In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, almost 90 percent of all payments and transactions are based on cash. But there is a large opportunity to increase mobile money penetration, as two-thirds of the region is adopting mobile phones. Companies like Cellulant are tapping into this market by digitizing payments in an effort to provide increased reach and transparency for players in the financial sector.
While the lives of about 700 million people in Africa revolve around sectors such as agriculture, there are many challenges that both businesses and consumers face — African consumers have limited options when it comes to making payments and merchants cannot efficiently and effectively collect payments.
To tackle this challenge, Cellulant seeks to facilitate payments for consumers, retailers, merchants, banks, mobile network operators, Governments and International Development partners by providing a unified eCommerce and digital payments platform. For merchants, the company provides a single application program interface (API) and a single connection that will enable local and global merchants to collect multiple payment options covering 162 payment methods. And, for banks and mobile wallets, the company seeks to provide a single point of connection for consumers to pay more than 600 merchants.
“All that is delivered [in a] few lines of code,” Cellulant Group Chief Strategy Officer David Waithaka told PYMNTS in an interview. “We have seen double-digit growth of online sales for particular merchants on availing local relevant payment methods.”
At the same time, consumers in Africa are increasingly getting connected to the internet. The region is seeing a 35.2 percent internet penetration rate, with 453 million users already connected, and is growing at a rate of 20 percent year-over-year (YoY). And, as governments lay down fiber cables and initiatives like Facebook Express Wi-Fi and Google Loon take hold, the internet penetration rate is rising. Amid these changes, the smartphone penetration rate is projected to be 26 percent this year.
Even though online payments in Africa last year were estimated at $48 billion, a whopping 98 percent of them were made in cash. By comparison, credit card penetration stood at only 1.5 percent, and bank account penetration was at 22 percent. But, according to Waithaka, “in regions where financial inclusion is limited, mobile money promises a lower-cost, more scalable alternative to traditional banking.”
The U.S. Treasury Secretary says a new government cost-cutting effort has found $50 billion in savings.
Speaking to Fox News Tuesday (Feb. 18) evening, Scott Bessent said the work by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group created by executive order last month, could ultimately lead to “several percent of GDP that we are saving.”
The secretary added that the public doesn’t “have to be concerned about any of this,” in reference to attempts by the Elon Musk-connected team to access taxpayer data, leading Democratic lawmakers to raise concerns about privacy.
At the Internal Revenue Service, Bessent said, there’s one member of the DOGE team “looking at an outdated IT system, that’s all they’re doing.”
Bessent said two people at Treasury had “read only access” to the payments systems, meaning they don’t have the ability to make any changes. “There are very strict guardrails around them,” he said.
The $50 billion figure is slightly lower than the $55 billion in savings DOGE claims to have found so far. However, a report from Bloomberg News Wednesday (Feb. 19) notes that while DOGE says it has saved $55 billion, its website accounts for just $16.6 billion.
That site also includes an error, the report added, mislabeling an $8 million contract as $8 billion, reducing the amount of the group’s itemized savings by nearly half.
DOGE’s efforts have helped bring about hundreds of thousands of government layoffs, some of which have been rescinded as departments realized they were missing crucial workers.
For example, the mass firings led to the dismissal of a team in the U.S. Department of Agriculture working on the government’s response to the avian flu. The department has said it is now trying to reverse the firings.
In another incident last week, the National Nuclear Security Administration rescinded firings for employees responsible for monitoring the nation’s nuclear stockpile, only to discover it had no way of getting in touch with said employees.
The idea for DOGE was first floated last year, with President Donald Trump announcing that Musk would lead the project. However, the administration has since said that Musk was an advisor to the White House, and not in charge of the department.
In a recent interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Amias Gerety, a Treasury official for the Obama administration, warned of the consequences if DOGE’s efforts to access payment systems created uncertainty.
“If there’s one phrase that dominates discussions about the Treasury’s role in the nation’s finances, it’s ‘full faith and credit,’” Gerety said.
“The full faith and credit of the U.S. government should not be impeached. It’s literally in the [Constitution]. If you’re a bank, if you’re an investor, if you’re a government contractor, if you’re a retiree receiving Social Security — you have to ask, will my payments go through? That uncertainty should be felt around the world.”