The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has declared that the two rapidly growing African firms Flutterwave and Chipper Cash are unauthorized to conduct business in Kenya.
During Wednesday’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting, CBK Governor Patrick Njoroge responded to inquiries by saying that the two companies are not permitted to run remittance businesses or provide payment services to merchants in the nation.
“Flutterwave does not have a license to conduct business in Kenya as a supplier of payments or remittance services. They are not licensed to operate, so they should not be operating. We could also argue the same with Chipper Cash,” Njoroge said.
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Following the nation’s anti-money laundering regulations, a Kenyan court recently froze accounts linked to Flutterwave totaling more than $40 million.
A court decision allowing the freezing of various accounts held by three banks on behalf of the Kenyan-registered Flutterwave Payment Technology Ltd. was issued to Kenya’s Assets Recovery Agency.
In a statement, Flutterwave claimed that to maintain compliance, its business processes were audited and it regularly consulted with regulatory bodies.
The Assets Recovery Authority (ARA) is presently investigating Flutterwave for possible money laundering, and it’s not clear whether the business has the necessary licenses to operate in the nation.
A Nigerian start-up and four Kenyans had 62 bank accounts totaling more than Sh6.2 billion when the High Court froze them at the beginning of this month out of concern that they may be the profits of card fraud and money laundering.
After the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) applied to halt the transfer or withdrawal, pending the filing of a petition to have the money forfeited to the government, the billions in Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB), Equity, Eco Bank, KCB, and Co-operative Bank accounts were frozen.
Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji founded the payments technology company in 2018, and it now has operations in San Francisco, California, and Lagos, Nigeria.
According to the company’s website, it operates in 34 African nations, including South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria.
