I was at the JW Marriott in Nairobi this morning for the official Kenyan Government recognition launch of TouristTap — Craft Silicon’s cashless payments mobile app for international and domestic tourists — and I came away more convinced than I expected to be. What began as a smart fintech proposition solving a specific friction point has, in the space of six to seven months, quietly become one of the more consequential pieces of digital payments infrastructure in Kenya’s tourism ecosystem. The partners are credible, the Kenyan Government’s endorsement is genuine, and the commercial logic holds at every level.

Let me start with the number that matters most. Kenya’s tourism sector generated approximately KES 500 billion — half a trillion shillings — in revenue in 2025. The sector supports close to 3 million jobs, both directly and indirectly, across the country. That is not a rounding error and it is not a vanity statistic. It is an economy-within-an-economy, one whose full potential has been consistently undermined by a payments infrastructure that has not kept pace with the destination’s ambition. Sustaining that growth momentum, as CS Miano noted this morning, demands innovation, sharper efficiency, and the delivery of exceptional experiences to every visitor who chooses Kenya as a preferred destination.

A Cabinet Secretary Who Made the Business Case From Her Own Experience

Before I get to the technology, I want to spend a moment on what Cabinet Secretary Hon. Rebecca Miano, EGH, Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, said this morning — because she delivered what was, for me, the most analytically complete case for TouristTap of the entire event, and she made it not through statistics or policy language, but through lived experience.

The first story was personal. CS Miano had an international guest visiting Kenya in a professional capacity. The guest admired the dress she was wearing and asked where she could buy one. CS Miano took her to her own tailor. The tailor could not complete the sale — no card machine, no way to accept a digital or card payment. The guest left empty-handed. The tailor lost a sale. Kenya lost the revenues from the sale. That story — quiet, undramatic, and entirely ordinary — is the most precise summary of the problem TouristTap exists to solve that I heard all morning.

The second story was institutional. At the time CS Miano discovered that KICC — the Kenya International Conference Centre — was collecting just KES 250,000 per month from parking through manual payment systems, she issued a directive: switch to digital payments within 90 days. Collections rose to over KES 1 million per month thereafter. Same infrastructure. Same parking spaces. Four times the revenue — simply by removing the friction and opacity of cash handling.

Those two anecdotes do more for TouristTap’s commercial case than any slide deck or projected revenue model could. Kenya is not losing tourism revenue because visitors do not want to spend. It is losing it because the payment infrastructure at the informal end of the economy has made spending unnecessarily hard. The KICC story in particular is a real-world proof of concept for exactly what digital payments do to revenue formalization at scale — CS Miano essentially made the TouristTap investment case from lived government experience rather than projected forecasts.

Indeed, what gave her formal remarks particular texture was her specificity about who this platform is actually designed to serve. In her own words: the curious sellers, the vibandas, the TukTuks, the kiosks will have their fair share of trade using this product. These are the informal economy participants who have, until now, been structurally excluded from the tourism revenue flow simply because they could not accept digital payments. 

CS Miano’s recognition of TouristTap was not a gesture towards convenience for wealthy travellers — it was a deliberate move to ensure the broadest possible slice of Kenya’s tourism economy gets its fair share. She also shared something worth noting separately: in her view, TouristTap has utility beyond the tourist, and she expects it to become a convenient application for local use as well.

The TouristTap Origin Story Was Personal Before It Was Commercial

On the sidelines of this morning’s event, I had the opportunity to interview Kamal Budhabhatti, Group CEO of Craft Silicon, and what struck me most was how unambiguously human the origin of TouristTap is. Every time family came to visit from India — his mother, his sister — the same problem repeated itself: hunting for cash, arranging liquidity outside formal channels, the persistent awkwardness of a world-class destination with a payments experience that had not caught up with its ambition.

“It just clicked one of those nights when I was sleeping,” he told me. That is not the polished founding narrative of a product designed by committee. It is a founder seeing a universal problem through a personal lens — which is usually where the most durable solutions originate.

The Most Remarkable Coincidence of the Morning

Interestingly, I did not expect Chad Pollock, General Manager and VP for East Africa at Visa, to also take to the stage and tell almost exactly the same story.

