Pesapal and Drift Consult widen RACK partnership to retail and hospitality merchants

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Payments company Pesapal and business advisory firm Drift Consult have widened their partnership on RACK, a platform that ties together point-of-sale, stock management and payments, to push it to more retailers alongside bars, restaurants and cafés.

The firms announced the expanded partnership on Monday, October 19. They did not disclose the financial terms, a rollout timeline or how many merchants they hope to sign up.

Who does what

Under the arrangement, Drift Consult will lead business advisory and implementation, helping merchants work out how to fit the system into their operations. Pesapal will provide the technology and the payments infrastructure, handling both mobile money and card transactions.

For retailers, the companies said RACK lets owners monitor stock across several outlets and pull payments from mobile money networks and card providers into one place. Restaurants and cafés can use it to manage orders and payments.

In the announcement, Pesapal founder Agosta Liko said businesses now need more than a stand-alone payment service and want technology that shows them what is happening across their whole operation so they can make better decisions. Drift Consult co-founder Ferdinand Eloto said RACK would help businesses replace scattered manual processes with tools for tracking performance and improving efficiency.

Built on February’s hospitality launch

RACK is not new to Pesapal’s customers. The company was already pitching it to salons, restaurants and retail shops in October 2025, describing it as a single system for payments, inventory, reporting and customer insights across branches.

The partnership with Drift Consult began with a version for bars and restaurants. The two firms launched Rack Hospitality on February 18, 2026. Developed by Drift Consult with Pesapal’s payments built in, it lets restaurants take orders from dine-in and online channels, send them straight to a kitchen display, produce and print bills, track stock down to the ingredient and reconcile payments in one report. For bars, staff can post bills in real time, split them, pull up open tabs and print the final bill without switching systems.

At the time, Pesapal said the product had been tested in live bar and restaurant settings and was being rolled out to qualifying partners.

“Restaurants have digitized customer touchpoints, but the systems behind them remain fragmented,” Mr Eloto said then. “Rack brings ordering, kitchen management, inventory, billing, and payments into one continuous workflow.”

“Hospitality businesses today require full operational visibility, not fragmented systems. By embedding payments directly into Rack Hospitality, we eliminate reconciliation gaps and drive efficiency from order through to settlement,” Mr Liko said at the February launch.

Why payment firms want the till software

For a payments company, sitting inside a merchant’s daily software means more of that merchant’s sales run through its rails. Pesapal said in February that putting operations and payments in one system cuts reliance on cash, captures more transactions digitally and gives operators real-time sight of settlements. It added that the transaction records this produces can support forecasting, margin management and access to financial services.

Pesapal, which has operated since 2009, says businesses in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia use its platform. Earlier this month it teamed up with Safaricom to bring dynamic QR and tap-to-pay M-Pesa to shop tills.

The retail push puts RACK up against the many point-of-sale and stock systems already sold to Kenyan shops and supermarkets. Merchants comparing such tools will also weigh what they already pay to move money, from bank transfer charges to mobile money fees, and credit tied to their tills such as Fuliza Biashara.

The companies have not said whether merchants will pay a subscription, a share of each transaction or a one-off fee to use RACK.