SOURCED FROM CURRENT NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALS
A growing number of giant construction firms, which won big-ticket jobs under the late president Moi’s reign, have run into financial headwinds after losing ground in a transformed infrastructure landscape dominated by Chinese players.
Crescent Construction Company is the latest in a string of cash-strapped legacy contractors to face auction, having missed out on the building boom that began under the Look-East policy introduced during the late President Kibaki’s tenure.
The new public procurement framework has granted the taxman a view of all payments, cornering rogue suppliers who have been dodging taxes after earning from the government.
Starting July 2025, the electronic government procurement (e-GP) integrated public procurement details with the Kenya Revenue Authority’s (KRA) iTax system, allowing individuals and companies to update tax details, file returns and register payments.
What you need to know:
International payments platform LemFi allows over 2 million immigrants to easily send money across the globe
LemFi uses AI within its robust credit service to enable ‘send now, pay later’ remittance, so people can ensure their families are supported when they need it most
New product will help streamline nearly £10 billion worth of payments
LemFi, the leading AI-powered international payments platform dedicated to building financial products and services for immigrant communities, today announced the launch of Send Now, Pay Later (SNPL), a credit-powered remittance product that allows its UK customers to use their LemFi credit line to send money home to their families when they need it most.
For the millions of immigrants in the UK whosend nearly £10 billion back home annually, there is often a timing mismatch between unexpected expenses and local earning cycles.
This can force them to delay pivotal transfers home or turn to unregulated, expensive credit solutions. Since traditional remittance providers typically require immediate payment, Send Now, Pay Later aims to address this critical pain point and provide vital service to customers who are new to the country and have a limited UK credit history. Powering SNPL is LemFi’s Ensemble AI model, which combines multiple data sources to inform credit decisions, including national credit bureaus, open banking data, and the company’s own remittance data, to help determine credit limits and repayment structures.
This intelligent system also automatically adjusts depending on the individual customer’s journey and available data points, determining the required data points based on the customer’s circumstances and then offering risk-adjusted credit based on the available data.
Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi, said: ‘The rise of Buy Now, Pay Later means people across the world can buy products and stagger the payments depending on their cash flow. But this has never been possible before with remittance, despite it being such a core part of the immigrant financial experience. With Send Now, Pay Later, we’re integrating credit directly into the remittance experience, ensuring financial support is never delayed by cash flow timing. It’s also a testament to our commitment to building a full-stack, AI-enabled financial ecosystem that understands and serves the unique challenges faced by global citizens.’ How Send Now, Pay Later Works
To access SNPL, LemFi customers are onboarded to LemFi Credit, which gives users access to credit lines ranging from £300 to £1,000, depending on their credit profile and assessment, which is enabled by leveraging open banking technology to evaluate eligibility.
This makes it accessible even to recent immigrants who often lack extensive UK credit histories and are excluded from traditional finance services. In addition, LemFi’s platform can recognise international credit histories and employs alternative credit assessment methods that look beyond traditional UK financial records.
This allows users to start with smaller credit limits and build their UK credit profile over time while accessing essential financial services.
This is done through the company’s AI-driven decisioning engine that analyses a wide spectrum of data points, including open banking insights, bureau files, remittance history and patterns within LemFi, as well as international credit footprints.
By training models across these diverse datasets, LemFi can predict affordability and repayment likelihood with greater accuracy than traditional scoring approaches while reducing bias that often excludes immigrants from mainstream credit, helping to solve the issue of ‘credit invisibility’ through the application of artificial intelligence.
Once onboarded, customers can access their credit limit to send money to any of the 30+ LemFi-supported destination countries. When choosing the SNPL option, LemFi immediately processes the transfer to the recipient while creating a deferred payment obligation for the sender.
Bridging the Credit Divide
Currently, immigrants face significant and widespread issues when it comes to trying to access credit and banking services more broadly. Approximately five million individuals in the UK are considered ‘credit invisible’, with immigrants from emerging countries disproportionately affected.
Research indicates that nine in 10 immigrants report that accessing credit has become more difficult in recent years, while 13 percent of migrants are excluded from banking services compared to just 3 percent of the general UK population. This exclusion creates a cascade of financial challenges that extend beyond simple access to credit.
LemFi’s approach to credit assessment specifically addresses these challenges. As well, SNPL will tackle friction points around timing and bank transfers. Its real-time / same-day transfers reduce the time taken by traditional banks by a third and provide a means for its users to support their community despite their cash flow.
