The revocation took effect on December 6, 2023. 

Cellulant is therefore leaving the consumer-facing mobile money market to focus on providing payment services to businesses. The company told TechCabal via email that it decided to exit the mobile money space and focus on providing solutions “as far back as 2021”. This informed its procurement of a Payment Solution Service Provider (PSSP) licence from the CBN, which has been issued and is now operational. 

“The regulator did not revoke the licence as a result of infractions or any breach. The CBN succeeded in gazetting this request in December 2023, occasioned by the time it took them to conclude the process of revoking the mobile money license as requested by Cellulant,” Cellulant said in the email.

The CBN in the aforementioned letter addressed to Cellulant said it was revoking Cellulant’s mobile money licence, “following [Cellulant’s] decision to discontinue operating the licence”.

The company, which raised $54.5 million in three funding rounds between 2014 and 2018 from investors like The Rise Fund, has hit a rough patch lately. After an out-of-court settlement of a long-drawn leadership tussle with its former co-founder, Bolaji Akinboro, Cellulant has struggled to stabilise its operations and raise new funding.

In 2023, Cellulant saw the need to restructure its business, including reducing the headcount by 20% in August. In December, the company’s CEO Akshay Grover, stepped down citing personal reasons. That exit also led to another round of layoffs in the company and the announcement of an acting CEO. 

At least four high-profile executives also left the company in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Cellulant confirmed the “departure of staff, including some at the senior level” because of the “execution of strategic initiatives.” The company said it would name new leadership in a separate statement on Thursday.

These departures and layoffs culminated in the exit of CEO Akshay Grover, which was announced on Thursday. Akshay joined as CFO in January 2021 and was named CEO three months later. He was handpicked to lead Cellulant through a fourth financing round, said two people with direct knowledge of the situation. 

In September 2022, the company said it would raise $100 million in a Series D round before the end of the year to “deepen operations, acquire more merchants, more customers, and ensure seamless and effective payment services.” Ultimately, Cellulant was unable to raise the $100m it targeted.  

“The funding was a struggle, even though the company kept pushing towards it in 2022,” said one source who asked not to be named because they are not authorised to speak on behalf of Cellulant.

“The company maintains an active dialogue with potential investors. In 2024, we currently don’t plan to raise funds,” Cellulant said in an email to TechCabal.

The fintech company raised $54.5 million in three funding rounds between 2014 and 2018 from investors like The Rise Fund—a private equity firm owned by TPG Growth—and Velocity Capital. 

Unable to raise funding, Cellulant began restructuring its business in 2023. At the start of 2023, it laid off 27 employees, and in a second round of layoffs in August, it reduced its headcount by 20% and said it was “moving towards a leaner product-focused strategy.” 

Most of the changes the business made in 2023 were geared towards cutting costs, and one ex-employee claimed Cellulant had been spending significant amounts of money without specific growth goals.

“We undertook strategic operational adjustments designed to enhance operational efficiency and support our ambitious growth goals,” said Cellulant. “As part of these measures, we adopted a product-led structure in August and aligned our business into three core business units – banking, collections, and payouts – in December.”

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Editor’s note: This article has now been updated to reflect comments from Cellulant on their growth goals.

Cellulant confirmed his departure in an email to TechCabal and said, “The company is committed to maintaining its momentum and continuing its growth trajectory.”

Peter O’Toole, the company’s CFO, has been named Acting CEO. According to the company’s communications, new names will be added to its leadership team in the coming months.

Grover joined Cellulant in January 2021 as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He was appointed Acting CEO in May 2021 after Cellulant’s longtime CEO and co-founder, Ken Njoroge, stepped down, commenting, “Cellulant’s next phase requires an ‘enterprise runner’ rather than a ‘venture builder.’”

Cellulant has a storied history, and the tale of how its cofounders scribbled the original idea for the company on a napkin in 2003 is now lore. With an initial $3,000 investment from its cofounders, Cellulant began as a ringtone-selling platform. Its business model soon came under pressure after Safaricom, Kenya’s leading telco, began offering the same music service to customers for free.

