrastructure.
For TAI FINTECH, the mix of commercial delivery, academic backing, and engineering depth positions it as the natural partner for global technology providers looking to enter East Africa — and Stanchion is a clear example of that in action.
For Stanchion Payments, partnerships like this one are central to how the business grows in new markets, pairing proven technology with the local relationships, delivery capacity, and market understanding that banks look for before they commit to change.
As banks across the region weigh the pressure to modernize against the realities of legacy infrastructure and limited internal resources, partnerships that combine global expertise with local delivery, like Stanchion Payments and TAI FINTECH, offer a practical way to move forward with confidence.