Mastercard is embedding card payments directly into WhatsApp conversations through a collaboration with commerce platform Flowcart, launching in Kenya before scaling across East Africa — a bet on a channel that now carries more than a fifth of all Kenyan online shopping orders.
The “chat-to-pay” arrangement lets consumers discover products, place orders and complete payment inside a single conversation, without being redirected to an external website or app. Payments run through embedded links, QR codes or native checkout flows powered by Mastercard Gateway and its acquiring partners, part of Mastercard’s Merchant Cloud portfolio. Tokenised card details support repeat purchases, and merchants — from individual social sellers to enterprise brands — can accept payments without a website or point-of-sale system.
What the AI actually does
The announcement describes Flowcart only as an “AI-powered commerce orchestration platform,” which says little. The company’s own product materials are more specific.
Flowcart builds AI-generated carts — assembling ready-to-buy orders when a customer asks about products in chat — alongside AI flows that move prospects from a click-to-WhatsApp advert through to first purchase, and AI segmentation for targeting campaigns.
That places the AI at the point where conversational commerce usually breaks: a customer messages a seller, describes what they want in ordinary language, and someone has to translate that into a priced order. Automating that step is the difference between a chat channel and a sales channel.
Flowcart is not new to African payments infrastructure. Paystack listed a Flowcart Commerce integration among its recent expansions when it launched Index, its AI agent checkout, in Nigeria in June.
Two companies, one channel, opposite conclusions
The deal lands in pointed contrast to Meta’s own strategy.
iAfrica reported last week that Meta expanded its AI tools for small businesses with connections to Facebook, Instagram, advertising campaigns and Google Workspace — but not WhatsApp Business. On Meta’s own figures, 93% of Meta AI prompts in sub-Saharan Africa come through WhatsApp.
Mastercard has reached the opposite conclusion about the same channel in the same region, and is building payment rails into it.
Shehryar Ali, Mastercard’s senior vice president and country manager for East Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, framed it as meeting consumers where they already are. “Social commerce is redefining how consumers discover and engage with brands,” he said. “Our collaboration with Flowcart enables us to embed secure, seamless payments directly into these experiences, unlocking new growth opportunities for merchants and expanding digital payment acceptance in one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital economies.”
Flowcart founder Ananth Gudipati described the target as spanning “an independent social seller, a fast-growing SME or a large enterprise brand running WhatsApp as a core commerce channel.”
The gap it is aimed at
Mastercard’s 2026 SME Confidence Index found 80% of Kenyan SMEs cite simple, seamless payment methods as a top requirement for future growth.
The structural point is card acceptance. A social seller running a business through WhatsApp has historically had no practical way to take a card payment — no website, no terminal, no merchant account. Kenya’s answer has been M-Pesa, which dominates. Extending card acceptance into that segment brings a different rail into a market where mobile money set the terms.
Whether merchants adopt it depends on cost, which has not been disclosed, alongside the launch date and any merchant targets.
Where it sits
The deal is the latest in a run of agentic and conversational commerce launches across African markets. Paystack’s Index lets Nigerian customers pay through Claude, ChatGPT and OpenClaw. Naspers launched Zapia and ToqanClaw for South African users. Bolt integrated ride booking into ChatGPT. Visa has been building Intelligent Commerce and an Agent Score for agent-initiated transactions, while Mastercard’s own Agent Pay embeds payment tools into conversational AI platforms.
Chat-to-pay is the least futuristic of these and possibly the most consequential. It does not require a customer to adopt an AI assistant. It requires them to keep doing what a fifth of Kenyan online shoppers already do.
