For years, the conversation in East Africa about digital commerce has
been about access. Connecting people to mobile money, enabling businesses to
accept digital payments and bringing more consumers into the formal financial
system.
That progress has created one of the world’s most dynamic digital payment
environments. East Africa is a leader in mobile payments globally and continues
to evolve as consumers move between mobile money, cards, digital wallets, apps
and online marketplaces.
What comes next is a different kind of challenge. As more commerce moves
online, trust is increasingly becoming the deciding factor of whether people
and businesses participate and transact online. The question is no longer
whether a payment can be made digitally. It is whether the ecosystem behind
that payment can make the transaction both secure and seamless.
Kenya shows where the region is heading.Mastercard’s 2026 SME Confidence
Indexfound that 95% of Kenyan SMEs accept mobile payments
and 39% accept online payments, while 70% expect their revenues to grow over
the coming year. Those numbers demonstrate the importance of digital tools
today and the ambition businesses must have to scale tomorrow. That growth
creates an opportunity. It also creates a responsibility.
When the card isn’t there, trust has to work harder
A card-not-present transaction occurs when the physical card is not
presented at the point of purchase. Instead, payment credentials are
transmitted digitally through an online checkout, app, marketplace or another
digital environment.
This simple change has transformed commerce. A consumer in Nairobi can
purchase from a business they have never visited. A small business in Kampala
can reach <a href="https://bitcomme.com/asus-warns-customers-of-eshop-data-breach/” title=”Asus warns customers of eshop data breach”>customers beyond its physical location. A customer in Dar es Salaam
can pay for a service from a smartphone without ever interacting with a
physical point of sale. But this access and convenience also mean that the
trust signals behind every transaction need to be assessed digitally. The
ecosystem must determine whether the payment credentials, the device, the merchant,
the customer behavior and the transaction all make sense together, often within
milliseconds.
Mastercard data shows that70% of card-related fraud occurs on card-not-present
transactions, highlighting why the security of digital commerce has
to evolve alongside its growth.
TransUnion reported that 2.3% of transaction attempts
involving consumers in Kenya in 2025 were suspected of digital fraud.
Among Kenyan consumers who reported losing money to digital fraud, 39% said
third-party seller scams on legitimate websites were responsible. This highlights
how much of the risk sits outside the payment credential itself. It can sit
with the merchant, the device, the identity or the wider context in which a
transaction takes place.
The East African Community has recognized this challenge through itsregional e-commerce agenda,
which focuses on creating an enabling environment for cross-border digital
trade while strengthening consumer protection, digital identity and trust in
online transactions. That work matters because digital commerce does not stop
at national borders.
Security Should Not Mean More Friction
As digital commerce becomes more embedded in everyday life, security
needs to become more sophisticated and less visible at the same time. The goal
should not be to make every transaction feel like a security check. It should
be to use technology and intelligence to identify genuine risk while allowing
legitimate commerce to keep moving.
Tokenization is one example. Instead of exposing the underlying card
number during a digital transaction,Mastercard tokenizationreplaces
sensitive payment credentials with a unique digital token. More thanfour billion Mastercard transactions
are tokenized globally each month, around 30% of Mastercard transactions
worldwide, and Mastercard is targeting 100% tokenization of its online
transactions by 2030.
Through its collaboration with MCB, Mastercard has launched Apple Pay in
Mauritius, enabling Mastercard cardholders to make contactless payments with an
iPhone or Apple Watch and pay in apps and online. The service uses tokenization
to replace the card number with a device-specific token, helping protect
payment details while keeping the payment experience seamless.
For the consumer, none of this is visible. The payment simply works.
Behind the scenes, however, the credentials are better protected that they were.
That is an important principle for East Africa: security should work inside the
infrastructure rather than stand as one more barrier at the checkout.
The same principle applies to transaction intelligence.Mastercard’s Decision Intelligenceuses AI and network insights to assess transaction context and help financial
institutions distinguish legitimate activity from potentially fraudulent behavior.
Rather than relying on one signal in isolation, the technology looks at
patterns and relationships around the transaction to improve the precision of
fraud decisions.
