Akshay Grover, who initially joined Cellulant as the Chief Financial Officer in January 2021, later assumed the role of Acting CEO in May 2021 following the resignation of the company’s longtime CEO and co-founder, Ken Njoroge.

Following the development, the company emphasized its focus on maintaining momentum and sustaining its growth trajectory despite this change in leadership.

Peter O’Toole, currently serving as the Chief Financial Officer, has been appointed as the Acting CEO in the interim period. Cellulant has also announced plans to incorporate new names into its leadership team in the coming months.

Cellulant, founded in 2003 as a ringtone-selling platform with an initial investment of $3,000 from its co-founders, has undergone commendable changes over the years. Originally faced with challenges when Safaricom, Kenya’s leading telco, began offering a similar music service for free, Cellulant grew from its initial B2C model to connect banks to the M-PESA payments ecosystem.

The company expanded its operations to Zambia, Ghana, and Botswana, strengthening payment partnerships with international entities such as StanChart. Before the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Cellulant had successfully raised funding across three rounds – $1.5 million, $5.5 million, and $47.5 million. In 2022, the company was actively pursuing a $100 million Series D round, which was later put on hold.

Despite its previous successes, Cellulant faced challenges in 2023, a year that saw the company undergo restructuring to adapt to a challenging business environment. In early 2023, 27 staff members were laid off, and by August 2023, the company had to dismiss 20% of its workforce. These strategic changes were communicated as necessary steps towards achieving “leaner and efficient operations.”

The payments market in Africa is experiencing rapid growth, mainly due to advancements in peer-to-peer (P2P) and consumer-to-business (C2B) payment solutions. However, the fragmentation of payment processing continues to pose a significant challenge for businesses seeking to establish a presence in Africa.

Solving intractable problems is not new to Cellulant; founded at the height of Africa’s mobile technology boom in 2003, Cellulant is building Africa’s most comprehensive payments infrastructure. The company offers a single API payment platform that enables businesses to collect payments online and offline while allowing anyone to pay from their mobile money, local and international cards, or bank. 

Providing alternative payment methods for African consumers is particularly important on a continent that holds 70% of the world’s $1 trillion mobile money market. Card penetration sits at a 3% penetration rate – meaning global companies looking to expand into Africa need a payments partner that can offer alternative payment methods for the local market. 

At the recently held 25th Annual Harvard Africa Business Conference in Boston, Cellulant’s Group CEO Akshay Grover stated, “Solving the payments challenges in Africa is not just about payments but accelerating global economic growth. Africa’s dynamic economies and lack of an established payment infrastructure have resulted in a unique occurrence on the continent. 

On the one hand, this has prompted the growth of payment platforms and solutions to meet the various needs of businesses and consumers, turning Africa into a centre of innovation in the payments sector. On the other hand, with multiple providers, a wide range of payment methods exists due to the absence of a consistent infrastructure enabling businesses to collect payments seamlessly or easily operate across borders. 

Therefore, a payments infrastructure in Africa must holistically address the needs of businesses and their consumers by making it easy to collect payments online and offline -regardless of the size of the business.” 

Cellulant has built Tingg, a payments platform that provides multinational and international businesses with a one-stop-shop solution for their payment needs across the continent. The payments gateway connects to over 370 payment methods from mobile money operators and banks across the continent to global and regional card switches such as Visa, Mastercard, NIBSS and Verve.

The payments platform has full-stack offline and online payment capabilities. It caters to businesses in various sectors, such as Airlines, Telecoms, E-commerce, Ride-Hailing, Retail and Remittances, enabling these businesses to deliver a frictionless payment experience to their customers. Today, Cellulant powers payments for renowned global companies such as Emirates, Bolt, KLM, Ethiopian Airlines, Glovo, Kenya Airways, and Jumia; and processes billions of dollars yearly.

Cellulant is ISO 27001 (ISMS), ISO 27701 (PIMS), ISO 22301 (BCMS), ISO 20000-1 (Service Management) and PCI-DSS compliant for all its payouts and collections products.

This license enables Cellulant to continue providing online and offline payment solutions, including collections, check-out, biller aggregation, and payout services securely to thousands of businesses across Nigeria.

Cellulant’s digital payments platform, Tingg – enables businesses to seamlessly accept and make payments offline and online. A single integrated digital payments solution, Tingg addresses the complex needs of managing payments by simplifying the payment experience for the end-user and providing tools and processes for a merchant to manage their collections from a single dashboard.

“At Cellulant, we are committed to providing innovative and accessible digital payment solutions to businesses in Nigeria, which play a pivotal role in enabling financial inclusion and driving economic growth in the country. The renewal of our license is a vote of confidence from the Central Bank of Nigeria on the efforts of our team and partners, who have worked tirelessly to create safe and secure solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses in Nigeria and the regulatory standards. Tingg is now used by thousands of businesses and outlets in the 36 states across Nigeria, enabling businesses to easily collect and make payments, monitor transactions, reconcile and settle cash seamlessly,” said Akshay Grover, Cellulant’s Group CEO.

Nigerian consumers have different payment options, including card, mobile money, bank transfer and cash- with volatile currency fluctuations and no single settlement framework. As a result, the demand for digital payments continues to increase. Roughly 50% of retail customers request to pay for their purchases using digital payment options. However, this demand presents several challenges for most merchants who might not always support the customer’s preferred payment method, resulting in merchants having to enable multiple solutions to support multiple wallets and varying processes for settlement and reversals for a merchant.

