Mastercard and Flowcart social commerce partnership

Mastercard and Flowcart have partnered to launch a conversational commerce initiative in East Africa, beginning with Kenya. The collaboration integrates secure card payments directly into social and chat-based platforms like WhatsApp to facilitate a “chat-to-pay” experience.

By utilizing Flowcart’s AI-powered orchestration platform and Mastercard’s payment gateway, the service allows users to discover products, place orders, and complete transactions within a single chat interface. This eliminates the necessity for consumers to redirect to external websites or apps. The technology is intended to support the growing creator economy and various merchant scales, from individual social sellers to large enterprises, by providing native checkout flows through embedded links, QR codes, or tokenized card details.

The initiative addresses the high volume of social commerce in the region, noting that WhatsApp handles over 20% of all online shopping orders in Kenya. Following the initial launch in Kenya, the partnership plans to expand across Africa into markets including South Africa, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire.