Mukuru Broadens Remittance Business Into Digital Financial Services

Mukuru is moving beyond its traditional cross-border money-transfer business as it develops a wider range of digital financial services for customers across Southern and East Africa.

Juan Seco, the company’s Chief Growth Officer and Managing Director for East Africa, described the strategy as a “remittance-led neobank” model. The approach uses Mukuru’s established remittance business as an entry point to offer customers wallets, cards, payments and other banking functionality.

According to a report by TechCabal, Mukuru operates in more than 60 countries and serves 17.6 million customers through physical and digital payout networks. The company is headquartered in South Africa and reaches customers through agents, USSD, WhatsApp and digital accounts.

Remittances as a starting point

Seco said remittances often represent the first transaction between Mukuru and a customer, creating an opportunity to support broader everyday financial needs.

“Remittance is the tip of the spear,” he said. “It is the first transaction and, in many cases, the first time we have that relationship with the customer. The opportunity is to take that trust and make the customer’s everyday financial life easier.”

Under the proposed model, customers may retain money received through Mukuru in a wallet and use it for bills, purchases, salary payments, transfers to other people and potentially additional financial services. Seco said new offerings should be connected to activities customers already undertake rather than operating as unrelated products.

“They should be an extension or adjacent to what the customer already does,” he said.

Cards and banking infrastructure

Mukuru has launched a physical Visa debit card linked to its wallet in Botswana. In South Africa, it has partnered with Bank Zero to provide the banking infrastructure supporting its account and card offering.

The arrangement separates the infrastructure from the customer-facing relationship. Bank Zero provides the underlying banking services, while Mukuru retains responsibility for the customer experience and relationship, according to the TechCabal report.

The South African offering is intended to allow Mukuru customers to receive salaries and other payments, make electronic payments and use cards for routine transactions. About 500,000 Mukuru customers are being migrated onto Bank Zero’s infrastructure, contributing to a combined Bank Zero customer base of more than 700,000 end customers, the report said.

The supplied information does not specify when the migration began or when it is expected to finish. It also does not provide details on fees, eligibility requirements or the regulatory status of the Botswana card and South African account offering.

Serving customers through familiar channels

Seco said Mukuru’s expansion is intended to include customers who continue to rely on cash, rather than limiting access to people who already use fully digital financial services.

“At Mukuru, we always talk about meeting our customers where they are,” he said. “Just because someone transacts in cash should not mean they have access to fewer financial services.”

The company’s stated approach combines cash transactions and agent networks with USSD, WhatsApp bots, digital accounts and debit cards. This gives Mukuru several ways to connect customers with its expanding product range.

Seco joined Mukuru in 2023 after spending roughly a decade in the Jumia ecosystem. He worked across technology, commerce and financial services at Jumia and served as chief financial officer. His experience with repeated mobile-money integrations there contributed to the development of Jumia Pay, which expanded into products including working-capital services, buy-now-pay-later integrations, consumer credit in Egypt and microloans in Nigeria.

Before joining Jumia, Seco worked at PwC in Spain, auditing financial institutions including American Express and Prudential, and later moved to New York for private-equity mergers and acquisitions. He was born in Madrid, spent his childhood between France and Luxembourg, and studied finance and international business at McGill University in Canada.