Cellulant then pivoted from its B2C model, connecting banks to the M-PESA payments ecosystem. It would later expand to Zambia, Ghana, and Botswana as it sealed payment partnerships with international partners such as StanChart.

Before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it had 13 offices across the continent and raised $1.5 million, $5.5 million, and $47.5 million across three funding rounds. In 2022, Cellulant was pursuing a $100 million series D round, but the raise was put on hold.

Like most digital businesses in Africa, Cellulant was also affected by a challenging business environment in 2023. At the start of 2023, it laid off 27 staff members, and in August 2023, it fired 20% of its staff, consolidated some roles, and created new ones. These changes and trimmings were effected for “leaner and efficient operations,” per a statement shared with TechCabal at that time.

“With its collections and disbursement payment solutions, Cellulant will enable global and regional merchants operating in Egypt to easily manage their B2B and B2C payments seamlessly in-country and internationally,” the company said in a press statement.  

Egypt’s payments sector has been notable lately, following new regulations supporting instant payments and the rise of fintech companies. These changes have challenged traditional banking and changed how people make payments.

According to the 2022 Mastercard New Payment Index, 88% of Egyptians have used emerging payment methods, and this trend is expected to grow. This shift in consumer behaviour pushes businesses to provide better payment options to meet customer demands. Per Akshay Grover, Cellulant’s group CEO, “Egypt is a strategic market for business growth in MENA. We’re excited to successfully secure these licences and solidify our operations in Egypt.” 

Cellulant is undergoing a restructuring exercise that will impact a fifth of its workforce. In a statement to TechCabal, Cellulant, which operates across 19 markets, disclosed that these changes will be implemented in the coming days as the company focuses on a product-led approach that ideally creates user-centric products for growth. The company has clarified that this strategic shift has been in development for some time and has come to mutual agreements with affected employees. Cellulant has declined to disclose the exact number of employees leaving the company. 

“Cellulant is moving towards a product-focused strategy which will, unfortunately, see approximately 20% of our pan-African team transitioning out of the company. We are committed to supporting our employees as we transition and cannot comment on their separation,” Cellulant said.

The affected workers will be served with exit packages, alongside extended medical cover for themselves and their families. “Our goal is to treat our impacted colleagues with dignity and respect. As such, we provide comprehensive separation packages and extended medical coverage for every impacted employee and their families in every country,” Cellulant added.

Admittedly, the market has been challenging for African startups and the rest of the world. Other than that, Cellulant says it has been honing its business in the last two years to become “a merchant-focused payments business led by the productisation of its services and a complete revamp of its technology stack.” According to the company, these changes have led to the expansion of its customer network and 100% year-on-year revenue growth in its core offerings. Our next phase of growth required a shift to an agile product-driven organisation,” Cellulant shared.

Cellulant is consolidating some roles and creating new ones in the process. However, it has not closed any departments; instead, the payments company has “resized and reorganised for leaner efficient operations.” This marks Cellulant’s second round of layoffs, following a trimming in early 2023. While rumours circulated about substantial workforce cuts in specific markets, Cellulant has re-confirmed its presence across all markets. For instance, it highlights Nigeria as a key market, where it serves as the payment partner for various businesses such as airlines, QSR, e-commerce, ride-hailing, retail, and remittances.

Cellulant has also clarified that it did not lay off 30% of its workforce earlier this year. Instead, 27 employees left the company, with only four coming from Nigeria.

Full company statement

Leading Pan African payments firm, Cellulant, has announced adopting a product-led structure as its anchor for increased growth across the continent. This is part of its new organizational strategy that will see the company enhance its service offerings to evolving customer needs across the 19 countries it operates in.

The fintech, which powers payments for over 1,500 global, regional and local businesses across the continent, said the new strategy is informed by emerging market dynamics, investments in automation, and the recent consolidation of their product offerings in four already successful categories that are anchored by its robust banking, card, and MoMo wallet solutions on its payments platform.

“We remain cognizant of the ever-dynamic operating environment, influenced by many factors not limited to technological changes, consumer needs and market dynamics,” said Akshay Grover, Chief Executive Officer. “We’re therefore pursuing a leaner product-led strategy to support our scale and increase customer base. We also aim to drive operational efficiency measures to support our growth and operations in multiple geographies.”

