For a decade, banks measured customer experience by the things customers could see: the app’s onboarding flow, the speed of a chatbot, the polish of a mobile redesign. Meanwhile, the moment that actually decides whether a customer trusts their bank, the moment money moves from one account to another, was left to legacy pricing sheets, some written before smartphones existed. That gap is no longer sustainable. Payments are not a back-office utility sitting behind the experience layer. Payments are the experience.
Think about how rarely a customer opens a banking app to admire it, and how often they open it to send money. A salary transfer. A supplier payment. Money to a parent, a landlord, a sibling in another town. These are not incidental interactions; they are the interaction. Every fee charged, every hour a transfer sits “pending,” every SMS that says a payment failed for no stated reason, is a direct message from the bank to the customer about how much that relationship is actually valued. Customers read that message clearly, even when banks don’t intend to send it.
The remittance fee is a trust tax
Remittance and transfer fees have survived largely on inertia. They were priced in an era when moving money required manual reconciliation, correspondent banking relationships, and real operational cost per transaction. Much of that cost structure has since collapsed, interbank rails have gotten faster, switching infrastructure has matured, and the marginal cost of a digital transfer between two mobile wallets or bank accounts is now close to negligible in many markets. Yet fee schedules often haven’t moved at the same pace as the underlying cost of moving money.
The result is a mismatch that customers feel acutely, especially the customers banks can least afford to lose: the informal trader moving daily takings between accounts, the gig worker splitting a payment three ways, the family sending a small but urgent amount across town. For these customers, a flat fee on a small transfer isn’t a rounding error, it’s a meaningful percentage of the money itself. When that happens often enough, people don’t complain. They simply route around the bank, using cash, informal networks, or a competitor’s rail that charges less friction and less money for the same outcome.
Fintech didn’t win on features. It won on friction.
It’s tempting for incumbent banks to explain fintech and mobile-money disruption as a technology story, better apps, faster onboarding, sharper design. That’s part of it, but not the deciding part. The deciding part was economic: fintech challengers made the cost of moving small amounts of money approach zero, and they made that cost transparent up front instead of buried in a tariff guide. They understood something banks were slow to internalize; that in payments, price is UX. A customer doesn’t experience your interface when they’re deciding whether to send money through you. They experience the number that gets deducted, and whether it felt fair.
Rethinking the economics, not just the interface
None of this means every transfer should be free forever, or that banks should price without regard to sustainability. It means the default assumption that remittance fees are a stable, defensible revenue line, deserves the same scrutiny banks apply to every other legacy cost center. A more useful question than “what can we charge for this transfer?” is “what does it cost us to earn this customer’s daily transaction habit, and what is that habit worth over a relationship measured in years rather than transactions?” Banks that answer that question honestly tend to find that transfer fees are a poor place to defend margin, and a very effective place to build loyalty, deposit stickiness, and the kind of daily engagement that no marketing campaign can buy.
This is the deeper shift underway in retail banking: payments have stopped being plumbing and become the primary surface where a bank’s values, and its respect for the customer, are demonstrated in real time. A well-designed app can be undone by one punitive transfer fee. A plain, unglamorous interface can earn genuine loyalty if the money moves instantly and costs nothing to move. Customer experience, in 2026, is not measured in screens. It is measured in shillings, cedis, rand, and naira, in what is left in someone’s account after they’ve done the ordinary, necessary work of moving their own money.
A market example
SBM Bank Kenya’s decision to offer free PesaLink transfers for amounts below Kes 1 Million via Mfukoni, is a useful illustration of this shift in practice. PesaLink already solved the technical problem of moving money instantly between banks; SBM’s move solves the economic one, removing the cost barrier that previously sat between a customer and their own funds, regardless of which bank the recipient uses.
For a trader who moves money between accounts several times a day, a mother sending school fees to a rural branch, or a small business settling several suppliers in an afternoon, that fee removal is not a marketing gesture, it’s a material change in what banking can afford to be used for. Zero-fee transfers lower the threshold for formal financial participation itself: money that might otherwise move through informal, unrecorded channels stays inside the regulated system, building transaction histories, credit footprints, and financial identities for customers who have historically been priced out of exactly that kind of visibility.
That is, in the end, what “payments as customer experience” actually means in a market like Kenya’s. It is not a slogan about better design. It is a measurable commitment to keeping the cost of participating in the formal economy lower than the cost of staying outside it. Banks that treat free, instant transfers as an inclusion strategy, not just a pricing experiment, will find that the loyalty, data, and deposit relationships that follow are worth far more than the fee income they gave up to earn them.
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