Global Expansion and Market Opportunities
Following the UK launch, LemFi plans to expand the SNPL service to its other markets in the United States, Canada, and Europe. It currently supports over 2 million customers, enabling them to send money to over 30 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
Since its founding, LemFi has supported over 2 million customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Europe. In January 2025, LemFi secured $53 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to over $86M. Investors include Highland Europe, LeftLane Capital, Endeavor Capital, and Y-Combinator.
At least 35 counties have snubbed the electronic public procurement portal (e-GP), even as the National Treasury insisted that the government would only deal with suppliers through the platform.
The Treasury says, while all State departments have uploaded their procurement plans and some started procuring through the e-GP, only 12 county executives have uploaded the documents, leaving out 35 of the devolved units.
It’s just struck 1pm, and John Fox has ordered a Prosecco. Which makes perfect sense – when you’ve written a newspaper column for 34 years, you’ve earned the right to drink bubbles before lunch. We are with his friend M, who has a head of bouncy hair from a TV commercial.
We’ve been talking for an hour, mostly about my new book, which really means we’ve been talking about life. Because all books – even the bad ones – are about lives.
We sit under an umbrella as music thuds lazily from a speaker. The sun presses gently on our shoulders. I last saw Fox 15 years ago. He hasn’t changed much, though time has rearranged things around us with its long, meddlesome hands. It’s two days before my birthday, so it feels perfectly proper to start early. Never mind that in a few hours I’ll be picking my son up from school and he’ll say, ‘Papa, you smell funny.’ And I’ll tell him, ‘That’s the smell of birthdays.’
I’ve passed Kalamata countless times but never gone in. So, this feels like a small celebration – or at least a justified detour. It’s an outdoorsy sort of place, the kind people dress up for even if they pretend they didn’t. A lady in a blue dress walks in and claims her spot in the sun. She knows she looks good.
We order fish – something buttery with vegetables. It comes a little soggy, but that’s fine. The ambience wins. The chatter around us hums with energy, and the Prosecco sparkles in Fox’s glass like it’s auditioning for joy.
He tells me stories – about writing, about travel, about staying curious. The kind of wisdom that sounds light but sits heavy later.
When we finally leave, I feel older – not because of the birthday coming, but because time suddenly feels visible. Still, it’s been a good afternoon: prosecco, talk, sunlight, and the sense that growing older is a treasure, if Fox is anything to go by.
Members of Parliament have criticised the State’s plan to delay access to funds raised from the privatisation of government entities, saying that it would defeat the logic of selling off these firms.
The National Assembly Committee on Debt and Privatisation and that on Finance and National Planning have jointly proposed removal of the clause that allows privatisation cash to first be kept in a special interest-bearing account and then transferred to the Consolidated Fund (CF) within 90 days.
The High Court has issued temporary orders restraining Turkish clothing retailer LC Waikiki Retail Ke Ltd from terminating a sublease agreement between itself and Nova Holdings Ltd before the stipulated period has lapsed.
Justice Wendy Micheni, sitting in Mombasa, also restrained the multinational clothing retailer from vacating the leased premises on the first floor of Likoni Mall in Mombasa, which belongs to Nova Holdings Ltd.
The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) has dismissed concerns that Tanzanian tycoon Edhah Abdallah Munif’s acquisition of an extra 29.2 percent stake in East Africa Portland Cement (EAPC) will give him control over the company’s board and a dominant position in the cement sector.
CAK Director General David Kemei told the National Assembly’s Committee on Trade, Industry and Co-operatives that the proposed deal will not hand the businessman control or veto powers in the EAPC board.
The past few weeks have marked a new chapter in the career of Kenyan singer-songwriter rapper/producer, Nyashinski, with the release of his second solo album Yariasu, and a partnership deal with global music industry giant, SONY Music Africa.
‘It is a relief obviously, when you finalise a project, any project, and put it out to the world,’ Nyashinski (Nyamari Ongegu), told the BDLife in an exclusive interview a few days after an exclusive black-tie album listening party hosted with his brand partner Johnny Walker Black Label. ‘It is exciting when you release it (the album) for the world to hear it. It is exciting to present it and show what East Africa has to offer.’
Luxury Indian motorcycle firm Royal Enfield has entered the Kenyan market, targeting wealthy and middle-class clients in a move that brings new competition for established players like Inchcape Kenya, which sells BMW bikes.
Royal Enfield has appointed Ganatra Plant and Equipment (GPE) as its official distributor for the region, with the first store in Kenya recently opened at Nairobi’s Rosslyn Riviera Mall.