KashLink

Challenge

Buyers and sellers don't trust each other

Selling on Instagram and WhatsApp in Kenya runs on trust. Buyers fear paying for goods that never arrive; sellers fear sending goods that never get paid for. KashLink isn't another payment gateway: it's a trust layer between the two. It holds the buyer's money until they confirm delivery, so people can transact with businesses and individuals they've never met.

The product had to explain escrow in seconds, to people who have never heard the word. Most of them would meet KashLink for the first time through a payment link a seller had pasted into a chat, on a phone, often on a slow connection.

Approach

Explain it in three steps, then get out of the way

• Mapped the buyer and seller journeys, from payment link to delivery code to payout.
• Wrote plain-language copy first and designed around it: "pay", "receive", "release" instead of finance terms.
• Built a small design system in Figma, then implemented it as Nuxt components so design and code never drifted apart.
• Kept the checkout to a single screen with M-Pesa first, because that is how most buyers pay.
• Tuned the front end for mid-range Android phones: small bundles, system-friendly fonts and no layout shift.

Key screens

Escrow, explained at a glance

What shipped

Launched and live

KashLink is live at kash-link.com. There are no client metrics to share yet, so this is the delivered scope.