With the need to make quick payments and remittances across Africa, mobile money transactions are fast becoming the most effective and efficient way of transaction.

With this in mind, Accra-based Mazzuma conceptualized a mobile payment platform idea in 2015, and launched in 2018 with a focus on implementing mobile money transactions using cryptocurrencies.

Mazzuma is driven by blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in its transactions, and works based on CYST. CYST is a software company that focuses on AI, blockchain and mobile payment systems to actualize financial inclusion in emerging markets, including in Africa. Being CYST’s flagship brand, Mazzuma has evolved into a mobile money payment system that uses secure infrastructure and cryptocurrency to enable seamless payments.

It does this in partnership with other global remittance firms such as World Remit, Remitly and UnityLink.

Web3 Coding Without Pain

“Our focus is building Web3 infrastructure, in developer tools with remittance payments. We have two key products. The first is an AI-powered Web3 code generator in which we purely use AI,” Kofi Genfi, the co-founder, CEO, and director of business strategy at Mazzuma tells NODO News. “We believe that developers and product managers should be able to generate world class code without having to go through the pain and the cost of using Web3 languages such as Solidity and Plutus.”

The AI-driven Web3 code generator, which is currently in its final stages of development, is expected to go live within this quarter. It is operational at the moment in terms of software development, Genfi said.

Genfi, who describes himself as an entrepreneur with deep affiliation to innovative business strategies in the digital commerce space in emerging markets, was a co-founder and director of CYST from 2013.

He co-founded Mazzuma together with his childhood friend, Nii Osae, who is the director of software engineering at the company.

“What we do at Mazzuma is kind of, attempting to speed up the process of prompt engineering and also have a Web3 product focusing on reducing the cost of sending remittances across Africa,” he said, adding that the tech company currently operates in Ghana using its Web2 product focusing on remittances, while with its Web3 products, it seeks to work across the continent. “We primarily work with remittance companies and provide the necessary infrastructure for them.”

Transaction Volumes Surge to $114 Million

Mazzuma is regulated by the Bank of Ghana and prides itself in having steadily carved a niche for itself in the global remittances market through its last-mile distribution into local mobile money accounts, and has thousands of users who process millions of dollars in transaction volume monthly.

Its daily transactional volumes have, according to Genfi, grown significantly due in part to a surge in the uptake of digital financial services due to Covid-19.

“Over the past three and half to four years, we’ve transacted close to about $114 million in volume on our platform. We have between 380,000 to 400,000 customers and beneficiaries now,” he reveals, noting that the company works with about 20 partner companies. “We also have about 10,000 developers on our platform, who actively develop using Mazzuma API’s. We are seeking to enhance those figures by introducing some more new products.”

Mazzuma, Genfi says, works in partnerships and with developer groups, making it easy for the tech company to get its clientele.

For instance, one of Mazzuma’s partnerships is Coinbase. “What Coinbase does is to expose us to the developer community to use our tool to develop. That allows us to reach the most people with minimal resources used,” he informs NODO News. “Working closely with dev groups, and also dev congresses helps us reach many people with our tool.”

Hackathons are also a mode through which the tech company gets its clientele. Through them, Genfi and his team meet and attract new people who are also looking to start learning to build and partner with them.

Wider Partnerships to Grow Business

Partnering with educational institutions that focus on tech is likewise another way that Mazzuma gets its prospective users. Such institutions ultimately use Mazzuma’s tool to teach coding to their students.

To generate code in the platform, Genfi says the tech company charges $2 per prompt, making it an affordable and at same time high quality code generator.

“This allows a developer in, say, Morocco to build an entire Web3 application with just roughly $10. We want to democratize the Web3 space. One of our services portfolio companies plans to train a million developers across the continent. A tool like this will enable those developers to easily achieve the goal,” he tells NODO News.

He notes that for blockchain startups, regulation is an important issue that has to be put in mind whenever a tech founder is starting out. He reveals that the regulation process for Mazzuma was quite a challenge. It took him and his partner two years to finally get the certification to work; acquiring it in 2020 despite launching the tech company in 2018.

This is quite unlike in the present day where a tech company does its activities in a sandbox as it works on attaining the regulations, before it achieves the requirements to be allowed to work outside of it.

Clear Crypto Regulations

“Nonetheless the regulations have gotten better these days. Even the talent has gotten better because people now have better tools and a lot more information,” he acknowledges. “Technology adoption has similarly gotten better today than it was when we were starting out.”

The tech company, he says, mainly uses blockchain in its corporate side of transactions, where it transacts in Tether (USDT), USD Coins (USDC). These allow it to settle the transactions much quicker and more easily. Blockchain, he says, essentially allows these transactions to work better, faster and easier.

In 2021, Mazzuma sought to team up with CV VC and Binance to drive the adoption of blockchain in Africa. Though the idea wasn’t wholly actualized, the partnership managed to accomplish a series of educational activities for Africans.

This year, Mazzuma plans to enhance its Web3 offerings and creating more Web3 business lines. It also intends to get at least 100,000 developers using its AI-driven platform to develop their Web3 applications. The tech firm also seeks to have more partners onboard in its remittance services.

Transitioning from Web2 to Web3, startups, Genfi says, face numerous challenges but the most key is that of talent gap.

Africa, he believes, doesn’t have complicated problems. But the difficulties lie in finding a simple enough solution for the simple problem. “We realize that the solution suggested for the simple problem is sometimes even more complex than the problem itself. That’s what we’re trying to address.”

-Edited by Shigeru Sato