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The Bank of Tanzania (BOT) has approved Cellulant Corporation to operate in the country, as it has satisfied all regulatory requirements, Africanews reported.
The Nairobi-based company is a payment solution service provider (PSSP) co-founded by Kenyan entrepreneur Ken Njoroge in 2014.
The company will offer the Tanzanian market top-level performance and seamless payments solutions with its globally acclaimed product, Tingg.
In Tanzania, PSSPs make up the underlying e-payment infrastructure for the majority of its population. Given the peculiarity of the primarily rural 58-million population, the market is favorable for digital money solutions such as Cellulant.
Recent statistics from Financial Inclusion Insight revealed that almost six in 10 adults, or 56 percent, are financially included in Tanzania. However, mobile money platforms account for 55 percent of the figure.
Therefore, the nod of approval from the BOT will open up Tanzania to the leading PSSP multinational, allowing it to provide digitized payment solutions for more financially excluded individuals.
“This approval sets Cellulant into a select group of few payment aggregators that operate as PSSPs in Tanzania and will help add millions of economically active but financially excluded Tanzanians into the digital payment ecosystem,” Country Manager for Cellulant Tanzania Edwin Kiiru said.
Cellulant
The idea behind Cellulant was first discussed in 2002 and the company was later launched in Kenya in 2014.
In May, it appointed Akshay Grover as its acting group CEO after Njoroge, who co-founded the company alongside his Nigerian partner Bolaji Akinboro, stepped down.
The founders started Cellulant as a music ringtone sharing platform to help musicians earn when users downloaded their songs.
It soon grew into a globally reputed payments platform, serving 13 African markets in partnership with about 28 mobile operators and 31 banks in the region.
Since its establishment, the company has grown into a leading international payments company in Africa, with a focus on digitizing payments for Africa’s largest economies.
