At the market opening on March 31, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) launched a report featuring “Companies to Inspire Africa”. Roughly 50% of the companies featured in the report for propelling growth in the continent are in the Financial Services and Technology/Telecoms sectors. According to the report, in almost 10 years, there has been a 344% growth of mobile phone usage in African from 2007-2016.
This is complimented by the rise of mobile consumers across Africa who increasingly rely on their mobile phones to send/receive money and to make payments. In countries such as Kenya more than 58% of the adult populations have a mobile account. This presents a great opportunity for companies to develop mobile payment solutions that are relevant to the customers’ needs.
Among the featured companies in the report is Cellulant, a leading payments service provider and recently acclaimed as the Best Payments and Transfer Company in Africa. The company has been at the center of Financial Technology innovation for more than 13 years.
In countries that the company has operations, they were the first ones to catalyze the mobile commerce penetration. Just recently, Cellulant was the technology partner to build the Ecobank Mobile app that currently services 33 markets in Africa. The company also launched Mula, a payments experience empowering consumers across Africa to pay their bills; and send and receive money.
The LSE feature comes shortly after Cellulant launched a report highlighting the impact of Financial Technology (FinTech) on transforming the agricultural sector in Africa. The report highlights key progress on food security and financial inclusion for farmers across 30 states in Nigeria and the impact of expanding the same services to Liberia.
With the eWallet technology that is powering more than 15M farmers in Africa, private sectors and financial partners will be able to give out loans to smallholder famers with ease. In Nigeria, Cellulant has already arranged the consortium of financial sector actors who have agreed to deploy a loan book portfolio of $ 100 million into smallholder farmers’ micro loans.
Mobile Commerce
“The goal is to scale transformation of African economies with payment experiences that evolve the way consumers make their payments on various digital channels, “ states Ken Njoroge during the launch of the LSE report in London.
“Scaling services in more than 23 markets in Africa will enable Cellulant to fix Africa’s payments problems by working to connect more than 700m mobile users with millions of businesses and capture the latent demand for payments for services that power their daily lives – providing the glue that connects everyone to everything. everyday”
Key to growing African economies in Africa is the partnerships forged between public and private sector players. This will enable companies such as Cellulant accelerate towards providing infrastructure to various sectors by using mobile payments to transform countries, communities, societies, businesses and everyday consumers.
