I&M Bank Selects Otoma to Modernise End-to-End Payments

What happened

I&M Bank, a Tier 1 commercial bank headquartered in Kenya, has selected Otoma to modernise its end-to-end payments technology. The stated goal is to improve the speed, reliability and efficiency of payment services for the bank's customers, according to Finextra's report on the partnership.

Otoma is described as a provider of AI-native, no-code payments infrastructure. The arrangement covers the full payments chain rather than a single component, which places the work at the infrastructure layer of the bank's operations, not only in its customer-facing channels. The coverage we reviewed does not disclose a timeline, contract value or the specific payment rails affected, so those details should be confirmed directly with the parties before being relied upon.

The announcement is a useful marker of where African retail and commercial banking investment is heading: away from isolated digital channel upgrades and towards replacing the plumbing that determines whether a transaction completes cleanly.

Why it matters

Payments are one of the most frequent and most scrutinised touchpoints in banking. A transfer that stalls, a balance that updates late or a payment that fails without explanation can undo months of investment in a polished mobile app. Modernising the underlying engine, as I&M Bank has now committed to do, is therefore a service-design decision as much as a technology one. Faster and more reliable processing reduces the number of moments in which customers are left waiting and wondering what happened to their money.

The "AI-native" and "no-code" descriptors also point to a change in how such infrastructure is run. If payment flows can be configured and adjusted without lengthy custom engineering cycles, operations and product teams may be able to respond to customer friction far more quickly. That shifts the operating model: the people closest to customer complaints gain a faster route to fixing them. For leaders in digital transformation, the question becomes whether their organisation's change process is fast enough to make use of that capability.

By the numbers

• Tier 1 status: the bank is described in the announcement as a leading Tier 1 commercial bank headquartered in Kenya.
• End-to-end scope: the modernisation covers the complete payments technology stack, according to the reporting.

The Renascence take

Most readers will focus on the AI label, but the more important word in this announcement is "reliability". Speed is easy to promise and hard to feel; reliability is what customers notice only when it fails. The behavioural principle at work here is uncertainty reduction: people tolerate a slow payment far better than a payment whose status they cannot see. Modernising the engine is worthwhile, but the experience gain depends on whether customers can track each transaction and understand what is happening while it moves.

Banks should treat payment modernisation as a visibility project before it becomes a speed project. Before chasing faster settlement, map every point where a customer currently asks "where is my money?" and design a clear, real-time status message for each one. Then use the flexibility of no-code infrastructure to close those gaps quickly, rather than simply making failures happen faster.