Airtel Money plans to bring the Airtel Money Global Pay Card to Kenya, a Mastercard-powered virtual card that lets mobile money users pay foreign websites straight from their wallet. The move puts Airtel in direct competition with Safaricom's M-Pesa GlobalPay, which has had the Kenyan market for this kind of spending largely to itself since 2022.
Airtel Mobile Commerce N.V., the Netherlands-based fintech arm of Airtel Africa, named Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon as the card's next markets, according to reporting by George Kamau at TechTrends Kenya and Dennis Musau at Business Daily. Neither the company nor the reports gave a launch date.
What the Airtel Money Global Pay Card does
The product is a virtual card number linked to a customer's Airtel Money balance. There is no plastic. A user generates card details in the app and types them into a checkout page the same way they would a bank card.
Airtel pitches it for the purchases that usually push Kenyans towards a bank account or a friend's card:
- Streaming and music subscriptions such as Netflix and Spotify
- Shopping on international sites such as Amazon and eBay
- Any online merchant that accepts Mastercard
The card is prepaid. Techpoint Africa's Victoria Fakiya noted that users must load enough money before paying. That is one of the clearer differences from M-Pesa GlobalPay, where Safaricom offers an overdraft option to eligible customers.
It already runs in three markets
Kenya will not be the test case. Airtel launched the card in 2025 and it is already live in Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania. The company says it has issued more than 875,000 cards across those countries. It has not said how many of those cards are used regularly, which is the number that matters for a product like this.
Why Safaricom should pay attention
M-Pesa GlobalPay launched with Visa in 2022. It is part of a wider global payments line at Safaricom that also covers international transfers and Google Play payments. That line brought in KSh4.8 billion in the year to March 2026, up 22.3%, according to figures cited by TechTrends Kenya. Total M-Pesa revenue was KSh182.7 billion, up 13.4%.
The virtual card is a small slice of that. But it is a sticky one. A customer who links Netflix or a cloud storage plan to a card number tends to leave it there for years.
Airtel is starting from far behind. It has about 24 million subscribers in Kenya, with about 6 million of them using Airtel Money. Its share of the mobile money market stood at 11.1%, up from 10.9% the previous quarter and from under 2% about four years ago. Its agent network has grown from fewer than 20,000 to about 270,000 over the same stretch.
The total market is large enough to support a second player. The Communications Authority of Kenya counted 54.0 million mobile money subscriptions in June 2026, a penetration rate of 101.3%.
What users should check before switching
None of the reports published the card's fees, foreign exchange margin or spending limits for Kenya. Those three numbers will decide whether people use it once or keep using it.
If you are comparing the two cards when Airtel's goes live, these are the questions to ask:
- What is the FX markup? Most international purchases are priced in dollars. A small difference in the conversion rate adds up on monthly subscriptions.
- Are there issuance or monthly fees? Some virtual cards charge to create a card number or to keep it active.
- What happens with a failed recurring charge? A prepaid card with an empty balance will decline, and some services suspend accounts after repeated failures.
- Which merchants decline it? Network acceptance does not guarantee that every site will take a mobile money-backed card.
Airtel told TechTrends Kenya that its products go through regulatory review and internal security checks before launch. The reports did not say whether the Central Bank of Kenya has signed off on the card.
A tighter regulatory backdrop
The launch lands while Kenya is rewriting its payments rules. The proposed National Payment System Bill, 2026, would give the central bank wider supervisory powers over payment service providers. Public participation on the bill closed on October 9. We covered the central bank's push for more control earlier this month in Kenya's central bank seeks powers to take over struggling fintechs.
For Airtel, a new card product sits inside a broader effort to raise how much each customer moves through its wallet. In one of its operating companies, average merchant transaction value rose from $20 in the year to March 2022 to $74 in the year to June 2026, according to figures reported by TechTrends Kenya. That figure covers merchant payments generally, not the virtual card.
What comes next
Bonke Michael, managing director of Airtel Money Kenya, has described the company's strategy as growth across products, use cases, distribution and partnerships, according to TechTrends Kenya. The card fits that plan neatly. It gives Airtel Money users one less reason to keep a bank card or borrow an M-Pesa account for online spending.
Whether it dents GlobalPay will depend on details Airtel has not published yet: price, reliability and how quickly it reaches customers. A launch date would be a good start.
