Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations arrested two directors of Flexitech Group Limited, the company behind save-now-buy-later platform FlexPay, on September 2, 2026. Detectives from the DCI’s Nairobi Regional Office picked up Martin Kariuki Maina and Johnson Gituma Mwangi in Nairobi’s Roysambu area over the alleged theft of KES 31,213,700.95, roughly $242,000, belonging to a major, unnamed retail chain.
A Save-Now-Buy-Later Model Under Criminal Scrutiny
According to the DCI, Maina and Mwangi were acting as agents for the retailer, collecting payments from customers who had bought and picked up goods across several branches. That money was supposed to move on to the retailer. Instead, investigators allege the two directors, working alongside other suspects still at large, diverted the funds for personal use. The DCI said the pair are expected to face charges of stealing by agent under Section 283(b) of Kenya’s Penal Code, with arraignment set for the Milimani Law Courts.
Mwangi is not a peripheral figure at the company. He was identified by Flexitech in 2023 as a co-founder and the firm’s chief operating officer, which puts one of FlexPay’s senior executives, not a junior staffer, at the center of the case. FlexPay built its brand around an alternative to conventional buy-now-pay-later debt, letting customers save toward a purchase first through products like FlexPay Goals and FlexPay Chama, a group savings tool modeled on Kenya’s informal chama savings circles. That positioning made trust in how the company handled customer money central to its pitch, which is precisely what this case puts in question.
The arrests did not happen in isolation. FlexPay customers had already been airing complaints for months before the DCI moved in. One customer told a Kenyan blogger in July that he had waited six weeks for a KES 13,000 refund with no clear timeline from support. Another said in August that a KES 24,700 balance had gone unreturned since July, delaying her ability to pay for her child’s school return. The DCI has not said whether those withdrawal complaints connect to the specific KES 31.2 million the two directors are accused of diverting, but the overlap in timing has intensified scrutiny of how the company manages customer funds more broadly.
A Pattern Kenya’s Fintech Sector Keeps Repeating
FlexPay’s troubles land in a Kenyan fintech environment still absorbing the collapse of Lipa Later, a buy-now-pay-later startup that had raised more than $14 million before entering administration in 2025 with little warning to the merchants relying on it. Both cases involve consumer-facing credit and savings products where the core promise, that money handed over today will be there or accounted for tomorrow, depends entirely on internal controls investors and regulators rarely scrutinize until something breaks.
Kenya has spent the past several years building out regulatory infrastructure for financial technology, including a central bank sandbox and licensing frameworks that have supported a wave of acquisitions and consolidation across the country’s banking and payments sector. None of that infrastructure appears to have caught the alleged diversion of retailer funds before a criminal complaint forced the issue. That gap mirrors a tension TechMoonshot has tracked elsewhere on the continent, where regulators walk a narrow line between protecting consumers and avoiding rules so heavy they push legitimate lenders out of the market. An arrest after the fact does not answer the harder question of what oversight, if any, could have flagged the alleged misuse of agent funds earlier.
An arrest is not a conviction, and Maina and Mwangi will have the chance to answer the allegations in court. But for a company whose entire value proposition rests on being trusted with other people’s money, the reputational damage from handcuffs in Roysambu will likely outpace whatever the courts eventually decide. The DCI says its investigation is ongoing and that other suspects connected to the missing funds remain at large, meaning the next material update will probably come from a courtroom rather than a press release.
