Card payments in East Africa grew 45 percent year-over-year in 2023. Kenyan consumers increasingly use debit and credit cards for online purchases, especially for higher-value transactions and international services. For merchants, accepting cards alongside M-Pesa captures revenue that would otherwise go to competitors.
The PCI-DSS Compliance Problem
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requires any business handling card data to maintain strict security controls including network segmentation, encryption, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and annual audits. For a typical Kenyan SME, achieving and maintaining PCI compliance costs between 500,000 and 2,000,000 KES annually. This makes direct card processing financially impossible for most businesses.
DigiPay Solves PCI Compliance
When you process cards through DigiPay, your servers never touch raw card numbers. Card data flows directly from the customer to our PCI-certified infrastructure where it is tokenized, encrypted, and processed securely. This keeps your business completely outside PCI scope, saving you millions in compliance costs while still accepting every major card brand.
3D Secure Authentication
3D Secure adds a verification step where the cardholder authenticates with their issuing bank before the payment completes. This shifts fraud liability from you to the card issuer and dramatically reduces chargebacks. DigiPay implements 3D Secure 2.0 which provides a seamless experience where most transactions are approved without additional customer friction.
Supported Card Types
DigiPay processes Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards issued anywhere in the world. Local Kenyan bank cards work alongside international cards from any country. Currency conversion happens transparently with competitive exchange rates when international cards are used for KES transactions.
Fraud Protection Engine
Every card transaction passes through our multi-layer fraud detection system. We check velocity limits to catch rapid successive charges, validate card BIN numbers against known fraud patterns, verify geographic consistency between billing address and IP location, and calculate real-time risk scores. Suspicious transactions are blocked before they cost you money in chargebacks.
Settlement and Payouts
Successfully processed card payments are settled to your bank account within 24 hours, same as M-Pesa transactions. There is no difference in settlement speed regardless of payment method. Your DigiPay dashboard shows unified reporting across all payment channels for simple reconciliation.
Start Accepting Cards Today
Integration takes a single API endpoint. POST the card details, amount, and currency to our charge endpoint. DigiPay returns a success response with transaction reference or handles 3D Secure redirection automatically. No PCI audit, no security certificates, no complex infrastructure. Just simple, secure card processing from day one.
