Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Winners Edition

www.finance-monthly.com 57 PAN-AFRICA Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Finance Monthly CFO Awards 2018 Contact East Africa Hub: 5th floor, cavendish, 14 riverside, riverside drive. Nairobi. West Africa Hub: 9th floor Churchgate building, opposite World Trade Centre, Central Business District Abuja. Email: info@cellulant.com | Website: www.cellulant.com About Milkah Wachiuri 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!” Areas of Expertise Cellulant is the most experienced mobile commerce player on the continent - with diverse experience across sectors, markets & services – bringing passion, audacity & the tenacity to deliver world class solutions. The company operates an ecosystem that facilitates payments for consumers, retailers, merchants, banks, mobile network operators, Governments and International Development Partners. Today, Cellulant’s payments platform spans 1 in 10 Africans, with 2.5 million doing monthly transactions with coverage that extends to 50% of banks in Africa and 17 million unbanked farmers in Africa. Cellulant’s products and platforms come together to serve multiple use-cases for consumers at both the top and bottom of the socio-economic class: ● For consumers, Cellulant offers a one-stop shop for all their payment needs using their preferred payment method. ● For merchants, Cellulant offers a comprehensive solution that allows them to receive payments from their customers hassle free through their preferred store of value across Africa. Merchants can access a single API and a single connection that will enable them to collect with multiple payment options covering 162 payment methods from over 220m customers spread across 35 markets. All that is delivered in a few lines of code. ● For banks and mobile wallets, Cellulant offers a single point of connection for their consumers to pay over 600 merchants. At the lower socio-economic level- Cellulant is digitizing the agriculture value chain by fixing three problems that the sector ecosystem faces: i. Primary production: Farmers hardly receive quality fertilizer and seeds, lowering productivity to 10% of global average for almost every crop; ii. Pricing information & access tomarkets: Farmers do not have access to current information on market prices or even access to the trading markets thus demand & supply can’t be matched. This also creates a loophole for middle-men who control the market conditions; iii. Access to financial services: Most farmers in Africa practice small scale farming and a majority do not have access to bank accounts. Most are therefore undocumented with any financial services thus making their credit worthiness hard to determine. Due to this, many have no access to credit which they require to scale their farming. To solve this problem, Cellulant has a unified payments and e-commerce platform powering payments for more than 17million farmers. In Nigeria, Cellulant is digitizing the entire Agriculture value chain using blockchain technology.