Mukuru Expands Beyond Remittances Into Digital Financial Services

Mukuru is expanding beyond cross-border remittances into broader digital financial services, including wallets, cards, payments and banking infrastructure.

The company is building on a network that operates in more than 60 countries and serves 17.6 million customers through physical and digital payout channels across Southern and East Africa.

Juan Seco, Mukuru’s chief growth officer and managing director for East Africa, described the company’s strategy as that of a “remittance-led neobank”. He said remittances provide an initial relationship with customers that can support a wider range of everyday financial services.

“Remittance is the tip of the spear,” Seco 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.”

New wallet and card offerings

Mukuru has launched a physical Visa debit card in Botswana linked to customers’ wallets. The company has also partnered with Bank Zero to provide the banking infrastructure behind its account and card offering in South Africa.

About 500,000 Mukuru customers are being migrated onto Bank Zero’s infrastructure. The combined Bank Zero customer base is described as exceeding 700,000 end customers, including the contribution from the Mukuru migration.

Under the arrangement, Bank Zero provides the underlying banking infrastructure, while Mukuru retains the customer relationship and the user experience.

The broader model would allow customers to retain money received through remittances in a wallet and use it for activities such as bill payments, purchases, salary payments, transfers and other financial services.

Seco said new products should complement customers’ existing financial behaviour. “They should be an extension or adjacent to what the customer already does,” he said.

Reaching customers through multiple channels

Mukuru’s services are available through its agent network, USSD, WhatsApp and digital accounts. Seco said the company aims to serve customers through the channels they already use rather than requiring them to adopt a single digital format.

“At Mukuru, we always talk about meeting our customers where they are,” he said.

That approach also reflects the continued role of cash in many customers’ financial lives. Seco said people who transact in cash should not be excluded from formal financial services or receive access to fewer products. He described the company’s objective as reducing friction between cash and digital value.

Seco’s payments background

Seco was born in Madrid and spent his childhood between France and Luxembourg. He studied finance and international business at McGill University in Canada before starting his career at PwC in Spain, where he audited financial institutions including American Express and Prudential.

He later moved to New York for private-equity mergers and acquisitions before relocating to Nairobi to join Jumia, taking what he described as a significant pay cut. He spent roughly a decade in the Jumia ecosystem, working across technology, commerce and financial services.

At Jumia, Seco worked on cash-on-delivery operations, digital payments and integrations with mobile-money systems such as M-Pesa. Jumia Pay developed into the company’s payments platform, while related offerings included working-capital products, buy-now-pay-later integrations, consumer credit in Egypt and microloans in Nigeria.

Seco joined Mukuru in 2023. His current strategy is based on extending the trust built through the company’s cross-border money-transfer services into additional financial products used in customers’ daily lives.