Cellulant elevates veteran engineer Michael Muriuki to unified technology lead

Cellulant, a pan-African payments giant, has appointed Michael Muriuki as its Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO), a strategic promotion aimed at driving unified, product-led growth across the continent.

Announced on 5 February 2026, the new role unifies leadership across product strategy and technology execution.

This consolidation comes as the Nairobi-headquartered firm sharpens its focus on enterprise solutions and infrastructure scale.

By bringing these departments under a single executive, Cellulant aims to align its technical capabilities more closely with its commercial mission of delivering secure, innovative payment solutions.

Mr Muriuki’s ascent to the C-suite is the result of a decade-long journey within the company. Having joined over ten years ago as an implementation engineer, he witnessed Cellulant’s transition from a mobile banking provider into a resilient, full-scale payments platform.

During his early years, he was instrumental in consolidating M-PESA B2C integrations across Kenyan banks and spearheaded the redesign of Ecobank’s mobile banking platform across 33 African countries.

The appointment follows a period of massive technical success under Mr Muriuki’s leadership as Vice President of Software Engineering. Over the last three years, he led the modernization of the Tingg platform into a cloud-native microservices architecture.

This overhaul has yielded significant results; in 2025 alone, the platform’s daily transaction volume surged from 1 million to 4.5 million, while the cost per transaction was slashed by more than 60%.

“Over the years, I’ve seen Mike’s deep technical judgment, calm leadership, and strong sense of ownership translate directly into measurable business results,” said Peter O’Toole, Chief Executive Officer at Cellulant.

He emphasized that Mr Muriuki’s deep knowledge of the African payments ecosystem makes him the ideal leader to guide the company’s next chapter toward sustained profitability and scale.

In his new capacity, Mr Muriuki will have end-to-end executive ownership of Product, Platform, and Software Engineering.

His primary mandate includes strengthening the company’s technology foundation and building out robust AI and data insights capabilities.

This forward-looking strategy is intended to ensure Cellulant remains a dominant force in a competitive landscape increasingly shaped by big data and automated financial services.

Responding to his promotion, Mr Muriuki expressed his honor at leading teams in a company he has grown with.

He noted that Cellulant has a unique ability to “adapt and reinvent itself” for the realities of the African market.

He pledged to keep “raising the bar” for the platform’s reliability as it serves millions of businesses and consumers across the continent.