Mastercard and Flowcart are bringing card payments into WhatsApp shopping journeys in Kenya, with plans to expand across East Africa and later into South Africa, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire.
The companies announced the partnership on 7 September 2026. Mastercard Gateway and its acquiring partners will connect to Flowcart’s existing In-Chat Checkout, allowing customers to move from product discovery and ordering to payment from a WhatsApp conversation.
Flowcart is not building this checkout system from scratch for Mastercard. The company, previously known as Sukhiba, has offered WhatsApp commerce tools since 2021. Flowcart says its checkout already connects to more than 50 payment gateways. The Mastercard partnership adds its card-payment infrastructure to that existing system.
How the payment works
A customer can discuss a product with a seller, add items to a cart and choose to pay from the WhatsApp conversation.
Mastercard says payments can then be completed through embedded links, QR codes or native checkout flows powered by Mastercard Gateway and acquiring partners. An acquirer is the bank or payment company that connects a merchant to the card network and processes accepted card transactions.
Mastercard has not named the Kenyan acquirers participating in the rollout or said which payment route each merchant will use.
The companies also say card details can be tokenised for repeat purchases. Tokenisation replaces sensitive card information with a digital token, reducing how often the original card details need to be exposed or entered again.
WhatsApp is already a major shopping channel
Mastercard’s release says WhatsApp handles more than 20% of online shopping orders in Kenya. The underlying Communications Authority of Kenya survey needs more careful wording.
The CA surveyed 2,400 respondents across Kenya and found that 29.1% were involved in e-commerce. Among the channels used for placing and receiving e-commerce orders, mobile apps accounted for 44.8%, WhatsApp 20.2% and website portals 12%.
That means WhatsApp ranked ahead of websites as an order channel in the survey. It does not mean WhatsApp processes 20.2% of every online shopping transaction made in Kenya.
The same CA report also shows the challenge for card payments. Mobile money was the preferred e-commerce payment method for 65.7% of respondents, compared with 10.2% for credit and debit cards.
That puts the Mastercard and Flowcart partnership into a market where consumers already have a dominant way to pay online.
Mastercard is adding cards to a mobile-money market
For Kenyan sellers, WhatsApp commerce is already possible without Mastercard. A merchant can discuss an order through WhatsApp and ask the customer to pay through M-Pesa.
The new partnership is about making cards another payment option within that same shopping journey.
Mastercard’s own SME Confidence Index found that 95% of Kenyan SMEs surveyed accepted mobile payments. It also reported that 80% considered simple and user-friendly payment methods important for future growth.
Those figures come from Mastercard’s own survey, rather than an independent measure of demand for the Flowcart service.
What merchants will pay is still unclear
Neither Mastercard nor Flowcart has announced merchant pricing for the new card-payment integration.
Flowcart’s terms say Kenyan clients use its software to connect their systems to Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform and that Meta messaging charges can be passed on to clients.
We recently explained changes to WhatsApp Business Platform pricing in Kenya, which take effect on 1 October 2026. Those Meta charges are separate from Flowcart’s own commercial terms.
The companies have also not named launch merchants or given a detailed timeline for how broadly the Mastercard integration will become available in Kenya.
For Kenyan sellers, the idea is straightforward: keep the buying process centred on WhatsApp while adding cards alongside existing payment methods. How useful that becomes will depend on merchant pricing, participating payment partners and whether shoppers choose cards in a market where mobile money remains the preferred way to pay online.
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