Tingg solves these challenges by delivering a single solution to accept all digital payment methods (Bank Transfers, USSD payments, Cards & Mobile Money) maintained with the highest compliance and security standards. 

Speaking to the news, Frances Diribe, Cellulant’s Group Chief Risk & Compliance Officer, said, “Cellulant is dedicated to meeting the highest standards of risk and compliance management as we understand the importance of maintaining the integrity of our payment platform. We have invested heavily in robust security measures and compliance processes to ensure our customers can confidently use our services. We welcome this news that showcases our compliance with the standards, directives, and regulations of the Central Bank of Nigeria.”

In addition to being licensed to operate as a Payments Service Provider in multiple African countries, including Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Botswana, and Zambia, Cellulant has also achieved global security, privacy, business continuity and service management standards. The company’s certifications include ISO 27001 (ISMS), ISO 27701 (PIMS), ISO 22301 (BCMS), ISO 20000-1 (Service Management) and PCI-DSS.

Cellulant provides two essential payment ecosystem solutions: Collections and Payouts. It has three key offerings – Checkout for businesses who want their customers to pay for goods or services online; In-store Payments enabling businesses to collect payments at a physical location; and Payouts, which allow both local and global businesses to make payments, process international transfers or make payments to service providers.

The goal is to simplify payments for Copia Global’s diaspora and urban customers.

Copia’s diaspora and urban customers can now conveniently initiate transactions and purchases for their loved ones in rural areas in Kenya using the Cellulant network. 

This also provides greater choice, affordability, and convenience for both urban and rural shoppers when shopping for everyday items. 

“We are deeply committed to simplifying e-commerce in Africa and are excited to collaborate with Cellulant in expanding Copia’s market reach. This will enable us to provide diaspora and urban customers with alternative and convenient payment options when they shop on Copia’s platform for friends and family across Kenya and Uganda,” said Tim Steel, Chief Executive Officer, Copia Global. 

Remittance inflows to Kenya have increased tenfold in the last fifteen years, reaching an all-time high of $3.72 million in 2021, according to the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). 

For many Kenyans as in many African nations, digital payments made by diasporans to rural families provide a financial lifeline to millions of households. Diasporans and people living in urban areas can use Copia’s online platform to pay for goods and have them delivered to friends and family back home. 

“We are delighted to be Copia’s payments technology partner enabling consumers in the diaspora to make purchases seamlessly. As the African e-commerce and payments landscape in Africa continues to evolve, we believe that fintechs and e-commerce platforms need to have a deeper collaboration in expanding opportunities that will help ease payments and collections for businesses and their consumers across all sectors of the economy”, said Akshay Grover, Chief Executive Officer Cellulant.

In recent years, Cellulant has led the charge in simplifying payments for a wide range of businesses in various sectors such as airlines, telecoms, e-commerce platforms, and ride-hailing companies among others processing about $14 billion in 2021 alone. 

Cellulant provides a single digital payments platform – named Tingg- that addresses the complex payments needs of businesses. Tingg makes it easy to collect and make payments across multiple payment methods in different currencies, with the best customer experience for any business looking to digitize its payments.

Copia combines mobile technology, over 40,000 digitally enabled local agents, and an innovative last-mile logistics system to provide a broad product offering efficient, reliable delivery to rural consumers. The streamlined process enables customers to simply provide the phone number of a friend or family member at checkout and Copia will do the rest, including locating the recipient, identifying the nearest delivery centre agent, and delivering the goods.

Founded in 2003, Cellulant is among the pioneer Financial Technology (fintech) Companies in Kenya and Africa at large and has a history of driving innovation through creative technical solutions delivered with a streamlined user experience. 

Over the last decade, the company has evolved in its payments solutions, from mobile banking services to offering a full-stack one-stop-shop payments platform for global, regional and local businesses.

The authorisation permits Cellulant to continue enabling businesses collect payments online and offline, while allowing anyone pay from their mobile money, local and international cards or directly from their bank.

“As the payments industry has evolved globally, we are fortunate that the Central Bank of Kenya has provided a regulatory framework and environment that has allowed companies such as Cellulant to operate while adhering to the highest standards in providing payment solutions to businesses and their users. This authorisation will enable us to continue serving our customers better with guaranteed secure and regulated conditions for us to facilitate payments,” said Faith Nkatha, Cellulant’s country manager in Kenya.

Cellulant has partnerships with 45 of the largest mobile money operators and 210 banks across Africa and has a converged payments ecosystem that brings together a network of banks, businesses, mobile network operators and consumers. 

The company provides its services in 35 countries across Africa, including Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa, offering the largest and most connected payments network on the continent.

Commenting on the state of the payments ecosystem in Africa, David Waithaka, group chief revenue officer at Cellulant, said: “A connected payment network is integral to the prosperity of businesses in Kenya and Africa at large. Because of the industry’s fragmentation, most businesses are forced to integrate multiple payment providers simply to operate on a day-to-day basis. For Cellulant, simplifying the payment experience and providing merchant tools to manage all their payments  frees businesses to focus on their growth and consequently create opportunities that accelerate growth for all.”