Cellulant, a leading payments company, is bridging the gap in Africa's fragmented payments markets using AWS technology. The company's platform, Tingg, provides a single API payment interface for businesses to manage collections, payouts, and reconciliations across 24 markets. This enables seamless transactions for businesses operating within and across Africa's borders. With Tingg, businesses can integrate with multiple payment systems, eliminating the need for separate integrations.
Africa's payments landscape is structurally, legally, and technically distinct from market to market. A business operating in multiple countries faces different central bank frameworks, dozens of banks, and mobile operators. Cellulant simplifies this complexity with its single integration platform, Tingg. The platform processes 4.5 million transactions a day, connects 120+ banks, 47 mobile network operators, and 600+ enterprise merchants. This infrastructure can scale without warning and recover without pause.
To manage its transaction volume at scale, Cellulant migrated its workload to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Today, roughly 95 percent of Cellulant's computing power runs on AWS. This migration enabled Cellulant to move fast, scale instantly, and enter new markets without waiting months to set up physical infrastructure. The company's Chief Product and Technology Officer, Michael Muriuki, says the biggest impact of migrating to AWS is the speed of experimentation.
The results of Cellulant's migration to AWS are measurable. The company scaled its business approximately threefold in a single year without disrupting customer-facing services. Uptime improved from around 99.90 percent on legacy local infrastructure to 99.98 percent and above on AWS. Latency on key workloads fell from roughly three seconds to under 20 milliseconds. This change is not just technical; it is commercial, as a hesitant transaction is often an abandoned one.
Cellulant's technical foundation on AWS centres on Amazon EKS, the Elastic Kubernetes Service that underpins its 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, freeing substantial time for product work.
Cellulant is also focused on using data, AI, and local market context to make payments invisible and seamless for merchants. The company is building AI-powered products for fraud detection, merchant intelligence, and credit scoring. Working with AWS, Cellulant is leveraging its rich enterprise payments dataset to enhance user experience for merchants and operational efficiency. Amazon Quick, an AI-powered assistant, will help Cellulant teams work more efficiently.
A recent report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) highlights the opportunity for Cellulant's services. The report shows that the African payments market is expected to grow significantly, with a potential value of $65 billion. Cellulant's platform, Tingg, is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth, providing a seamless payments experience for businesses and merchants across Africa.
Key points
- Cellulant's platform processes 4.5 million transactions a day across 24 markets.
- The company scaled its business approximately threefold in a single year without disrupting customer-facing services.
- Cellulant is leveraging AI and data to build products for fraud detection, merchant intelligence, and credit scoring.