Cellulant started operations in Kenya in 2003 and has since grown to become one of the largest pan-African payments companies offering both online and offline payments, with businesses across various sectors such as oil and gas, ride-hailing, e-commerce, travel, logistics, retail, airlines, and fast-moving consumer goods, in its client list.

Grover said the new implementation of the strategy business shift would entail consolidating essential functions and creating new roles. “Cellulant has come a long way to become a leader in the pan-African payments space. Innovation, efficiency, and agility will underpin our narrative over the next few years, and these are the first of critical steps,” he said. 

In February this year, Ibrahim Aminu was appointed Cellulant’s new general manager for Nigeria. The former general manager for VigiPay, a Venture Garden Group company, boasts experience that includes time at a pharmaceutical company, an oil and gas firm, two Nigerian banks and one of Nigeria’s oldest fintechs, Interswitch. When he joined Cellulant, one of Kenya’s oldest payments firms to lead its Nigerian business, the company announcement described his role as providing “leadership as Cellulant expands coverage for Tingg, Cellulant’s Digital Payments platform, across Nigeria.”

Cellulant has always served big merchants. Airlines, banks and other fintechs as an aggregator. But Tingg, originally Mula, was the company’s foray into directly offering consumers a way to pay merchants from a single app.

The offerings were typical. Airtime top-up, utility token purchases and satellite TV subscriptions. Launched in 2017—the same period when the agent network business was near its crest—Cellulant also began to roll out an agent network to support Mula’s smartphone app experience. Mula quickly became synonymous with bill payments.

Two years later, in 2019, Cellulant rebranded the service to Tingg. While Cellulant focused on its traditional business of collecting payments for big merchants like airlines, Tingg was to become a payments super app uniting bill payments, remittances, lending, group investments, and food and gas orders in one app across (then) eight markets in Africa.

These days, Tingg is none of these things. It suspended its agency banking business. And in 2022, Cellulant’s CEO, Akshay Grover told TechCabal that his company wanted to enable smaller merchants to collect digital payments. The new goal was to add 50,000 small merchants in a year. And Tingg was the arrowhead.

With a streamlined focus on enabling digital payments for smaller merchants, Tingg grew quickly. Between September 2022 and February 2023, InStore, a product that allowed small merchants to accept payments from multiple channels grew by 200% in Nigeria alone

Growing this segment is a key focus of Aminu, the new country manager in Nigeria. Already Instore is used by several mid-sized businesses including quick-service restaurant chains. At last count, Tingg was being used in 400 stores in Nigeria.

“The SMBs (small and medium businesses) still handle a lot of cash today as it is and there is a big opportunity [there] as we see it,” Aminu told TechCabal earlier in June. Nigeria’s infamous cash ban policy was a boon, Aminu admitted. “There is now an urgency for businesses to start accepting payments digitally,” he added.

But the same policy wave that lifted Cellulant, did the same for the competition. In particular, Opay, Moniepoint and Palmpay. All three offer point-of-sale devices for card payments as well as bank transfers. In addition, all three also have strong agent banking networks that run mostly Cash-In-Cash-Out operations.

Tingg’s edge lies in its razor focus on targeting small merchants that are big enough to be worth the hassle. The core of its offering is a promise to deliver smoother offline acquiring without the hardware where possible. As a result, it does not have to deal with the hassle of managing a CICO-oriented agent banking network. Nigeria’s agent banking operators have said they will increase the charges they collect from customers seeking to make deposits or withdrawals.

This could drive customers away from CICO agent networks to more bank transfers and mobile phone-based payments. For now, this is only conjecture. Consumer habits die hard and Nigerians love withdrawing cash on demand.

“Yes, competition would exist but we pride ourselves on the service we are able to offer our customers and our ability to deepen that relationship,” Aminu concedes.

TechCabal talked to Gilbert Lungu, general manager of Cellulant Zambia, to find out more about the fintech startup’s motivation for pivoting, the overall state of payments in the country, challenges they have come across in their operation, and more.

