Cellulant’s CEO Akshay Grover is leaving the company this January 2024, three years after joining the fintech as Chief Financial Officer in 2021, and his subsequent appointed as CEO in the same year. He will be replaced by the current CFO, Peter O’Toole, as the Acting Group CEO effective January 2024.
Akshay Grover joined Cellulant in January 2021 as the Chief Financial Officer and was later appointed as the Group CEO in October 2021. Prior to joining Cellulant, he served as the Chief Investment Officer at ISON. Akshay leads the African chapter of TiE, a worldwide organization committed to supporting and nurturing entrepreneurship. He is also an enthusiastic angel investor.
Since joining Cellulant in 2021, Akshay has guided the company in transforming into a merchant-centered payments business. Through his efforts, the organization has made substantial progress in productizing its services and has undergone a complete overhaul of its technology stack. This has resulted in a significant improvement in service levels for its customers, attracting tremendous year-on-year growth in revenues and key business performance indicators. The company’s reach has also expanded to 18+ countries in Africa, providing further opportunities for growth. Under Akshay’s visionary leadership, Cellulant has consolidated its product offering into a single platform that allows businesses to collect and make payments seamless across Africa.
TechMoran is yet to establish the main reason why Grover has stepped down but he says he is leaving the company to focus on personal matters. Under his leadership, Cellulant has expanded and strengthened its position both on the African continent and internationally.
Recently, Cellulant announced a reorganization that saw 20 percent of its workforce affected in a new organizational strategy to enhance its service offerings across the 19 countries it operates in. After that the company obtained the initial approval as a Payment Service Provider and Payment Facilitator in Egypt to provide reliable payment options for businesses in the region.
Over the last three years, the company has been sustainably investing in the growth of its real-time payment solutions for businesses, namely checkout, in-store, payouts, payment links, and its robust business dashboard, all anchored on its single API payment platform – Tingg. With its collections and disbursement payment solutions, Cellulant will enable global and regional merchants to easily manage their B2B and B2C payments seamlessly in-country and internationally, whether through mobile money, wallets, cash, card, or direct bank transfers across multiple payment methods in various currencies.
Peter O’Toole
The current CFO, Peter O’Toole, will oversee the organisation’s operations as Acting CEO as the firm strengthens its leadership team further with a number of seasoned senior leaders with international and pan-African experience in the payment space. Apart from the previous reorganization that saw 20 percent of its workforce laid off, Cellulant had another mass lay off in December which saw several top level executives and employees let go as the firm moves towards lean operations and profitability.
Peter is the Acting Group CEO at Cellulant and is responsible for driving the strategic direction and expansion of the business. He joined Cellulant in June 2023 as Group CFO, tasked with driving the company’s financial success, overseeing strategic financial operations and driving operational efficiency.
He is an accomplished CFO and COO with over 30 years of experience in banking, finance, payments, and technology across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Demonstrating a remarkable track record, he has achieved outstanding financial and business performance across diverse organisations, ranging from start-ups and SMEs to divisions and regions of large global entities. His expertise includes managing teams of varying sizes and overseeing all aspects of strategy, finance, and operations, leading organizational transformations comprehensively.
He has spent the last 13 years living and working in Africa, where he has held a number of high-level positions, including Group CFO at Interswitch, CFO at Renmoney, COO at MBU Education Group, and Head of Finance and Market Expansion at Umba. He also has extensive experience working in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He has served as the CFO at Dun & Bradstreet and held various regional CFO roles at First Data Corporation (now Fiserv), a major global payments company. He was also a Finance & Operations Director at Barclays Bank in Ireland.
His appointment is expected to drive Cellulant, launched in Kenya in 2003, to enable businesses to collect payments online and offline while allowing anyone to pay from their mobile money, local and international cards, or their bank. The firm had earlier in the year laid off 27 employees from across its African operations. TechMoran will report on the headcount of the latest mass layoffs shortly!