For card-not-present payments, that intelligence becomes particularly
important because there is no physical card to provide a visible signal of
legitimacy. The objective is not to treat every transaction as suspicious. It
is to become better at understanding which transactions make sense, so that
scrutiny falls where it belongs.
East Africa’s payment ecosystem is becoming more connected
Mastercard’s collaboration withKCBspans Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, supporting
solutions that include e-commerce payments, cross-border remittances, QR
payments and Tap on Phone. The collaboration reflects how payment ecosystems
are increasingly being designed to operate across different channels and
markets rather than around a single payment method.
In Kenya, Mastercard andSafaricomhave expanded payment acceptance and cross-border remittance capabilities aiming
to reach more than 636,000 M-PESA merchants, helping businesses participate
more easily in digital and international commerce. In Uganda, Mastercard andMTN MoMointroduced the Virtual Card by MoMo, enabling customers to make online payments
without a physical card or traditional bank account. In Tanzania, Mastercard
andNMB Banklaunched QR Pay by Link, allowing merchants to accept payments through QR codes
and secure payment links without requiring a traditional point-of-sale device,
while also incorporating Click to Pay for online checkout.
These are different solutions serving different needs, but they point in
the same direction: digital commerce is becoming more connected, and the
infrastructure behind it has to carry trust across the whole journey.
AI Is Changing the Fraud Equation
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to this. AI is already
helping businesses personalize commerce, improve customer experiences and
automate parts of the payment journey. At the same time, it is giving
fraudsters new tools to create convincing websites, messages, identities and
digital storefronts. That means consumers cannot rely on appearance alone.
A polished website does not make a merchant trustworthy, and a
convincing message does not always come from a genuine business. A transaction
that appears normal may look very different when assessed alongside other
signals.
This is why the next generation of payment security needs to be
increasingly contextual and predictive.Mastercard’s Merchant Trust Servicesis
designed to extend that intelligence beyond the transaction itself. By
combining Mastercard network insights with cyber and identity capabilities,
external intelligence and analytics, it helps acquirers and payment service
providers identify potentially fraudulent merchants from onboarding through
ongoing monitoring.
This broader view of trust is particularly important as commerce becomes
more distributed across websites, social platforms, marketplaces, apps and
other digital environments. The question is no longer only, “Is this payment
legitimate?” It is also, “Is the business on the other side of this payment
legitimate?”
Trust Has to Be Built Across the Ecosystem
No single organization can answer that question alone. Consumers protect
their credentials, verify who they are buying from and pay attention to what
they authorize. Merchants keep their digital environments secure for the
customers who use them. Financial institutions and payment providers strengthen
fraud controls, and technology companies build security into the platforms where
digital commerce happens. Regulators set the standards and frameworks that allow
digital ecosystems to grow responsibly.
For East Africa, this collaborative approach is particularly important
because the region’s strength has always been its ability to connect different
parts of the financial ecosystem.
Mobile-money platforms, banks, fintech companies, merchants and
technology providers are increasingly interconnected. Mastercard’s work across
the region reflects that model, from linking mobile-money ecosystems to global
payment rails, to expanding e-commerce acceptance, virtual cards and other
digital payment capabilities.
The opportunity ahead is therefore bigger than preventing fraud. It is
about creating the conditions for more people and businesses to participate in
digital commerce with confidence.
The Next Phase of Digital Commerce Will Be Defined by Trust
East Africa does not need to be convinced of the value of digital
payments. Consumers already use them every day, businesses accept them, and financial
institutions and fintech companies are continually investing in new ways to
make them more accessible.
The next challenge is ensuring that trust grows at the same pace as
adoption.
That means protecting the credentials consumers use, giving financial
institutions better intelligence to assess risk, and helping legitimate
merchants establish trust. It also means designing payment experiences where stronger
security does not translate into greater friction.
This is what the future of card-not-present payments in East Africa is about.
The physical card may disappear, and the checkout may become almost invisible,
but the technology and intelligence working behind the transaction will
determine whether digital commerce can reach its full potential.
At Mastercard, we believe acceptance, security and privacy are the
foundations of trust. When the card isn’t there, trust has to be.
[Shehryar Ali is the senior vice president and country
manager for East Africa and Indian Ocean Islands at Mastercard]
