Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Winners Edition

Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 www.finance-monthly.com 56 Some Of Our Exciting Projects: POWERING INTERNET PAYMENTS FOR AFRICA Cellulant has enabled internet merchants to collect payments from any online buyer in Africa by offering a single connection that enables global and local merchants to collect multiple payment options. By availing local relevant payment methods, merchants are seeing double-digit growth of their online sales. This service was launched in October 2017 with Cellulant availing an online ticket payment solution for Kenya Airways - instantly connecting them to 40m customers across Africa. DELIVERING A UNIFIED MOBILE BANKING EXPERIENCE In 2016, Ecobank partneredwithCellulant to deliver a unified, multi-country, multi-currency and multi-language mobile banking app. With 13 Product Engineers, the Ecobank mobile app was delivered in 86 days and currently live in 33 markets in Africa. Since it’s launch, the Ecobank mobile banking app has 5 million downloads and attracted 3 million new customers. TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMING A COUNTRY In 2012 we worked with the Nigerian government to digitise the Agriculture value chain and deployed a mobile wallet allowing the government to make bulk payments of fertilizer subsidy to over 14.5 million farmers. As a result, the program known as Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GESS) doubled farmers’ income and added $30M to Nigeria’s GDP. PAN-AFRICA Group Chief Finance Officer at Cellulant Milkah Wachiuri Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Cellulant - connecting people to what matters to them. everyday Cellulant is connecting a continent. Africa is home to 1.2Bn people which represents 16.2% of the world population. Increasingly, African consumers are getting connected to the internet with a 35.2% internet penetration rate (453Mn already connected) and growing at 20% Year on Year. The internet penetration rate is getting better with initiatives geared towards high internet proliferation like laying down of fiber cables by governments, initiatives like Facebook express Wi-Fi, Google loon project, falling data costs and a projected 26% smartphone penetration in 2018. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 90% of all payments and transactions remain cash based. As such, African consumers have limited options when it comes to making payments and merchants cannot efficiently and effectively collect payments. In 2017, online payments alone in Africa were estimated at US$ 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. Furthermore, in regions where financial inclusion is limited, mobile money promises a lower-cost, more scalable alternative to traditional banking. 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.