• Akshay Grover, Group CEO at Cellulant


• 27.01.2022 12:55 pm

1. Please tell us a little about Cellulant’s history. Please also explain what its current business is.

We are a pan-African payments company that enables seamless payments for businesses, banks and consumers across Africa. We provide a single API payments platform that enables businesses to collect payments online and offline, while allowing anyone to pay from their mobile money, local and international cards or directly from their bank. We have an office presence in 18 countries but serve 35 countries across Africa, offering seamless payment options for businesses, banks and consumers. 

Although we currently serve an extensive network of banks, mobile network operators, global and regional businesses, this is not where the company began many years ago.

Officially started in 2004, Cellulant has gone through different phases of providing financial solutions to its customers across Africa, first by innovating in the mobile space with a new micro-billing model for our ringtone service.

Bringing our technology to banks, Cellulant also transformed the early user interface of mobile banking, helping create the process that would see mobile money – and particularly M-PESA – reach critical mass. We’ve come a long way since inception and our journey is filled with award-winning industry firsts anchored in mobile payment and financial inclusion solutions.)

2. Have you had any interesting announcements or developments recently?

We are rolling out exciting and innovative developments all the time – and getting recognition for it too. For instance, Tingg by Cellulant was recently awarded “Overall Mobile App of the Year” and “Mobile App of the Year: Productivity and Utilities” at the 2021 Mobile App Summit, reflecting our dedication to simplifying and streamline processes for our clients.

A few months ago, we launched our Tingg Proximity Pay solution for offline merchants (stores) across five of our markets – Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda. This solution enables end consumers to pay via any mobile money/independent wallet or directly from the bank account at a merchant outlet without a POS device or any physical infrastructure. Over the last few months, we have grown 40x in the size of the business we are doing in this space. 

We recently partnered with a leading pan African bank across their 20-country footprint in Africa to take our Tingg solution to their 50000+ merchant base. 

We have also recently expanded our strategic partnership with MarketForce, the B2B retail and financial services distribution platform. The collaboration will extend the availability of MarketForce’s RejaReja retailer ‘super app’ to over one million merchants across seven countries (five new) in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2022. The integration will help MarketForces’s micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) clients to harness the power of mobile-first financial distribution technology and infrastructure to grow their businesses.

We also continue to onboard new merchants to our platform at a rapid rate – expanding our business and extending the benefits of frictionless payments across the continent.

3. What have been the key drivers of the development and growth of Cellulant for over the last two years?

The African payments market is characterised by fragmentation – and Cellulant’s main value proposition is harmonisation. This is what gives us our mission and is the fundamental root of our growth. But there are many other factors that have helped us to grow larger and more successful in accomplishing this mission. 

One of the key factors has been the strength and breadth of our payments infrastructure, which covers 35 countries across the continent – including all the major markets for MNCs – enabling us to cover around 600 merchants and many more through our partnership with 54 banks. On top of this, our long relationship with the banking community means that we are able to play a critical role in bridging banking and mobile money infrastructure – seamlessly facilitating transfers between these systems and playing a unique role in connecting Africa’s two main payments.

4. Can you please give us some specific examples of how your solutions have really had a positive impact for your clients?

There are many examples I could give, but they all boil down to resolving the complexities that merchants face due to the fragmentation of the market. Let’s take Zambia as an example, like many African countries, credit and debit card penetration is very low and mobile money is a far more popular form of payment. Three mobile money operators share the consumer mobile money market in Zambia, which means a merchant needs to be able to receive payments from any telco their customers might choose to pay with.

Without Cellulant, a merchant needs separate contracts with each telco, a source of daily friction when interacting with the unstandardised nuances of each user interface. Pain points occur at the point of sale, where a cashier must operate three different interfaces/phones to monitor incoming payments. Meanwhile, back-office teams contend with essential data that is split across three different systems and formats.

Cellulant aggregates these different providers via a single interface for the merchant. Once registered, merchants only need to engage with the Tingg app, which absorbs all the complexity of managing accounts with the separate telcos for them and makes all details associated with payments available in one place. In the back office, a single user interface streamlines reconciliation, refunds and dispute management, while cashiers are freed from juggling devices to focus on their customer service. 

These challenges are of course compounded for MNCs working across borders, interacting with different payments ecosystems across the continent. This example is just one payment method in one country – now imagine the same challenge but multiplied for every new method and every new country to get a feel for how challenging the overall landscape can be on the continent.

5. What are the main trends that will determine how your company develops over the coming two years or so?

We are looking to roll out self-onboarding to enable our merchants to sign up to and use Tingg quickly and easily, without support from a Cellulant operative. This will help us deal with the huge demand for our services and enable us to scale our merchant business at speed.

The acceleration of digital payments is another key trend across the continent. Cellulant is unique in offering both online and offline payments for merchants – and we believe there is much potential in the relatively underserved offline payments space. 

Cellulant streamlines the integration of mobile money and banking services across Africa, and we hope to expand our offering to consumers in the future. 

6. What does the competitive landscape look like from your point of view?

The competitive landscape in Africa is highly diverse – this is one of the main challenges for business entering African markets. There are so many providers – from banks to mobile money firms to fintechs – and each market requires engagement with multiple partners.

Each country has a unique payments ecosystem, with multiple payment methods and multiple providers for each. Whereas across Europe and the US, credit and debit cards are by far the most popular payment method, in Africa, adoption of these methods is frequently less than 1%. This means there is a good deal of competition across the African payments landscape, but this diversity of providers and methods is what Cellulant is here to resolve. We stand apart from other payment aggregators through the breadth of our reach and the strength of our offering, which includes 257 payment method integrations, covering 46 mobile money providers, 211 banks and 6 local bank acquirers.  

Cellulant’s main value proposition for businesses is that it can take on this complexity internally and act as a single point of entry for businesses on the continent. 

From a landscape point of view, we see one cross section – online and offline (accepting merchants payments at physical stores). There are players operating in both. Online includes Flutterwave and Paystack among others, and offline includes players such as Opay in Nigeria. Cellulant straddles this cross section of the market. This makes us very valuable to several merchants that require our solutions across both. 

Another cross section is collections and payouts (peer to peer transfers, payments to partners and vendors for our merchants). Again here – in Africa you have players focused on payouts online, such as MFS Africa, and you have players focused largely on collections. Cellulant is a fully integrated player that enables both. 

This is what differentiates us from our competition. We are all pervasive, not just geographically but across payment services.

7. How would you summarise all this in one or two sentences?

Simply put, we power payments across Africa – using our pan-African infrastructure and partnerships to replace fragmentation with harmonisation and offer a single-entry point for businesses looking to make and accept payments in African markets.