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Two Kenyan firms named in world emerging Fintech companies

The two include Digital payments provider Cellulant, and Mobile loans provider Tala who are among the three African companies representing Africa/FILE

NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 31 – Two Kenyan companies have been named among the Top 50 emerging Fintech companies in the world in this year’s KPMG FinTech100 report.

The two include Digital payments provider Cellulant, and Mobile loans provider Tala who are among the three African companies representing Africa to be included in the list of leading global Fintech innovators that are transforming the financial services industry and have successfully raised venture capital.

In April Mobile financial services firm, Tala, secured US$65 million (Sh6.5 billion) in new investment to power the growth of its consumer lending app.

The funds will focus on product development and growing human talent capacity in Kenya and expand its services to cover Mexico and India.

Tala, which operates in Kenya, Tanzania and the Philippines, secured the Series C investment from Revolution Growth, with existing investors such as IVP, Data Collective, Ribbit Capital, Lowercase Capital and Female Founders Fund also topping up their stake.

The round brings Tala’s total fundraising to more than US $105 million (Sh10 Billion).

In Kenya, Tala has disbursed over 10 million loans to over 2 million customers with a value of Sh28 billion (US$280 million). The app has over 2.7 million downloads in the country.

“We are excited about how Tala is using mobile devices and data-science to unlock this huge unmet opportunity and serve a market that is underserved by traditional financial institutions,” said Steve Murray, Managing Partner at Revolution Growth who now joins Tala’s Board.

With more than 3 billion underserved consumers globally, Tala’s ultimate aim is to deliver meaningful products and services that build radical trust with our customers and put more people in control of their financial lives,” said Tala’s founder and CEO Shivani Siroya.

On its part, Cellulant closed a Sh4.7 billion financing, one of the largest investment in a fintech company in Africa.

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Cellulant plans to use the funds to enter two new markets in Africa before the end of the year as well as upgrade its payment infrastructure to suit emerging demands of the market.

Cellulant operates in 11 countries, with 12 percent of Africa’s mobile consumers now able to make payments using their services and products.

Cellulant is now building Agrikore- a block chain based smart-contracting, payments marketplace that ensures every stakeholder in the agriculture value chain can do business in a trusted and transparent environment.

“Cellulant is connecting a continent. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 90 percent of all payments and transactions remain cash based yet the rate of mobile penetration in Africa is currently at 43 percent, we are innovating around digital payments to change this status quo. Diversity has shown itself to be a powerful driver of innovation; we have seen an explosion of innovation over the past five years, across geographies and sectors. We attribute much of this innovation to the diversity of experiences and the inherent creativity of the people working in many of these companies…” said Cellulant Co-CEO Ken Njoroge.

The 100 companies on the list, have together raised over US$52 billion in venture capital.

This is more than double the 2017 figure. In the last 12 months alone, these companies have also raised US$28Billion of capital.

The 2018 KPMG Fintech100 report highlights truly innovative companies creating products and services at the nexus of technology and financial services.

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