THE AFRICAN BUSINESS FORTUNE MAGAZINE ISSUE #006 The African Business Fortune Magazine | Page 48

THE AFRICAN BUSINESS FORTUNE - ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Meet techpreneur who quit banking job to start mobile money App

Kariuki
Kariuki Gathitu
Gathitu -- Founder
Founder Zege
Zege Technologies
Technologies
By Brian Tirok

T

o make it out there as an innovator for the technology hub it requires you to be suave and think
fast so that you can establish yourself
as an ambitious entrepreneur.
Kariuki Gathitu is an example of
these audacious and world changing
minds.
Gathitu ventured into tech business
at a tender age which and later came
up with Zege-technologies, a platform
that builds solutions around mobile
money technology.
The application is also responsible
for business communication and management and soft solutions for companies and enterprises in Kenya.
The alumni of Kenyatta University
pursued Computer Science has always
had the passion in innovation.
He was working for Equity Bank in
2009 in innovation and project management and played a big role there
as one of the developers of one of Kenya’s first mobile money revolution,
M-KESHO.

He spent 2 years at the bank before
quitting in 2010 to his newly found company Zege technologies, that is where he
came up with M-Payer another moneyintegration product, an innovation that
would change his life.
Kariuki says that with the knowledge
he gained from school and the experience from Equity, he knew he was ready
to come up with something of his own.
Through own savings and support
from NGO’s to the help of M-lab incubators his dream became a reality.
He launched an app that will enable
other banks, microfinance institution,
and SACCOs (Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations) to integrate mobile payments. That was how the product
MPAYER came about.
“This app simplifies the large and complex banking system by merging it to the
simple mobile pay system, we have since
been developing the software pending on
the customer needs, it manages business,
monitors payments and lets you acquire
more customers,” he opens up during an
interview.
According to Kariuki the Mobile app
helps one track payments in real time;

48 THE AFRICAN BUSINESS FORTUNE MAY - JUNE 2016

you can see which product in the market is
doing well or not performing by reviewing
reports, sales and expanses of the day so
that you can decide to promote the product
or remove it from the market space.
The app also enables you to monitor your
businesses country wide at the comfort of
your Home by helping account better.
“It’s very efficient and simplifies work in
such a way that it takes you not more than 2
seconds to do a transaction. In just one click
on the menu, you will see which products
are on high or low sales and decide what to
do,” he says.
The app is able to display by the number
of transactions accrued in a period of time
the most regular customers and by that you
will be able to see who is valuable to the success of your business and probably reward
them.
Kariuki has high hopes that his product
will pick fast in the country considering that
money transfer systems like Airtel money,
M-Pesa, Orange among other services his
product integrates with has flourished.
“When you look at the market Kenya has,
its big business space is between 60 per cent
to 80 per cent and that is all about mobile