We’ve all been there. You’re exploring providers for your next project, trying to decide which payment solution works best for your use case. Then you hit a wall: you can’t even view the documentation without going through weeks of compliance hoops.
This is one of the most frustrating realities of building with mobile money in Africa.
Compliance Before Discovery
Across MTN, Airtel, M-Pesa, and others, it’s surprisingly common that you cannot access even the bare minimum of their API docs without first completing compliance and KYC.
Think about that. Imagine if Stripe or PayPal hid their documentation behind a “government and business KYC” process before you could decide whether their API was a good fit. Sounds crazy, right? Yet here, it’s normal.
And it creates real problems for developers and product teams.
Why This Hurts Developers
When you’re an early-stage technical team, you don’t have months to burn. You need to make decisions quickly, and that means evaluating a provider’s API against a checklist like:
Documentation quality: Is it robust and developer-friendly?
Stack compatibility: Does it support our language/frameworks?
Webhook handling: How does it notify us of payments?
Support: Can we reach a developer team if we’re stuck?
Pricing: What are their fees and rates?
Reliability: How often is their API down?
Transaction limits: What’s the min/max per transaction?
But if you can’t even see the docs, you’re left choosing blindly.
This leads to wasted time, wrong integrations, and sometimes having to rip everything out and start again with a different provider.
A Broken Onboarding Experience
This isn’t just inconvenient. It slows down innovation:
Prototyping becomes impossible: You can’t test before choosing.
Stakeholder buy-in is harder: No working demos for your team or investors.
Dead ends cost time: You realize too late that the API won’t work for your use case.
The result? African fintech teams move slower than they should, and developers burn months on bureaucracy instead of building.
A Different Approach
This is exactly why FundKit exists.
Instead of waiting weeks for compliance just to explore, FundKit gives you:
Instant sandbox access: Test MTN, Airtel, and M-Pesa APIs immediately.
Virtual mobile money network: Use our phone emulator to simulate real user flows.
Smart routing: FundKit auto-picks the cheapest, most reliable provider in real time.
Unified SDK: One integration works across multiple providers.
That means you can:
Prototype in minutes, not months.
Show stakeholders working demos early.
Switch providers easily without rewriting your stack.
Independence That Scales With You
The best part of FundKit is that it’s independent.
Once your compliance team is done with the paperwork and the provider has approved you, you can simply swap your sandbox API keys for production keys and FundKit will keep working with zero code changes.
Want to add another provider later? Just drop in their production keys, and FundKit will handle them the same way. No rewrites, no provider lock-in, no wasted development cycles.
This means your integration grows with you as your business expands.
Why This Matters
When developers have to wait for compliance just to start building, it kills momentum.
By flipping the order build first, compliance later FundKit makes it possible for teams to:
Validate faster.
Integrate smarter.
Launch quicker.
Final Thoughts
Compliance is important. No one is arguing against it. But forcing developers to commit before discovery is backwards.
FundKit is here to fix that.
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