Enabled by AWS technology, more than 4.5 million business transactions move across Africa each day on payment infrastructure built by Cellulant. Its cloud transformation has cut critical payment transaction latency from nearly three seconds to under 20 milliseconds. Now it is turning more than 15 years of accumulated transaction data into AI-enabled financial products, further streamlining African commerce and remittances.
It is on a Tuesday morning in Nairobi. David Mwangi, the owner of a small transport business, is checking payments on his phone. Several customers have paid through M-Pesa, while others have used bank cards. His drivers are waiting for their daily disbursements, and he needs to reconcile the previous day’s transactions before business picks up. What appears to be a routine morning involves several financial systems that must communicate with one another, often within seconds.
For a business serving customers across multiple markets, the challenge becomes considerably more complicated. A payment initiated through a mobile money wallet must reach the merchant’s account, while bank transfers, card networks and currency conversions introduce additional layers of coordination. Delays can disrupt operations, while integrating separately with every payment provider can become expensive and technically demanding.
This is the problem Cellulant, a Kenyan-founded payments technology company, says it spent more than 15 years trying to solve. Its payment infrastructure connects businesses to banks, mobile money operators and other financial networks across Africa, allowing merchants to collect payments, distribute funds and reconcile transactions through a single platform.
The company says over the years it built a payments infrastructure that powers African commerce, serving as a bridge linking global enterprise brands and local merchants to customers through a vast network of mobile money systems, bank rails, online wallets, and cross-border payment channels making sure the money arrives where it should.
“We are a merchant-centric payments business,” says Michael Muriuki, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Cellulant. “We remove the need to integrate separately with multiple payment systems, enabling seamless collections and payouts for businesses operating within and across Africa’s borders.”
One interface, 24 markets
For years, the tax on doing business across Africa hasn’t been a lack of customers or capital; it’s the sheer cost of getting money to move.
Africa’s payments landscape is structurally, legally, and technically distinct market by market. A business operating in Dakar, Nairobi, and Lusaka simultaneously faces three different central bank frameworks, would need to negotiate integrations with dozens of banks and mobile operators and absorb the investment and failures that come with stitching all of it together.
Cellulant simplifies that complexity with a single integration: Tingg, its single API payment platform manages collections, payouts, and reconciliations. Whether it’s a global airline in Lagos collecting payments across multiple channels, a ride-hailing firm in Nairobi disbursing funds to drivers or a global remittance company transferring money across several countries, the business sees one interface, and Cellulant manages what lies beneath.
Underneath is payment infrastructure that processes 4.5 million transactions a day, connects 120+ banks, 47 mobile network operators, and 600+ enterprise merchants across 24 markets that can scale without warning and recover without pause.
Managing this transaction volume at scale required moving away from localised legacy data centres, where fixed capacity and long procurement cycles limited Cellulant’s ability to scale and experiment. Migrating the bulk of its workload to Amazon Web Services changed that.
Today, roughly 95 percent of Cellulant’s computing power runs on AWS. For Michael, the real significance is not the technology itself, but what it made possible: the ability to move fast, scale instantly, and enter new markets without waiting months to set up physical infrastructure.
“The biggest impact of migrating to AWS is the speed of experimentation,” says Michael. “We can now adopt new technologies, instance types, and services without long procurement or provisioning cycles.”
“What excites me about our customers in Africa is how they harness the speed AWS provides to leapfrog,” says Jyoti Ball, General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS. “Cellulant experimented their way to solutions purpose-built for their customers and AWS gave them the freedom to experiment, fail fast, learn, and iterate without the burden of heavy upfront investment. That speed of iteration is their competitive edge.”
The results are measurable. Cellulant scaled its business approximately threefold in a single year without disrupting customer-facing services. Uptime improved from around 99.90 per cent on legacy local infrastructure to 99.98 per cent and above on AWS, reducing unplanned downtime from roughly nine hours per year to under two, with critical services now hitting 99.99%.
Perhaps the most striking change is speed. Latency on key workloads fell from roughly three seconds to under 20 milliseconds – faster than a blink. In a business where a hesitant transaction is an abandoned one, that gap is not just technical. It is commercial.
The technical foundation of this shift centres on Amazon EKS, the Elastic Kubernetes Service that underpins Cellulant’s containerized, microservices-based architecture. The company also relies on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for compute workloads, AWS migration services to decommission legacy systems, and Amazon Quick for transaction monitoring and internal analytics. Engineering teams no longer manage physical infrastructure, a change that Muriuki says frees substantial time each day for product work.
So how do you prevent costs from spiralling as transaction volumes grow? “Cost management starts with culture,” he says. “Our engineers understand the cost implications of every service they build. Cost awareness doesn’t sit only in finance; it is embedded in engineering and product teams.”
In practice, this means continuous visibility dashboards, AWS savings plans, regular architecture reviews, and a discipline around auto-scaling configuration. The guiding principle is that costs should rise in proportion to business value or transaction volume. When it rises for any other reason, that is a problem to solve.
The AI bet
Every transaction creates data. After more than 15 years of processing payments across Africa, Cellulant has built one of the continent’s richest enterprise payments datasets. Working with AWS, the company is now using that data, responsibly and in compliance with privacy requirements, to build AI-powered products for fraud detection, merchant intelligence and credit scoring.
Cellulant’s broader strategic vision is enhancing user experience not only for merchants but for operational efficiency as well. The company is also adopting Amazon Quick, an AI-powered assistant designed to connect organisational systems, workflows and information, helping Cellulant teams to work more efficiently.
“With Amazon Quick, Cellulant gains a unified AI-powered platform that brings together productivity, business intelligence, and automation, helping their teams move faster while maintaining the rigorous standards their customers expect,” Ball adds.
“Aggregation is largely solved,” Muriuki says. “The real opportunity is improving the user experience layer. We are now focused on using data, AI, and local market context to make payments invisible and seamless for merchants. We are building the next layer, not just payments, but the infrastructure that makes commerce work,” he says.
The $65 Billion Opportunity
This timing matters. A report published in March 2026, by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows Africa’s fintech market revenues are projected to increase 13-fold to around Sh8.45 trillion by 2030, the highest growth multiple of any region in the world, even as the digital payments economy accelerates toward an estimated Sh195 trillion opportunity, according to McKinsey.
As more commerce moves online and global businesses seek to tap into the Africa opportunity, the demand for dependable, high-speed payment infrastructure continues to grow. Through its alliance with AWS, Cellulant is reinforcing its commitment to serve as Africa’s bridge-builder, delivering the payment infrastructure, reliability, and continuous innovation that powers modern commerce across the continent.
Asked about where Cellulant is headed, Muriuki does not talk about a growth target or a market share figure. He sums up the ambition in a single sentence. “Our goal is to make payments the easiest part of doing business in Africa.”
Back in Nairobi, David Mwangi’s morning depends on much the same thing: customers paying on time, drivers receiving their money and transactions being reconciled without disrupting the day’s business. For him, technology matters most when he no longer has to think about it. A payment should simply go through, wherever the customer is and whichever payment method they choose.
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Mohd Hassan has extensive experience in news gathering, editing, and writing for the newswire industry, Contact – Info@impactnews-wire.com
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