Cellulant Appoints Michael Muriuki As CPTO

Pan-African payments company Cellulant has appointed Michael Muriuki as its Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO), consolidating leadership across product strategy and technology execution as the firm sharpens its focus on enterprise solutions, infrastructure scale and product-led growth.

The new role brings together oversight of product, platform and software engineering at a time when Cellulant is expanding its offerings for enterprise customers and deepening its footprint across African markets.

Muriuki joined Cellulant more than a decade ago as an implementation engineer, when the company was largely focused on mobile banking solutions. Since then, he has played a central role in building the technology infrastructure that has supported Cellulant’s transition into a full-scale payments platform operating across multiple African countries.

Earlier in his career, he led the consolidation of MPESA B2C integrations across most banks in Kenya, redesigned Cellulant’s mobile banking platform, and oversaw the design and expansion of Ecobank’s mobile banking platform in 33 African countries.

Over the past three years, serving as Vice President of Software Engineering, Muriuki has led a geographically distributed engineering team to modernise the Tingg platform into a cloud-native microservices architecture. The work included migrating critical systems to the cloud, significantly increasing transaction throughput and improving platform reliability, supporting Cellulant’s growing market penetration across Africa. In 2025 alone, the Tingg platform scaled from one million to 4.5 million transactions per day.

“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 has been central to building scalable customer-centric solutions for our bank and enterprise merchants, and to Cellulant’s journey to profitability. Our next chapter is about scaling this success, and it only makes sense for a respected leader with a deep knowledge of our products and infrastructure, the African payments ecosystem, and a deep care for our customers to lead us forward.”

In his new role, Muriuki will be responsible for shaping Cellulant’s product portfolio, strengthening its technology foundation and building AI, data and insights capabilities, while ensuring disciplined execution as the company advances its payments strategy.

“I’m honoured to step into this role at a company that I’ve grown with over the years,” said Michael Muriuki, Chief Product & Technology Officer. “Cellulant has continually shown the ability to adapt, reinvent itself, and build for the realities of Africa. I’m excited to work with our product and technology teams to keep raising the bar as we scale our platforms, serve our customers, and make the businesses we serve across the continent as successful as possible.”

The appointment underscores Cellulant’s broader strategy to deliver end-to-end value for businesses by expanding its enterprise-focused products, strengthening its technology backbone and accelerating growth across Africa.