Cellulant is looking to raise more funds in 2022 as it seeks to expand across the African continent. In this interview, Ashkay Grover, the company’s newly appointed CEO, speaks of Cellulant’s future plans and what he brings to the table of one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital payment platforms.
Prior to Cellulant, you held multiple C-level positions at iSON, a diversified group in 30+ countries. How will your experience at iSON, especially the starring role you played in restructuring the firm’s technology business, come to play in your new role at Cellulant?
ISON was a fairly diversified company having a BPO, infrastructure and technology business on top of a portfolio of investments. I held a number of leadership positions in my time there including; Head of strategy and investments and Chief Growth Officer for one of the businesses. I also led a lot of mergers and acquisitions for the group in Egypt, South Africa and other countries. Additionally, I had the opportunity to work with the founders of our technology investments in growing and expanding the business and driving business growth.
With these different roles, I gathered different experiences and a range of expertise. This helps when you are in an executive management position in any business. Owing to my different roles at ISON, the top three areas it enabled for me were;
First, a very deep understanding of Africa in all the footprint markets
Secondly, relationships with a large number of stakeholders including banks, financial institutions, large enterprise customers, consumers and investors which I continue to leverage even today as we look to grow and expand Cellulant.
Lastly, an all-rounded management experience.
You also enabled multiple rounds of private equity capital raise for the BPO business and drove the group’s expansion into the ME, North and South Africa regions via multiple acquisitions, what are the capital raising and expansion plans you have for Cellulant?
Cellulant completed its Series C round of funding in late 2018 where investors like TPG invested in the business. As we look forward to 2022, we are looking to fundraise to expand and grow the business across the continent.
Your track record paints a picture of someone who is innovative and a self-starter, what new ideas would you bebringing to a company that is already one of the largest digital payments companiesin Africa?
An advantage of working and spending time in 3 to 4 continents and having worked in markets like India, Far East Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Dubai and Saudi Arabia is the wide geographical experience that enables one to understand what the payments or digital technology landscape in each of these markets is.
These markets are in many ways ahead of Africa and it is quite visible what some of these players have done to create value. The biggest value that I can contribute to Cellulant is to bring that knowledge and understanding to the business and apply it towards our products and roadmap for the future as well as contextualizing that for Africa.
It is important to understand what products work best for every geographical location and what is happening in every market in the continent then selectively apply some of this knowledge to the different markets.
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Can you share some of the milestones attained since you became CEO?
Cellulant being a private company, we cannot disclose most of these details. There are a number of areas of progress we have seen so far which includes launching our newest products in the markets aimed at capturing the offline space where we were not operating before, growing our business quite substantially; close to 80-90%, over the last couple of months has been very encouraging, furthermore, our In-Store or proximity product that enables customers to pay at the store through checkout is one of the largest milestones in the past year, then the rebranding of both Cellulant, our corporate brand and Tingg, our payments platform.
Nigeria is one of the largest markets for Cellulant, and you have successfully expanded your payments platform to serve small, medium and large enterprises. Which sectors and company size have you seen the biggest growth in terms of new clients?
In the Nigerian economy, one of the largest sectors is FMCG and we have made great progress with acquiring customers here. Other spaces include logistics where we have made considerable progress in the last few months. Finally, there are few other sectors like mobile payments and airtime acquisition which continue to grow daily.
On your client list are global merchants such as Emirates, KQ, DHL, Kikuu and other local businesses such as StarTimes, GIG, Chisco, etc who are using your payments platform to digitize their payments in an effort to propel their growth. What is the current size of your client base, how has it changed over time in percentage terms and what targets have you set for yourself for the future?
Today we have 150 to 200 large customers and we are growing this at around 10-15% per month. We expect to have more than doubled by the end of this year.
We have increasingly focused on the large enterprise customers and as this continues to grow – we are expanding our focus to SMBs. We are building a payments platform for millions of emerging small and medium businesses that will be using Tingg by Cellulant as a platform.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your business and what lessons have you learnt that would be useful for the future?
COVID has been a tremendous health crisis that has impacted people and businesses all over the world. In the initial months of COVID, there was an immediate shift on the number of transactions especially because most businesses were shut down or customers had ventured out.
However, in the last few months we have been able to get our volumes back to Pre-COVID levels and we can see a sustained increase in adoption of digital transactions which might have been a direct effect of COVID. More and more customers are happy to make digital payments and this is set to increase over the years.
What trends do you see shaping the digital payments space in Africa and how is Cellulant adjusting to these trends?
Africa is a large continent with different dynamics in the different markets. I would say that the one thing that will happen in the next couple of years is the breakthrough of APMs, that is, Alternative Payments Methods. These include any payment methods that are not the traditional debit or credit card payments. The use of mobile money wallets and other methods will accelerate. A lot of our merchants’ customers are also demanding to make payments via methods like bank accounts which we are increasingly beginning to provide.
There is also going to be a move towards credit lending to merchants at areas like the point of sale and our expectation is that in the next couple of months, we will launch products and solutions to address some of these market needs and opportunities.
What new investments are you looking to make in the markets you operate and what is in the pipeline for Nigeria? Are there any new markets you are targeting?
Nigeria is a very important market and is one of the largest markets in Africa, second from South Africa from a GDP standpoint. We will continue to build our business aggressively in Nigeria. On the payments side, over the past few months we have grown our Nigeria business by almost 300% in the last 6 months. Because of the tremendous growth we have seen in Nigeria, we are doubling down our efforts in the products and services we are offering in the market and expect to see more of this growth.
We are already in 18 markets in Africa and have a presence in at least 35. This means that we are already at 67% coverage on the continent. The expectation is that we will not be expanding into other markets but we will be doubling down and investing further in the markets where we are present so that we are substantially large players in each of these markets. We have taken a view that in any of our core markets, the minimum market share that we should be having is close to 10% and in some we are aiming for 25-30% market share. This is our strategy and our direction from a geographical standpoint
Can you give an update on Tingg and what you have been able to achieve with it since it was launched?
Tingg is a platform that we have developed and evolved as a piece of architecture and technology to simplify payments for businesses and their consumers. As a consumer, how one experiences it is by paying via any of your mobile payment options, cards or your bank account.
Tingg has different uses for different sets of people as of today. We are building more products, solutions and services all on the back of the Tingg Brand and as a consumer, one is expected to benefit more and more from the usage of Tingg at your favorite store online or offline.Our hope is that Tingg is all pervasive so that everything that one wants to do relating to payments in Africa, one would be using Tingg.
