The AllenHark Group, a Kenyan finance and technology company, has signed a partnership deal with Mambu, a cloud banking system from Germany, which will see the Kenyan firm become the latter’s innovation & integration partner for East Africa.
AllenHark is a software development company that was founded in 2014 by Antony Gitonga and Kageni Wilson. They have worked with companies like Aitec Africa to build and maintain custom hybrid clouds and Evidence Action to build a highly customized GPS mapping solution.
The Mambu banking platform is used by over 100 financial organizations in over 50 countries Worldwide. Mambu’s cloud banking software will be integrated into a product called Allensuite. Allensuite will include a Core Banking System (Mambu), Mobile Money integration, SMS Banking, Automated Payments Disbursement and a GPS visualization engine for Data-driven customer acquisition.
The AllenHark-Mambu partnership will see the 2 companies jointly bringing the new Allensuite banking platform to market as a unit. Mambu will get revenues paid for its Core Banking Platform while AllenHark will get its revenues paid for add ons to the banking platform (Mobile Money, SMS Banking, Payments disbursement, GPS client mapping etc.). AllenHark stands to make an estimated $33 Million (Ksh. 2.3Bn) from both subscription and transaction fees in the revenue split deal with Mambu over the next 5 years. The revenues will range from $2M (Ksh. 194M) in year 1 to over $12M (Ksh. 1.16Bn) in year 5 depending on customer growth.
Kageni Wilson, the founding partner of AllenHark Group had this to say about Allensuite “All this functionality will be available on day 1. No more long integration processes that take months. Everything works seamlessly right out of the box. The best part however is the affordable cost. Unlike other Core Banking and MIS systems which cost anywhere from 50 million to 500 million shillings to acquire, Allensuite has no upfront cost. You pay as you go and depending on the size of your organization. This makes it incredibly affordable to every size of financial institution ranging from banks to MFIs and even SACCOs.â€
“You don’t need to buy servers and go to the hassle of maintaining them yourself. We store your data in redundant data centers which means there is no risk of losing access to it and comply with the highest standards of security as our system is ISO certified and independently audited by both Ernst & Young and KPMG to ensure it is secure.†Says Mambu’s Chief Operating Officer Mr. Frederik Pfisterer. “This solution was built with Africa in mind and for areas where connectivity problems exist, the system has an offline mode for devices through which agents on the ground can conduct business and automatically sync with the rest of the system whenever connectivity returns.â€
One of the institutions already using the platform is Premier Credit which serves over 11,000 customers in Kenya and in 5,000 customers in Uganda.