Cellulant names long-serving tech leader to lead product and technology

Cellulant, a Pan-African payments processor, has picked Michael Muriuki as its chief product and technology officer (CPTO), promoting a long-serving insider as the company doubles down on product-led growth and infrastructure scale amid intensifying competition across Africa’s digital payments and banking sectors.

Muriuki, who joined the Kenyan fintech over a decade ago as an implementation engineer, will assume end-to-end responsibility for product strategy, platform development, and software engineering, a consolidation of leadership that signals Cellulant’s push to align technology execution with its profitability push.

The appointment comes at a time when African payment service providers face increasing competition from banks building in-house platforms and global card networks expanding direct merchant services. Fintech rivals are also competing on pricing, reliability, and value-added services such as data analytics and fraud prevention.

Cellulant’s chief executive, Peter O’Toole, told TechCabal that Muriuki has played a central role in the company’s growth from a mobile banking solutions provider into a payment infrastructure platform with operations in over 20 African markets.

“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 was an early architect of mobile banking integrations across Kenyan banks, including consolidating M-PESA business-to-consumer connections, and later led the redesign and expansion of Ecobank’s mobile banking platform across 33 African countries.

More recently, as vice president of software engineering, he oversaw the modernisation of Cellulant’s Tingg payments platform to a cloud-native microservices architecture, a shift the company says has dramatically improved scalability and cost efficiency.

In 2025 alone, Tingg’s daily transaction volumes rose from about 1 to 4.5 million, according to the company, underpinned by a migration away from fixed on-premise infrastructure towards elastic cloud computing.

Cellulant said the move cut its cost per transaction by more than 60%, enabling the platform to process roughly three times the previous volume while replacing fixed infrastructure costs with demand-based spending.

Beyond cutting costs, Cellulant is betting that data will set it apart as competition intensifies in Africa’s crowded fintech market, where moving money is now becoming a low-margin commodity.

A Mastercard report projects that the continent’s digital payments economy will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, driven by rising internet access and expanding financial inclusion. This scale suggests that platforms with rich transaction data can tap trends in commerce, credit risk and fraud patterns to build services that go beyond basic money movement.

After over two decades of operating across multiple markets, the company says it has accumulated transaction data that gives it an edge that newer entrants struggle to replicate.

Muriuki will also be responsible for keeping the platform stable as volumes grow, a critical issue for enterprise clients operating across markets with uneven infrastructure and regulation.

Over the past three years, Cellulant has rebuilt much of its core technology, moving away from older systems to a cloud-based architecture that scales more cheaply and reliably. More than 95% of transactions now run on the new platform, with Tanzania the only exception due to local data rules.

The overhaul has been paired with automated testing and deployment systems intended to allow faster product releases without disrupting live payment flows, a balance the company says is essential when processing millions of transactions a day.

Muriuki said retiring legacy systems allowed teams to focus less on maintenance and more on resilience, automation, and new product development.

“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.”