CBK 2025: mobile money transactions fell 30 percent while the agent network grew 24 percent. Kenyans made fewer, bigger payments.
The Central Bank of Kenya published its Bank Supervision Annual Report 2025 on 21 September 2026. The headline most coverage will miss: monthly mobile money transaction volume fell 30 percent while value fell only 4 percent, so the average transaction grew by more than a third.
What changed
- Monthly mobile money transactions fell 30 percent, from 309.28 million in 2024 to 217.58 million in 2025, while the monthly value fell only 4 percent, from Ksh.753.45 billion to Ksh.722.53 billion. Volume reached its lowest point in February 2025, the weakest level since April 2023 (Source: CBK Bank Supervision Annual Report 2025, Table 8).
- Arithmetic paybillke has done on CBK's own two figures: the average mobile money transaction rose about 36 percent, from roughly Ksh.2,436 in 2024 to roughly Ksh.3,321 in 2025. CBK does not publish this average and does not attribute a cause for the volume decline. Neither do we.
- The network kept expanding through the decline. Active mobile money agents rose 24 percent, from 381,116 to 473,536, and mobile money subscriptions rose 22 percent, from 42.3 million to 51.4 million (Source: CBK Bank Supervision Annual Report 2025, Table 8).
- Agency banking shows the same shape. Bank agents grew 4.7 percent to 93,341, but transactions through them fell 20.2 percent, from 142.3 million in 2024 to 113.5 million in 2025. Over 85 percent of bank agents sit with three banks: Equity 39,094, KCB 22,413 and Co-operative 17,914 (Source: CBK Bank Supervision Annual Report 2025, section 3.20).
- Digital lending went the other way. CBK licensed 110 new Digital Credit Providers in 2025, 41 in June, 27 in September and 42 in December, taking the total from 85 to 195. Their gross outstanding loans nearly doubled, from Ksh.55.2 billion to Ksh.110.1 billion, across 6.74 million loan accounts, with the average loan at Ksh.16,341 (Source: CBK Bank Supervision Annual Report 2025, Charts 15 and 16).
Why it matters
Almost every account of Kenyan mobile money is a growth story, and the operator numbers support it: Safaricom and Airtel both reported record years. The regulator counting the whole sector reports something different for 2025. People transacted less often and in larger amounts, on a network that added 92,000 agents and nine million subscriptions while they did it. Those two pictures are not contradictory, they are measured differently, and the gap between them is the interesting part. For anyone paying a till or a paybill, the practical reading is that the cost of a transaction now matters more than it did, because each transaction carries more money and there are fewer of them. For anyone borrowing, the other half of the report is blunter: 195 licensed digital lenders, 6.74 million open loan accounts, and an average loan of Ksh.16,341.
What to do
- For journalists and researchers: every figure above is cited to its table or chart in the CBK report and may be reproduced with attribution to paybillke. The one derived number, the average transaction size, is labelled as ours and shows its working.
- For businesses: if your till or paybill volumes fell in 2025 while takings held up, that is the sector pattern, not necessarily your shop.
- For borrowers: check any digital lender against the CBK register before you borrow. paybillke keeps the full licensed list.
Published 23 September 2026 on paybillke. Last verified 23 September 2026. We refresh news entries quarterly and within 48 hours of any directly relevant ecosystem change. Editorial process.