Kenya’s top financial regulators have flagged the financial system’s growing dependence on a handful of large technology providers as a structural vulnerability that could trigger widespread disruption if any one of them fails.
- •The warning came after a closed-door meeting in Naivasha on 7 November 2025, where regulators agreed to map the extent of this concentration risk and accelerate work on stronger crisis-management backstops.
- •The concern stems from banks, mobile money platforms, pension schemes, insurers, and capital market intermediaries increasingly relying on common cloud, switching, payments, and data service providers.
- •A failure, outage, or cyber incident at a single provider could compromise operations across multiple sectors simultaneously.
Mapping System-Wide Tech Dependencies
To mitigate this, the regulators will conduct a coordinated assessment of third-party technology exposure across the financial system. The aim is to identify where operational dependencies are clustered and to design supervisory tools that reduce single points of failure.
The Forum also agreed to overhaul crisis-management frameworks to ensure the system can absorb shocks more effectively. This includes reviewing access to emergency liquidity support and establishing adequately funded resolution mechanisms for distressed institutions, allowing regulators to intervene without destabilising the broader market.
Expanding Oversight to AI and Consumer Protection
Beyond infrastructure risks, the regulators also endorsed the development of a sector-wide strategy for artificial intelligence and machine learning, extending the focus on technological resilience to emerging analytical tools. The goal is to balance the efficiency gains of advanced analytics with safeguards against data misuse, algorithmic bias, and opaque decision-making.
Consumer protection and financial integrity oversight will also be strengthened. Regulators signaled sharper supervision of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing controls, alongside clearer disclosure standards for digital financial products, addressing concerns about pricing transparency and misleading terms.
During the meeting, the Forum launched the FinAccess Sectoral Reports, covering data from 2006 to 2024, providing a long-term evidence base to track shifts in financial access, product usage, and institutional market shares.