Please give us a brief overview of Cellulant’s operations since it entered the Zambia market.

Gilbert Lungu: Cellulant has been in Zambia since 2011. Primarily, at the time, the business was in a phase where the focus was on banking and providing mobile banking platforms, and then also doing what we call merchant aggregation, which is essentially just layering the mobile banking platforms with the actual merchants to enable payments to happen. In terms of that phase of the business, I think it went fairly well. We acquired 15 out of 18 banks, providing services in one form or the other for them.

Around 2017 and 2018, there was a view that there were other opportunities in the market that spoke to payment collections and there were hypotheses around it. The main one was that there was no dominant mobile network operator in the market. The second one was that the primary product that the mobile network operators were pushing was peer-to-peer payments. Number three was that there was a clear cut case in terms of being able to do merchant acquisition, and provide digital payments for them based on the ecosystem that existed, either with the mobile network operators, as well as the banks. The fourth one was the view that there was general fragmentation in the market as a result of hypothesis number two. So the market was fragmented, because there was no one operator that was ahead of the other,  and we realised that the fragmentation provided an opportunity to get into payment collections.

After considering all those hypotheses, we then decided to pivot to payments. The banking business kind of took a back seat and we pushed the payments business more. Since that pivot, Zambia continues to be quite exciting as a market and we continue to experience growth month on month. 

Where do you think the payments landscape in the country is headed in the next 2-3 years?

GL: The way I see it, Zambia is definitely poised to be a significant tech hub. There’s a lot of innovations that are going on with respect to young startups in ecommerce which I think will be big in the coming years. I think with the additional interest in terms of potential prospective investors looking for all sorts of opportunities, including in tech, when some of that money starts landing in terms of fundraising, we are going to see significant growth of the ecosystem. For a lot of these startups, I think what will then happen is that scale will begin to show.

From a macro environment point of view, stability will see the economy start to take shape in terms of the growth plans that the government has put in place. I see that also being an accelerant to many sectors, including tech. There is significant consultation between the government and the ecosystem which is well needed. We are having quarterly engagements with the minister and presenting ideas and papers to him about how we can accelerate digitization in our country. In short, we are putting across ideas and he’s driving it from a policy point of view, to ensure that some of those ideas become a reality. 

For instance, there is an idea from a payments point of view that if the government takes a decision to start compelling some of the government departments to do payments via digital platforms and then puts the relevant policy framework to guide that, it will guide customer behaviour towards using digital means for transactions. 

I think over the next two to three years, opportunity size is also going to grow in terms of what else the tech startups can actually do. From a product point of view, I think payments is the thing right now. I see payouts, disbursements being the next big thing, as well as remittances, inward remittances, and then the relevant rails to be able to receive those remittances, and make sure that they’re flowing in the economy. So I see a positive picture overall.

Which challenges would you say have been prominent in the Zambian tech ecosystem?

GL: I think for Zambian startups, capital is still pretty much a challenge. I mean I’ve seen that there is activity now with angel investors trying to invest in these young tech startups but there is still some way to go because raising money is very difficult because of the nature of the places from which you can obtain that money. If you go into the banking sector, the cost of money is extremely high especially for startups.

Challenge number two is in terms of incubation. People have a lot of ideas. I meet all sorts of youngsters that walk in here or find me on LinkedIn, and they’re telling me about very, very nice ideas, that if they got the right level of attention and training, they would become really grand ideas. The incubation to move from ideation to a point where they implement the ideas into scalable businesses is still relatively lacking in my opinion. We don’t have a lot of incubation hubs where these youngsters can take the ideas to be stress-tested.

The third challenge, in my opinion, is the fact that tech businesses typically thrive and scale in the context of an ecosystem. They don’t work in isolation. Unfortunately, the ecosystem in Zambia has not developed to a point where there is sufficient trust between each of the ecosystem players in terms of who should play in what space. The bigger guys are always suspecting the smaller guys of trying to sabotage what they are doing and vice versa. For me, those are some of the most significant challenges in the ecosystem.

What are some solutions you reckon could address these challenges?