Pollock arrived in Kenya two years ago carrying only his Visa cards. He could not spend using them everywhere. Two weeks before this morning’s event, his mother visited Kenya and went to the Mara. She wanted to spend money. She could not. He had to give her cash. “I probably shouldn’t be saying that,” he said, with the kind of candour that makes a corporate speech suddenly credible, “but I had to give her cash.”

The fact that the CEO of the company that built TouristTap and the VP of Visa for East Africa have essentially the same personal story — family arriving in Kenya, wanting to spend, being reduced to cash dependency — is not a coincidence you could manufacture for marketing purposes. It is the most honest proof of concept for what this platform exists to solve that I heard all morning. 

When the people building and backing a product are themselves its most representative users, that is an perspective worth taking seriously. Pollock’s conclusion landed with appropriate simplicity: when his mother next visits, she will spend using TouristTap. That is not a projection or a pilot metric. That is a sales conversion.

Where Tourists Actually Want To Go In Kenya

TouristTap’s commercial insight goes significantly deeper than the inconvenience of individual travellers, however senior. The real opportunity, as Kamal and his team identified through deliberate field research, is the informal tourism sector — and it is worth being specific about what that means in practice.

Kamal is clear on this point. The big hotels are fine. The park gates are fine. Formal tourism infrastructure has always had digital payment rails. But that is not where tourists actually want to spend their time and money. They may want to sit in a Kibanda— a local eatery where the food is Kenyan and the experience is genuine. 

They want to browse the local markets. They want to negotiate at the Maasai Market. These are the touch points where Kenya’s authentic tourism economy actually lives, and until now, every single one of them has been running on cash and mobile money via mostly M-Pesa.

Therefore, what Craft Silicon did before building the product deserves credit on its own terms. The team physically went to these places and observed. Hours at the Maasai Market alone, watching the friction in real time. A tourist reaching for a card, being told cash only. A vendor losing a sale because the payment infrastructure did not exist on their side. 

As Kamal put it: “We went to the Maasai Market. Sat there for hours and hours. Look at what tourists are going through — and that’s how we came in.” A lot of business goes into the informal tourism sector, he noted, and that business has been chronically underserved. TouristTap was built from that field observation, and it shows in the design.

What TouristTap Actually Does

Now approved for use across key tourism touch points — game parks, hotels, coastal destinations, and the informal vendors that constitute the authentic Kenya experience — TouristTap introduces a secure, fully cashless ecosystem that allows international and domestic travellers to transact without physical currency or currency exchange.

The mechanism is elegantly simple. Travellers download and register on the TouristTap app, choose where to pay by entering the vendor’s local till number, paybill, or mobile number, and complete the payment with a tap on an NFC-enabled mobile device and a secure PIN. Payments process instantly. No card terminal is required on the vendor’s end. No cash. No exchange rate negotiation. No transaction that falls apart because a market seller cannot accept what a tourist has in their pocket.

This is what makes TouristTap fundamentally different from a generic digital payments offering. It does not ask the informal sector to upgrade its infrastructure. It bridges the gap entirely from the tourist’s side.

Ten Thousand Users. Zero Marketing.

Here is the number that landed hardest in my conversation with Kamal: TouristTap has approximately 10,000 tourists using the platform, built entirely without a formal marketing campaign. The app has been live for six to seven months, growing organically through in-destination discovery and word of mouth. That is a meaningful product-market fit before the real awareness push has even begun.

That awareness push is now imminent. Campaigns will target airports and the full range of entry points into Kenya — border crossings and other arrival touchpoints included — where the intercept logic is strongest. A tourist encountering TouristTap at the moment of arrival, before the cash dependency has set in, is a far more convertible prospect than one who has already arranged their workaround. It is the right timing. 

The Infrastructure Beneath The TouristTap Experience

The consumer-facing simplicity of TouristTap sits on a serious institutional architecture. At its core is a strategic partnership with KCB Bank as the acquiring partner, with Visa providing the global payment network, delivered through the advanced capabilities of CyberSource — Visa’s enterprise-grade payment processing and fraud management platform used by banks and large-scale commercial operations globally to process digital payments, manage fraud risk, and support fast, reliable transactions at scale.

Kamal Budhabhatti explained the app’s broader ambition at the launch: “TouristTap represents a new era of convenience for travellers visiting Kenya. By enabling secure, cashless payments across the tourism ecosystem, we are not only enhancing the visitor experience but also supporting financial inclusion, transparency, and operational efficiency for service providers.”

