Cellulant, the payments company, has announced the appointment of Michael Muriuki as its Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO).
The role unifies leadership across product strategy and technology execution as the business sharpens its focus on enterprise solutions, infrastructure scale, and product-led growth.
Michael joined Cellulant over a decade ago as an implementation engineer, when the company was primarily focused on mobile banking solutions, and has since been central to building the technology infrastructure that has enabled the company’s evolution into a resilient, fully-fledged payments platform operating at scale across Africa. Early in his career, he led the consolidation of MPESA B2C integrations across most banks in Kenya, the redesign of our mobile banking platform, and led the design and expansion of Ecobank’s mobile banking platform in 33 African countries.
In the last three years, as VP of Software Engineering, he has led a sizeable, geographically distributed engineering team to modernise the Tingg platform into a cloud native microservices architecture, migrate critical systems to the cloud, significantly scale transaction throughput and improve the reliability of the Tingg payment platform, deepening Cellulant’s market penetration across Africa. In 2025 alone, the Tingg platform scaled from 1 million to 4.5 million transactions daily.
“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.”
As CPTO, Michael will have end-to-end executive ownership of Product, Platform, and Software Engineering. He will be responsible for shaping Cellulant’s product portfolio, strengthening its technology foundation, building robust AI, data, and insights capabilities, while ensuring disciplined execution as the company advances its mission of delivering seamless, secure, and innovative payment solutions across Africa.
“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.”
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