GL: For the capital challenge, I’m aware that in some developed markets, startups get access to things like government funds for working capital purposes, but at much cheaper rates compared to, say, banks. There is some effort there and I must really commend the government in availing monies that are now going into what we call the constituencies, and people who have fantastic ideas can then form cooperatives, and drive those ideas to fruition. I would like to see tech start taking up some of those funds. The other element around capital is that I know that on the international market capital is much cheaper so we need to position ourselves as an investment destination. Ultimately when that capital comes in, because it is much cheaper in relative terms, when these guys access it, then we’ll be able to create scale. 

In terms of ecosystem development, banks are talking with mobile network operators, who are also talking to fintech startups, which is a welcome development. Ultimately, we should create some level of trust, create some level of collaboration, and create some kind of structure in terms of how all the ecosystem players fit into this equation. With the passage of time and more of those engagements via the structured arrangements that are there, either with the Bankers Association, or with the fintech Association and so on, I guess in the end, we’ll get the result that we are looking for. In terms of the conversations around hubs, collaboration between private sector players and government would help because the government by nature has got access to the resources, the infrastructure, and the means to be able to make some of these ideas sort of come to fruition. So let’s start with ideas around creating hubs that are driven by the private sector, but to some extent, funded by the government, because ultimately, it’s a development issue. If we’re going to develop ideas, and the government’s primary interest is development, we then need to have stronger private sector and government collaboration to ultimately deliver some of these results. 

What traction would you say Cellulant has had in Zambia since launch?

GL: I think we’ve had fairly good traction in terms of growth. Over the past three or four years, if I take our blended growth rate, we’re sitting at anything between 30 and 40% year-on-year which for any business, is fairly significant. And then we look at what is it that drives that growth, and it’s essentially the new products that we create as well as some of the legacy products that we have. Some of the strategic partnerships have also greatly accelerated our growth.

 We had our own challenges in the beginning especially with ecosystem incumbents who perhaps weren’t so trusting of us as a fintech but by not giving up and collaborating, we have done relatively well so it’s been a very interesting journey. But I guess the challenges are part of the excitement. Every morning, you wake up, and wonder what will happen on that particular day to overcome a hurdle. There has also been a lot of discussion and talking points with our regulator, the Bank of Zambia, and I think they’ve been extremely supportive in terms of driving innovation. For example, crypto has been a big discussion in our market, as it has been in many other markets. But through engagement, there’s been some developments in the recent past where there is a crypto operator that is currently in the regulatory sandbox of the Bank of Zambia, testing out the product and drawing out all that data. 

How would you say the competitive landscape has changed between when you entered the Zambia market and now?

GL: If we look at 12 years ago when we entered the market, the landscape was very different in terms of our competitors, who then were mostly the mobile network operators. Strategically, what we did, and that sort of remains our strength, was to be extremely clear minded about where we wanted to play. The danger of being in a market like this is that there are so many opportunities that you might be tempted to chase the next shiny thing. But I think being very clear minded about where you are going as a business can be very vital.

As the years have passed, naturally, there’s been so many other players that have come in, both local and international. If you say that I’m going to do two or three things in which I’ll be very strong, and you invest your time, your energy or effort in growing and making sure that you become significant in those things in the end, it pays off and you stave off competition.

Over the past two to three years, with the pivoting that we’ve done, the investment we’ve made in terms of driving collections, if anybody is talking collections, everybody’s benchmarking against Tingg, our seamless payment gateway.. This has taken a lot of discipline and resilience. 

In terms of the future, what’s next for Cellulant in Zambia?

GL: The big goal is to be number one amongst our peers as a payments provider. Number one in revenue, number one in terms of number of merchants, number one in terms of gross payment values we process, number one in terms of brand affinity and so on. So that is very clear. The second is that we want to be Zambia’s most loved payments brand. Anybody talking about payments should talk about us.

In summary, we are pinning our growth on both organic growth and also looking at opportunities to build on our current partnerships and explore new partnerships within the market. So that’s essentially how the next two to three years will look like. Continue driving innovation and solving for very real problems in the country.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.