91 Finance Monthly FinTech Awards 2022. Pan Af r i ca Firm Profile Cellulant is a leading Pan African payments company that provides locally relevant and alternative payment methods for global, regional and local merchants. 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. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 90% of all payments and transactions remain cash based. As such, African consumers have limited options when it comes to making payments and merchants cannot efficiently and effectively collect payments. In 2017, online payments alone in Africa were estimated at US$ 48b. Ninety eight percent of these payments were made in cash with credit card and bank accounts standing at 1.5% and 22% respectively. This represents a latent demand for payments digitization amongst a landscape of fragmented merchants. Cellulant, a leading Pan-African payments company is fixing Africa’s payments problems by connecting 700m mobile users to payments that power their daily lives. A unified payments platform which powers marketplaces that matter in local, global and value-chain payments, Cellulant’s belief in providing solutions to everyday challenges across Africa has led to digitizing payments end to end. As a result Cellulant is able to provide increased transparency and broader reach within a single digital commerce platform for financial sector players. From a dream, $3000 and a serviette... Cellulant’s co-founders, Ken Njoroge and Bolaji Akinboro from opposite ends of the continent, sat across each other at a dinner table, and on a serviette, drew a business model that became Cellulant. In 2002, they set out to establish what is today a leading multinational payments business in Africa, for Africa by Africans. The mission? To build the number 1 payments business in Africa; led by values-driven entrepreneurial minded people. Cellulant commenced operations in Kenya and Nigeria and has grown to operate across 11 African countries, including: Zambia, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda and a team of more than 350 people. About MilkahWachiuri Milkah is a Certified Public Accountant, trained at Strathmore University who also holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) degree from University of Nairobi. She started her career at Deloitte as an auditor where she worked on various assignments across various industries that honed her skills in accounting. She later joined Cellulant fascinated by the big audacious goal of building a tech business in Africa for Africans and by Africans. Her role was to set up the group finance reporting structure and later rose to group finance manager and shortly thereafter to group CFO. At Cellulant, she has helped build and structure a finance function across 10 markets and raised 2 rounds of critical funding to grow the business, the latest one in May 2018 at $47.5mil (the largest of its kind in Africa for a technology business that is purely invested in Africa). She is extremely passionate about mentorship which she implements at work by transforming her team into seeing themselves as business drivers and not just number crunchers. Outside of work she dedicates her time to students mentoring ad coaching them to become believers in their ability as individuals despite their circumstances. Her mantra? “stay curious. There is a different between surviving or thriving either as an individual or as a business - and what differentiates the two is how curious and hungry you stay for information no matter how high up the the ladder you go. I’ve learnt over the years to never feel shy to ask what may seem like stupid questions just because of my position...ever!”
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