Pan-African payments processor Cellulant has promoted long-time executive Michael Muriuki to the role of Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO), consolidating leadership over product strategy, platform development, and software engineering as the company intensifies its focus on profitability and infrastructure resilience.
Muriuki, who joined Cellulant more than a decade ago as an implementation engineer, takes on end-to-end responsibility for the company’s technology roadmap at a pivotal moment for Africa’s digital payments landscape. The appointment reflects Cellulant’s strategic shift toward product-led growth amid rising competition from banks developing in-house platforms, global card networks expanding merchant services, and fintech rivals battling on price, reliability, and value-added offerings such as analytics and fraud prevention.
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In a statement to TechCabal, Cellulant CEO Peter O’Toole praised Muriuki’s track record and leadership style.
“Over the years, I’ve seen Mike’s deep technical judgment, calm leadership, and strong sense of ownership translate directly into measurable business results,” O’Toole said. “He has been central to building scalable customer-centric solutions for our bank and enterprise merchants, and to Cellulant’s journey to profitability.”
Muriuki played a foundational role in Cellulant’s early growth, helping architect mobile banking integrations across Kenyan banks and consolidating M-PESA business-to-consumer connections. He later led the redesign and expansion of Ecobank’s mobile banking platform across 33 African countries.
More recently, as Vice President of Software Engineering, Muriuki oversaw the transformation of Cellulant’s flagship Tingg payments platform into a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. The modernisation has delivered significant gains: in 2025 alone, daily transaction volumes on Tingg surged from approximately 1 million to 4.5 million, while the company reports a reduction in cost per transaction of more than 60% through the shift from fixed on-premise infrastructure to elastic cloud computing.
Cellulant is positioning data as a key differentiator in an increasingly crowded and commoditised market. With operations spanning more than 20 African countries and over two decades of transaction history, the company believes its accumulated data on commerce trends, credit risk, and fraud patterns provides a competitive edge that newer entrants cannot easily match.
A recent Mastercard report forecasts that Africa’s digital payments economy will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, underscoring the long-term opportunity for platforms that can layer intelligent services on top of core money movement.
Muriuki will also be tasked with maintaining platform stability and reliability as transaction volumes continue to climb—critical for enterprise clients operating across markets with varying infrastructure quality and regulatory requirements.
Over the past three years, Cellulant has rebuilt much of its core technology stack. More than 95% of transactions now run on the modern cloud-based platform, with Tanzania as the only remaining exception due to local data residency regulations. The overhaul has been supported by automated testing and deployment pipelines, enabling faster product iteration without compromising live payment flows.
“With that foundation in place, we treat tech debt management as an ongoing discipline,” Muriuki said. “This puts our teams in a strong position to keep debt low as we shift focus to scaling operational automation and strengthening operational excellence.”
