Regional Manager Cliff Siyam leads our work in West Africa, currently across Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, with Cameroon and Burkina Faso launching this year. Wilfred Wabwire heads up East Africa, where we operate across Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. They shed light on fintech trends for these regions.

West Africa

By Cliff Siyam, Regional Head, West Africa

A few years ago, if you’d asked fintech insiders where Africa’s next high-growth frontier sat, you’d have heard Lagos, Nairobi, or Cairo. Ask the same question now, and the answer comes back different. Francophone Africa (spanning the eight-nation WAEMU bloc anchored by Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and the six-nation CEMAC zone led by Cameroon) is commanding serious, sustained investor attention. And, for the first time, it has the numbers to back the story.

You see the same pattern wherever you look. Venture capital deal volume in Francophone Africa grew eightfold between 2021 and 2024, with fintech now accounting for 31% of total startup investment. Mobile money is the connective tissue. WAEMU added over 110 million mobile money accounts between 2018 and 2022, lifting financial inclusion from 56% to 71%, and 89% of those interactions still happen via USSD. The infrastructure powering this is able to reach the high volume of feature-phone users and rural communities in Africa that traditional banks can’t.

If 2024 was the year Francophone Africa entered the global fintech radar in earnest, 2025 was the year the ecosystem was tested. BCEAO licensing came into being, forcing compliance delays that led to frozen services that some have called the ‘Francophone Fintech Shock’. By September, a growing cohort of compliant operators had been licensed, and the message had landed. Compliance is non-negotiable, but the regulator understands the journey must be achievable.

The competitive landscape is coming into focus, and it’s more interesting than the headlines suggest. Orange Money and MTN MoMo hold the distribution. Wave, the Senegalese disruptor and Africa’s first Francophone unicorn, has redrawn user expectations with its flat 1% transaction fee and over 20 million monthly active users. Djamo, the Ivorian neobank, raised $17M in 2025, the largest VC round ever recorded in Côte d’Ivoire.

For JUMO, this is where the work gets interesting. Our digital credit products, VITKASH in Côte d’Ivoire and MOMOKASH and FAABA in Benin, have together served nearly one million unique customers across more than four million loan events, disbursing over CFA 65 billion (~$108M) in credit. All via mobile, no collateral required, with a default rate below 4%. That last number is the one we’re proudest of and is only made possible by JUMO’s decade-long fine tuning of AI algorithms that manage assets and risk with precision.

XpressLoan in Cameroon and FasoKash in Burkina Faso are on track to launch in 2026, with Mali, Senegal, DRC, Guinea-Bissau.

Mobile money has quietly created exactly the transactional record that AI-powered credit engines need. A market trader in Cotonou with two years of mobile money activity now has a richer financial footprint than a formally employed worker in a market with a credit bureau record. But only if you have the information management technology to read it. Building that responsibly and at scale, is part of what we do at JUMO.

East Africa

By Wilfred, Regional Head, East Africa

East Africa has long been one of the most dynamic fintech regions on the continent, and the pace hasn’t slowed. If anything, it’s picked up. Digital credit access has expanded rapidly, reaching populations that traditional financial institutions couldn’t serve. At JUMO, our work here is built on partnerships with leading mobile network operators – Airtel and MTN – and capital providers such as Absa, Standard Bank, and BlueOrchard. Together, these partnerships have widened access to inclusive financial services across the region, and we continue to explore new markets and funding sources to channel capital to those who need it most.

The context matters. East Africa is contending with climate shocks, health crises, and economic volatility, and these pressures fall hardest on the most vulnerable. I see it play out in our customer conversations every day. Inclusive finance such as credit, savings, and the tools to build resilience aren’t nice-to-have in this environment; they are foundational. The financial products JUMO has built are designed to be convenient, innovative, and easy to access, including on feature phones, so reach is genuinely broad. Financial literacy is embedded throughout the customer journey, because credit without capability builds fragility, not resilience.

JUMO’s footprint reflects that intent. In Uganda, Wewole delivered in partnership with Airtel Money and Mosente with MTN MoMo serve customers via USSD and the MTN MoMo app, offering 14-day, 30-day, and 60-day loan options. Cumulatively, JUMO credit services in Uganda have served 10.9 million customers since inception. That number changed how I think about this work. In Kenya, KopaCash on Airtel Money has served 639,000 customers. In Tanzania, the Timiza product on Airtel Money has reached close to 6 million. Each market tells a slightly different story, but the common thread is the same:

when credit is delivered sustainably through trusted channels, in the right format, and at the right size, people use it and they repay.

JUMO’s Banking-as-a-Service platform is attracting capital from Tier 1 banks and impact investors, and our collaboration with mobile network operators is unlocking customer growth at a meaningful scale. The next phase will be defined by deeper partnerships with MNOs, with mobile fintech companies, and with Tier 1 banks to broaden access further. Financial literacy and consumer protection remain the pillars underpinning it all. Without them, scale becomes a liability. With them, it has a lasting impact.