Fintech Founders’ Arrest Rocks Kenya With 200,000+ Customers & Retailers Stranded
For three years, FlexPay sold Kenyans a fintech fairy tale, offering a save-now-buy-later platform built on the promise that Kenyans did not need more debt, only more discipline, and that the company holding their money in the meantime could be trusted with it.
That promise collapsed on 1 September when detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations walked into Roysambu and walked out with two of Flexitech Group Limited’s own directors in handcuffs. Martin Kariuki Maina and Johnson Gituma Mwangi, the latter a co-founder and the company’s long-serving chief operating officer, are accused of stealing over KES 30 M (nearly a quarter of a million dollars) belonging to an unnamed major retail chain.
According to the DCI, the pair were acting as collection agents for the retailer, receiving funds from customers who had purchased and picked up goods from several branches. Instead of forwarding this money to the company, they allegedly diverted it for personal use.
FlexPay’s entire model relies on trust. The platform offers a digitised version of the old East African lay-by system, letting shoppers pay for a fridge or a school uniform in instalments and collect it once the balance is cleared. It identified as a payment facilitation and savings platform, not a lender. The company offers goal-based savings products and a group savings feature known as FlexPay Chama.
That framing did real work for FlexPay. It let the company sit outside the perimeter that usually catches deposit-takers and digital lenders in Kenya, even as its products did precisely what banks and saccos do: collect money from ordinary Kenyans and promise to give it back at a later date.
By September 2023 the company was telling TechCrunch it had signed more than 600 merchant partners and served over 200,000 customers, part of the pitch that carried it into TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 and, later, into the second cohort of Safaricom’s Spark Accelerator in October 2025.
Long before the DCI arrived, customers were already expressing their frustrations. In July, one customer reached out to a Kenyan blogger, desperate for assistance after waiting six weeks for a KES 13 K (USD 100.00) refund. He had contacted the company repeatedly, but was continually met with promises that his refund was being processed without any clear timeline. By August, another customer shared a similar experience: KES 24.7 K (USD 190.00) had not been returned since July. Because of this delay, she was unable to send her child back to school.
These breakdowns in trust became evident through customer reviews on Google Play, especially leading up to mid-2026. Feedback consistently mentioned withdrawal requests taking much longer than anticipated, and customer support being noticeably lacking. One customer shared their experience of waiting for a KES 15 K (USD 115.00) refund from June, which still hadn’t arrived by July. According to FlexPay’s terms, refunds are supposed to be processed within 14 working days, yet many customers reported waiting for months without any resolution.
FlexPay is not the first Kenyan buy-now-pay-later alternative to run into trouble. The sector has seen some turbulence and also been under pressure over alleged predatory lending, fueling the push for regulation. But this case is less about aggressive lending practices or high interest rates, and more about a company that positioned itself as a trustworthy steward of customer savings, a platform that promised financial empowerment without debt, and whose founders now stand accused of simply taking money that was never theirs to keep.
