Kenyan fintech company Cellulant has revealed how its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) transformed its payment infrastructure, allowing it to process approximately 4.5 million transactions daily while expanding its services across 24 African markets.
The company says migrating most of its computing operations to AWS improved transaction speeds, increased system reliability and enabled it to scale its payment services without investing heavily in physical infrastructure.
The development comes as African businesses increasingly embrace digital payments, mobile money and cross-border transactions, creating demand for technology that can connect different financial systems.
How Cellulant Is Simplifying Digital Payments Across Africa
Operating a business across multiple African countries can be complicated by differences in banking systems, mobile money platforms, currencies and financial regulations.
Businesses seeking to collect payments or transfer money across borders often have to establish separate integrations with banks and mobile network operators in each market. This can increase operating costs and cause delays.
Cellulant says its payment platform, Tingg, addresses these challenges through a single integration that allows businesses to manage collections, payouts and payment reconciliations across different markets.
“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.”
Through Tingg, international airlines, ride-hailing companies, remittance providers and other businesses can access different payment channels through one interface.
The company’s infrastructure connects more than 120 banks, 47 mobile network operators and over 600 enterprise merchants across 24 African markets.
Cellulant says its systems currently process approximately 4.5 million transactions daily.
AWS Migration Boosts Cellulant’s Transaction Speeds and Reliability
As transaction volumes increased, Cellulant faced limitations associated with traditional data centres, including fixed computing capacity and lengthy infrastructure procurement processes.
The company subsequently migrated most of its computing workloads to Amazon Web Services.
According to Muriuki, approximately 95 per cent of Cellulant’s computing power now runs on AWS, allowing its engineering teams to introduce new technologies and expand computing capacity more quickly.
“The biggest impact of migrating to AWS is the speed of experimentation,” Muriuki explains.
“We can now adopt new technologies, instance types, and services without long procurement or provisioning cycles.”
Jyoti Ball, General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS, says the cloud infrastructure has allowed Cellulant to experiment with solutions tailored to the needs of African businesses.
She says the flexibility has helped the fintech company develop products, test ideas and improve its services without significant upfront infrastructure investments.
Cellulant Reports Threefold Growth and 99.98% Uptime
The migration has delivered measurable improvements in the company’s operations.
Cellulant reports that it expanded its business approximately threefold within a single year without disrupting customer-facing services.
System availability also improved from approximately 99.90 per cent on its previous infrastructure to 99.98 per cent and above after migrating to AWS.
The company says this reduced unplanned downtime from approximately nine hours annually to fewer than two hours, with some critical services achieving 99.99 per cent uptime.
Transaction speeds also improved significantly.
According to Cellulant, latency on key workloads dropped from approximately three seconds to below 20 milliseconds.
For merchants and customers, faster transaction processing can reduce delays and improve the experience of making and receiving payments.
Technology Powering Cellulant’s Payment Infrastructure
Cellulant uses several AWS services to manage its payment operations and computing requirements.
Its infrastructure includes Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), which supports its containerised, microservices-based architecture.
The company also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for computing workloads and AWS migration services to transition away from legacy infrastructure.
Amazon Quick supports transaction monitoring and internal analytics.
Muriuki says moving away from managing physical infrastructure has freed engineering teams to concentrate more on developing products and improving services.
How Cellulant Is Controlling Its Growing Technology Costs
Despite the benefits of cloud computing, increasing transaction volumes can also lead to higher infrastructure costs.
Cellulant says it has introduced cost-management practices across its engineering and product teams to ensure that expenditure remains aligned with business growth.
“Cost management starts with culture,” Muriuki 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.”
The company uses monitoring dashboards, AWS Savings Plans, regular architecture reviews and automatic scaling configurations to manage its cloud expenditure.
Its approach is to ensure that infrastructure costs increase in line with transaction volumes and the value generated by the business.
Cellulant Turns to Artificial Intelligence for Fraud Detection and Credit Scoring
Beyond improving payment processing, Cellulant is increasingly exploring artificial intelligence to develop additional financial technology products.
After more than 15 years of processing payments across Africa, the company has accumulated extensive transaction data that it hopes to use to improve financial services.
Working with AWS, Cellulant is exploring AI-powered solutions for fraud detection, merchant intelligence and credit scoring, while observing applicable privacy and data protection requirements.
The company is also adopting Amazon Quick, an AI-powered assistant designed to connect organisational information, business intelligence and workflows.
Ball says the technology will help Cellulant improve productivity and automate internal processes while maintaining the service standards expected by its customers.
Muriuki says the company’s next phase of development will focus on improving the experience of merchants and customers rather than simply connecting payment systems.
“Aggregation is largely solved,” he 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.”
Africa’s Fintech Industry Eyes $65 Billion Market by 2030
Cellulant’s expansion comes as Africa’s financial technology industry prepares for substantial growth.
A March 2026 report by Boston Consulting Group projects that Africa’s fintech revenues could increase 13-fold to approximately $65 billion by 2030.
McKinsey has also identified a potential $1.5 trillion opportunity in Africa’s digital payments economy.
The projections point to growing opportunities for companies providing payment processing, digital financial services and cross-border transaction infrastructure.
With more businesses moving their operations online, reliable payment systems are expected to remain an important part of Africa’s digital commerce expansion.
Through its partnership with AWS, Cellulant hopes to strengthen its position in the market by providing payment infrastructure that connects businesses, financial institutions and consumers across different African countries.
Asked about the company’s long-term ambitions, Muriuki says its objective is straightforward.
“Our goal is to make payments the easiest part of doing business in Africa.”
ALSO READ: Ruto Announces 12-Month Deadline for Nairobi-Mombasa Highway Expansion, Rules Out New Taxes
