Airtel Money customers in Kenya can now deposit and withdraw cash at more than 22,000 KCB agents across the country. The two companies announced the partnership on 18 June, opening KCB’s agency banking network to Airtel Money users.
To use the service, you need a registered Airtel Money account and a valid national ID. Deposits are free. Withdrawals attract Airtel Money’s standard charges.
KCB and Airtel have worked together before. A 2024 deal let Airtel Money customers pay KCB merchant tills through Lipa na KCB, and the two have long allowed free transfers between KCB accounts and Airtel wallets. This agreement goes further. It opens KCB’s cash-handling agent network to Airtel Money deposits and withdrawals, which is a different and more useful thing than paying a till.
Why this matters: it is about cash, not features
Airtel Money has spent the last two years building a real challenge to M-Pesa. Its mobile money market share has climbed from under 3% in late 2023 to around 11% by the end of 2025, while M-Pesa has slipped below 90% for the first time. Much of that came from price. We already broke down how Airtel’s lower fees and free Airtel-to-Airtel transfers have been pulling cost-conscious users across.
But pricing only takes a wallet so far. The harder problem for Airtel Money has always been cash. Most Kenyans still load and offload physical money through an agent. M-Pesa’s biggest advantage is the size of its agent network, with more than 160,000 outlets. If you cannot easily find somewhere to put cash in or take it out, a cheaper wallet is less useful in daily life.
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This is the gap the KCB deal is meant to narrow. Instead of recruiting and managing thousands of new agents itself, Airtel is plugging into a network KCB already runs. KCB is Kenya’s largest bank by assets, and it says 99% of its transactions now happen outside branches, through agents, ATMs and mobile channels. Renting that distribution to Airtel turns KCB’s network into a product it can sell.
The interoperability story underneath
There is a bigger picture here. Kenya was supposed to have full agent interoperability by now. The Central Bank of Kenya pushed for a system where any customer could walk into any agent and transact, no matter which wallet they use. Person-to-person transfers across networks arrived in 2018, and merchant payments across networks followed in 2022. Agent interoperability, the part that would let an Airtel customer withdraw at an M-Pesa agent and the reverse, was promised for 2024. It still has not happened.
Because that regulator-led fix has stalled, companies are striking their own deals to fill the gap. Airtel partnered with the Naivas supermarket chain in 2024 to add cash points. The KCB agreement is the same idea at a larger scale. It is not true interoperability, since it only works for Airtel Money customers at KCB agents. But it gives Airtel users many more counters to handle cash without waiting for the regulator.
What KCB gets out of it
For KCB, the timing fits a wider shift. The bank recently completed its acquisition of a 75% stake in Riverbank Solutions, the fintech that has run its agency banking technology since 2013. Riverbank brings agency banking, revenue collection and social payment tools. KCB has also agreed to take a minority stake in payments firm Pesapal. Read together, these moves show KCB trying to become payments infrastructure for other companies, not just a lender. The Airtel deal is an early example of that infrastructure being put to work.
What to watch
A few things are worth keeping an eye on. Cash volumes moving through agents are actually falling, even as agent numbers rise, because more people now send money directly between wallets on their phones. So this deal matters most for Kenyans who still depend on cash, especially in places where Airtel’s own agents are thin. It is also worth watching whether Safaricom responds, and whether CBK finally delivers the agent interoperability that would make one-off deals like this unnecessary.
For now, the practical change is simple. If you use Airtel Money, you have thousands of new counters where you can put cash in or take it out. That kind of everyday convenience, more than any single feature, is what has kept M-Pesa ahead for so long. This is Airtel working toward the same thing without building the whole network itself.