CS Miano, speaking as Chief Guest, anchored the government’s position: “Kenya continues to position itself as a forward-looking, digitally enabled tourism destination. The adoption of platforms like TouristTap strengthens our commitment to enhancing visitor experience, improving revenue transparency, and ensuring that our tourism ecosystem remains globally competitive.”

Pollock articulated Visa’s role in terms that extended well beyond transaction processing. Through its global network and CyberSource’s infrastructure, Visa helps ensure that every transaction is fast, reliable, and secure — but its contribution to the tourism value chain also includes data-driven insights, global acceptance, and digital innovation that helps destinations attract the right travellers, understand their spending patterns, and design experiences that meet modern expectations. 

Specifically, Visa entered into a strategic partnership with the Kenya Tourism Board last year to strengthen how tourism is marketed, managed, and grown — supporting KTB with data-driven insights on visitor spending patterns, peak travel periods, and emerging source markets. That is intelligence infrastructure for the entire sector, not just a payments rail.

Chad Pollock’s formal remarks captured the broader stakes with clarity: “Tourism is one of Kenya’s most important economic engines, and how visitors pay is a critical part of the experience. Through Visa’s global network and secure payment capabilities, TouristTap enables travellers to pay seamlessly and securely wherever their journey takes them, while helping tourism players operate more efficiently and transparently. This is how digital payments can unlock growth across the entire tourism value chain.”

Johnson Ondicho, Head of Digital Channels at KCB Bank, confirmed the acquiring dimension: “As KCB, we are proud to power the acquiring infrastructure behind TouristTap. This initiative aligns with our commitment to driving digital payments adoption and supporting key sectors such as tourism with scalable and secure financial solutions.”

A Global Roadmap Built on Sound Logic

Craft Silicon has always conceived of TouristTap as a regional and ultimately global solution. Pilot deployments are already underway in Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with live market launches expected within months.

The global thesis, as Kamal articulated it in our interview, is analytically sound and worth understanding precisely. TouristTap is not designed for markets where card networks are already pervasive — Dubai, he said explicitly, is not a target because card acceptance infrastructure there is already mature. The strategic focus is the inverse: markets where local payment systems and mobile wallets are more pervasive than international card acceptance. That is not a defensive positioning; it is a highly targeted market selection logic that positions TouristTap exactly where the gap between tourist payment preference and vendor payment capability is widest.

That gap, as I put it to Kamal towards the end of our interview, is ultimately a story about underserved communities — vendors and informal economy participants who cannot accept credit card payments, not because of any failure of enterprise but because the infrastructure was never built for them. It is a financial inclusion story as much as a payments convenience story. Kamal confirmed that conversations with India’s UPI network are already at the presentation stage, and that markets such as Singapore are also in the picture. The opportunity, as he put it, is big globally.

What This Means for Kenya’s Tourism Ambitions

Kenya has been articulating a world-class tourism destination narrative for years. The wildlife, the coastline, the Rift Valley, the markets and the handicrafts sellers — the supply side of the destination proposition is genuinely exceptional. However, what has consistently lagged is the payment and transaction experience in the informal and experiential segments where tourists spend the most memorable portions of their time and money.

CS Miano’s two stories — the tailor who could not take a card, the KICC parking lot that quadrupled revenue when it went digital — are not edge cases. They are the everyday story of a tourism economy that has been underselling itself because its payment infrastructure has not kept pace with its destination ambition. The informal economy has been unfortunately excluded from that revenue flow, not because of any failure of enterprise or ambition on the part of vendors, but because the payment architecture designed for formal commerce was never built for them.

TouristTap is a real attempt in this market to close that gap from the demand side. Ten thousand users without a single marketing shilling spent. An solid backbone involving KCB and Visa at global scale. Government recognition from the Cabinet Secretary herself. A regional expansion already in motion across East Africa. A global roadmap rooted in the disciplined logic that wherever local mobile payment systems matter more than card networks — and wherever informal vendors cannot accept card payments — there is an addressable opportunity worth pursuing.

Finally, when the founder being the business that created TouristTap, as well as the VP of Visa inEast Africa, and the Cabinet Secretary for Tourism all have personal stories about the same problem, you do not need a market research report to validate what is broken. TouristTap is, at last, a clear answer to it.