Debited, Never Delivered: KCB M-Pesa Owes Customers Their Money and the Full StoryDebited, Never Delivered: KCB M-Pesa Owes Customers Their Money and the Full Story

We believe KCB Bank Kenya and its partner Safaricom must return every stuck shilling automatically, waive any penalty on loans customers could not repay while the service was down, and publish a full account of what went wrong by Friday 30 October. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), which licenses KCB and oversees the country's payment systems, should not wait for complaints to pile up. It should demand the incident report now and tell the public what it finds.

KCB M-Pesa's Ten-Hour Window Stayed Open

The facts are short and uncomfortable. KCB announced on 23 October that KCB M-Pesa, the savings and loans service that links KCB accounts to M-Pesa wallets, would be offline from 8 PM on Saturday 24 October to 6 AM on Sunday. As Mwenendo reported, the maintenance overran its window and the service was still down on Sunday afternoon.

In a statement carried by The Kenya Times KCB said the scheduled maintenance was still under way. It apologised, said its technical team was working to restore service as soon as possible, and gave no restoration time.

For as long as the work runs, customers cannot withdraw, deposit, check their savings, manage loans or move money between KCB M-Pesa and M-Pesa. Some say money was deducted during withdrawals but never arrived, and that refunds took 12 to 24 hours, in some cases up to 48. Mwenendo has not verified individual cases, and neither company has said how many customers or how much money is involved.

This is not a single bad night. Customers reported repeated interruptions between 19 and 22 October, and Safaricom Care acknowledged a system issue affecting KCB M-Pesa on 20 October. Two disruptions in one week, the second with a missed deadline and no new one, is a pattern that deserves an explanation, not just an apology.

KSh 544B in Mobile Loans Raises the Stakes

The scale explains why this matters beyond annoyed tweets. KCB's 2025 integrated report shows the group's mobile lending channels disbursed KSh 544B ($4.19B) last year, up 30%, or about KSh 1.5B ($11.55M) a day, as summarised by Khusoko. KCB M-Pesa is one of those channels, and the report says disbursements from the M-Pesa product alone grew 8%.

Behind those figures are households saving small sums on their phones and traders borrowing to restock in the morning and repaying by evening. Mobile credit is now part of how Kenya's small businesses run, as Safaricom's move to extend overdrafts to micro-merchants shows.

In our view, an outage on a savings and loans service hits these customers twice. They cannot reach their own money, and the gap often has to be filled with costlier credit elsewhere. Mwenendo has already argued that the nightly fees on Fuliza Ya Pochi fall hardest on the smallest debts.

A trader shut out of KCB M-Pesa for a weekend is exactly the kind of borrower who reaches for that kind of overdraft.

The Strongest Defence of KCB Falls Short

The case for KCB is worth stating fairly. Systems need upgrading, the bank warned customers a day ahead, it apologised, and an upgrade that fixes the glitches of 19 to 22 October is what customers should want. Skipping upgrades, the argument runs, only stores up worse failures for later.

We accept all of that. The failure is not that KCB carried out maintenance. It is that a planned job ran past its own deadline with no fallback and no new time, that customer money was left in limbo with no public count, and that this came days after an earlier unexplained disruption.

A planned upgrade should come with a plan for when it goes wrong: a point at which the old system is switched back on so customers can reach their savings. If such a plan existed, customers have not been told why it was not used.

Our Four Demands for KCB, Safaricom and CBK

First, KCB and Safaricom should reverse every transaction that was debited but not credited, without waiting for each customer to complain, within 48 hours of service returning. The CBK's own customer complaints mechanism expects banks to acknowledge a complaint within 48 hours and resolve it within seven days.

Customers who did nothing wrong should not have to take a number and queue.

Second, KCB should waive any late-payment charge, penalty or negative credit listing on KCB M-Pesa loans that fell due from 19 October until full service returns. A borrower cannot repay through a locked door, and no one should carry a black mark on their credit record for the bank's downtime.

Third, KCB and Safaricom should jointly publish, by Friday 30 October, when the outage began and ended, how many customers were affected, how many transactions were stuck and their value, what caused the overrun and what will change. The service runs across both companies' systems, so the account should come from both.

Fourth, the CBK should ask for a formal incident report now and publish a summary by 30 November. The Treasury and the CBK have proposed rules that would require payment providers to disclose cyber incidents such as fraud and hacking to the regulator immediately, as Business Daily reported on 4 October.

A failure that freezes customers' money for hours belongs in the same net, whether or not a hacker caused it, and the final rules should say so.

Trust Is the Product KCB M-Pesa Sells

Mobile money works in Kenya because people believe a shilling sent is a shilling delivered. That belief is what lets a market trader keep her float on a phone instead of in a tin, and what lets a bank lend billions a day to people it never meets.

Every hour of silence spends some of that trust. KCB and Safaricom can buy it back cheaply: return the money, cancel the penalties and tell customers the truth by Friday. If they do not, the Central Bank must make them.