Kenya: Capitalpay Targets Costly Payment Gaps Slowing African Trade

Nairobi — Garang Mayom Malek is building CapitalPay International around a part of financial technology that consumers rarely see, where payments must be matched with invoices, licences, cargo records, professional services and institutional approvals before transactions can be completed.

Rather than focusing primarily on consumer wallets and person-to-person transfers, CapitalPay is targeting the infrastructure behind high-volume transactions involving trade associations, logistics companies, agricultural cooperatives and other organisations that move money across multiple institutions.

The strategy has taken the company into Kenya's clearing and forwarding sector, Tanzania's customs-agent and agricultural payment systems, regional logistics projects and a technology partnership involving CapitalPay, GoPomelo, Tencent Cloud and Techtanium.

For Malek, the common thread is a problem that remains largely invisible to customers: while moving money digitally has become faster across Africa, businesses still spend significant amounts of time identifying payments, correcting references, reconciling transactions and confirming what should happen after money reaches its destination.

The next fintech problem sits behind the payment

Over the past two decades, African digital finance has focused heavily on making it easier for individuals and businesses to send and receive money, creating some of the continent's most recognised fintech success stories.

The next challenge is increasingly emerging behind those transactions, where businesses need to connect incoming money with the correct customer, service, invoice, shipment or professional obligation before finance and operations teams can close a transaction.

A payment can arrive through a bank or mobile-money channel within minutes, yet an organisation can still spend hours tracing it if the payment reference does not match the invoice or its operating system cannot identify what the money was intended to settle.

CapitalPay is targeting that gap through tools covering invoicing, payment validation, reconciliation, settlement records, approval rules and reporting.

The company is betting that the next generation of African payment infrastructure will be judged not only by how quickly money moves, but also by how reliably institutions can understand what happened after the transfer.

Kenya becomes an important market

CapitalPay's most visible Kenyan project is its long-term partnership with the Kenya International Freight and Warehousing Association, which represents professionals working across ports, customs, transport, cargo handling and other parts of the regional trade chain.

The proposed Centralised Clearing and Forwarding Management System is intended to support more than 1,200 licensed clearing agents through functions covering professional records, payments, compliance, cargo information, dispute handling and other industry services.

Kenya provides an important market for this model because cargo moving through the Port of Mombasa continues into several neighbouring economies, meaning delays in professional payments and transaction records can affect trade beyond Kenya's borders.

CapitalPay has also been involved in a logistics partnership addressing container deposits and cargo visibility for freight moving from Mombasa towards South Sudan.

Container deposits can tie up substantial amounts of cash until equipment is returned. Better tracking and guarantee structures can therefore affect the amount of working capital available for stock, transport, salaries and subsequent shipments.

Tanzania brings professional and agricultural payments

CapitalPay's Tanzanian plans extend the same infrastructure model into clearing-agent payments through the proposed Tanzania Customs Agent Management System, commonly known as T-CAMS.

The system is designed around professional fee payments, compliance information and transaction records involving licensed customs agents, creating a structure that links payment for a service with the professional who provided it.

CapitalPay has also announced work around agricultural payments, where cooperatives processing large batches of farmer payments can face incorrect account details, duplicate records and mismatches that result in failed transactions and delayed disbursements.

The proposed agricultural model focuses on validating payment information before funds are released and creating clearer reconciliation records after disbursement.

This could reduce the administrative burden associated with processing thousands of payments simultaneously.

The projects span different industries but rely on the same principle: a payment should remain connected to the person, service or obligation that triggered it.

Partnerships become part of the model

CapitalPay is increasingly working with specialist partners rather than attempting to build every technical component required for large institutional payment systems itself.

Its announced work involving GoPomelo, Tencent Cloud and Techtanium brings together cloud infrastructure, payment technology and delivery expertise with CapitalPay's institutional payment and revenue-management applications.

Large payment systems typically involve several organisations, including banks, technology providers, industry associations and operating institutions, with each retaining different responsibilities within the transaction chain.

For CapitalPay, the partnership model allows the company to focus on the transaction layer connecting payments with operational information, while specialist providers supply other infrastructure required by the system.

Malek's business thesis

Malek's business record increasingly centres on payments that sit inside larger economic systems rather than payments treated as standalone financial products.

Earlier technology work associated with South Sudan involved electronic taxation, customs automation and digital public services, giving Malek exposure to institutional systems where banks, public agencies and users needed to recognise the same transaction.

His more recent work through CapitalPay takes that experience into logistics, professional payments, agriculture and multi-bank infrastructure across African markets.

The result is a business model focused on the less visible parts of digital finance, where transaction references, settlement information, reconciliation and institutional records can determine whether a payment actually makes the underlying business process easier.

As CapitalPay expands into more markets, the test of the strategy will be whether businesses experience fewer failed payments, faster reconciliation, clearer settlement records and less time spent tracing transactions across disconnected systems.

Read the original article on Capital FM.