Mukuru’s strategic intent is to be a financial services platform for Africa’s emerging consumer and uses a cloud hosted architecture for product launches in 13 African countries. It is investing in DevOps cloud infrastructure to support its multi-service architecture which is being created to support business product expansion.
Mukuru is a next generation financial services platform in Southern Africa that offers affordable and reliable financial services to a customer base of over 16 million+ across Africa, Asia and Europe.
With more than 100 million transactions to date, Mukuru’s core was built providing international money transfers and from this base, it has developed a set of services to address the broader financial needs of its customers. The company now operates in more than 60 countries and across more than 500 remittance corridors.
Mukuru is a business that puts the customer at the centre of everything it does, and for that reason, it serves clients across physical and digital channels, by various payment methods, cash, card, wallet as well as a range of engagement platforms including WhatsApp, USSD, contact centre, App, website, agents and a branch and booth network.
Mukuru has embraced a hybrid working model for many years. Software engineers are employed in Europe, Dubai, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya and across South Africa. The major change in the working approach after the pandemic is that local staff who engage with remote colleagues have become far more adept at doing so.
Most staff remain supportive of engaging in person at least twice a week if possible, and definitely quarterly at a minimum, to drive effective relationship building and problem solving.
Strategic and operational roles
As Chief Information Officer, Sandy Rheeder, looks after all things IT at Mukuru. This includes typical office IT software and device management for both remote staff and those at the company’s various offices and branch locations across Africa.
She oversees product development and focus here is to manage teams that build the technology that underpins the financial services that Mukuru sells to its customers. Sandy heads security and risk management across both the technology products and typical IT operations landscapes.
Her role is to translate business strategy into an executed product and IT strategy. This supports Mukuru’s growth ambitions and future proof the organisation in an ever-changing and rapidly evolving technology environment.
The challenges of building software in-house through permanent software development teams tend to be typical of high-performing teams. It is about creating great teams that can find long-term career significance at Mukuru, teams that can solve problems well and are exceptionally good at what they do.
Capacity planning for the right mix of development teams as the company grows, avoiding key-man dependencies with IP that is not shared, and training engineers on new frameworks, security protocols, and more, needs to be precisely managed.
As a fintech, Mukuru will generally choose to build in-house, as it allows the company to own its technical architecture, and to pivot team capacity to different projects quickly if needed.
Architecture and application stack
Mukuru is a digital platform that uses the cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services, AWS, for its technology, with a strong DevOps approach for managing its infrastructure. Almost all the key applications that allow Mukuru customers to access services, or through which Mukuru staff can support customers, have been built in-house by Mukuru’s software engineering team.
The company partners with other platform providers which align to its customer service strategy. These include integrations with WhatsApp, Pattern Matched Technologies, Onfido, Thunes, Xcally, and various Mobile Money Operators, MNO’s, among others.
Mukuru builds its technology in a range of coding languages. Flutter is used for customer and staff applications and Web applications, and back-end services are typically built in PHP or .NET Core. Pipeline builds are managed through GitHub. Core staff office applications are managed through Microsoft tools and cloud hosting solutions.
Customers can access Mukuru services primarily through their mobile devices, using WhatsApp, USSD, the Mukuru App or mobile responsive websites. Customers receive service support through the contact centre.
Mukuru has an extensive agent, branch and booth network to meet customers where they are within their communities. These staff members have access to Apps on their smartphones to facilitate customer transactions.
Product development and innovation
Mukuru’s strategic intent to be a financial services platform for Africa’s emerging consumer, drives the technical product roadmap. This is aligned to the primary needs of those African consumer to send money, have a digital store of value and spend effectively in their ecosystem through relevant payment use cases
Mukuru moved to a fully cloud hosted architecture in 2015 which has allowed the company to leverage platform development for product launches across 13 African countries. It continues to invest in DevOps cloud infrastructure which supports the multi-service architecture which is being created to support business product expansion.
Long-term business transformation projects at Mukuru include:
- Building and launching wallet products across the business’s footprint
- Creating payment options for customers which include airtime, electricity, satellite TV services, and more
- Launching funeral insurance across the business’s footprint
- Adding multiple customer service use cases to our WhatsApp self-service chatbot platform
- Continuous improvement on our customer App
- Continuous partner integrations, which allow customers better access to a remittance network across Africa and Asia
IT expectations from business users, customers
Staff members need reliable technology that helps them serve customers efficiently and correctly in every interaction, across a broad range of use cases, some of which are unique to a particular country. Business users expect a software engineering department to develop scalable, secure products as quickly as possible.
A key business stakeholder pain point is the speed of software development. The speed with which a business can respond to changing market needs is often a differentiator in the Fintech space. Software engineers need to develop a minimum viable product that can be tested in the market with robust architecture that can scale.
Customers are at the heart of everything Mukuru does. Financial services customers expect secure, responsive access to Mukuru channels 24×7. Customers expect ongoing product and channel improvements. They demand ease of use and greater access to digitisation.
A key customer pain point is lack of options. Customers need technical solutions that are appropriate for their needs. This is especially true in Africa where customers need options ranging from USSD through to smart Apps because the needs vary notably across diverse markets. The cost of data is also a major challenge for the emerging consumer.
Navigating technical solutions for Africa’s emerging consumers across 13 jurisdictions is challenging. Regulators change their requirements frequently, while Africa has a level of both political and market volatility.
Mukuru manages six customer engagement platforms to meet consumer needs, and all of these moving parts need to be catered for in a single cloud-hosted technology platform which Mukuru can leverage for scale and security needs as it grows.
Usage of AI
Software developers are generally at the forefront of the AI adoption curve, and have been following AI trends in development tooling for quite some time. They have been using these as they become available in the market. Mukuru sees value in efficiency gains where good AI development tools can automate typical things such as code exceptions, service setup, and more. Mukuru has an active strategy to roll out standardised AI development tools to all engineers.
The biggest AI use case at Mukuru is in the customer service space. The company is investigating using AI to support customer queries across its social media and WhatsApp platforms, to improve both customer support response times and to standardise service query resolution.
Solving Mukuru’s challenges is the most satisfying part of Sandy’s role. She also enjoys building and supporting her exceptional team, as well as working alongside her executive colleagues, to drive the strategic execution of such a dynamic, purpose-driven company.
Snapshot
- With more than 100 million transactions to date, Mukuru’s core was built providing international money transfers.
- The company now operates in more than 60 countries and across more than 500 remittance corridors.
- Mukuru has embraced a hybrid working model for many years.
- Software engineers are employed in Europe, Dubai, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya and across South Africa.
- Role of Sandy Rheeder role is to translate business strategy into an executed product and IT strategy.
- The challenges of building software in-house through permanent software development teams tend to be typical of high-performing teams.
- Mukuru will generally choose to build in-house, as it allows the company to own its technical architecture.
- Almost all the key applications that allow Mukuru customers to access services, have been built in-house.
- Mukuru’s strategic intent to be a financial services platform for Africa’s emerging consumer, drives the technical product roadmap.
- Mukuru moved to a fully cloud hosted architecture in 2015 which has allowed the company to leverage platform development for product launches across 13 African countries.
- A key business stakeholder pain point is the speed of software development.
- Customers are at the heart of everything Mukuru does and A key customer pain point is lack of options.
- Customers need technical solutions that are appropriate for their needs.
- The cost of data is also a major challenge for the emerging consumer.
- Navigating technical solutions for Africa’s emerging consumers across 13 jurisdictions is challenging.
- Mukuru manages six customer engagement platforms and all of these need to be catered for in a single cloud-hosted technology platform.
- The biggest AI use case at Mukuru is in the customer service space.
