Moving money across Africa rarely feels as simple as tapping Pay Now. A mobile money wallet, a bank, a currency conversion and a merchant account must all agree in real time. Each market adds its own rules, banks and payment habits, which slows many businesses down. Cellulant says it built an Africa payments platform to close that gap for them.
How the Africa Payments Platform Works
Cellulant’s Tingg platform gives businesses one connection instead of many separate ones. It handles collections, payouts and reconciliations for businesses through a single API. Underneath, the network links more than 120 banks, 47 mobile network operators and over 600 enterprise merchants across 24 markets. It now processes about 4.5 million transactions each day, and the Africa payments platform keeps running while volumes grow.
Cellulant moved most of the Africa payments platform from local data centres to Amazon Web Services, and about 95% of its computing power now runs there. Michael Muriuki, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Cellulant, says the biggest impact is the speed of experimentation. “We can now adopt new technologies, instance types, and services without long procurement or provisioning cycles,” he says. Key transactions that once took nearly three seconds now finish in under 20 milliseconds, which is faster than a blink, and uptime rose from about 99.90% to 99.98% or better.
Data and AI Shape the Next Step
After more than 15 years of processing payments, Cellulant holds one of the continent’s richest payments datasets. With AWS, it now builds AI tools for fraud detection, merchant intelligence and credit scoring, while following privacy requirements. The timing looks promising for the Africa payments platform, because a BCG report from March 2026 projects that Africa’s fintech revenue will grow 13-fold to about $65 billion by 2030. Muriuki sums up the goal simply: “Our goal is to make payments the easiest part of doing business in Africa.”
