With over 3 million monthly transactions; see how these Ugandan techpreneurs are building Service Cops into Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading Fintech

David Mushabe, Joseph Ndiho Kiiza, Mathias Kamugasho and Arthur Rutaroh had always been friends for some time. In 2009, they decided that they needed to start a company and do some business together- to make some money and improve the state of service delivery in Uganda, but also give their friendship more purpose.

Given their backgrounds- David had a passion for technology, while Joseph and Mathias had a financial services background, having worked at Centenary Bank, dfcu Bank and Stanbic Bank, three of Uganda’s top banks; it was only natural that they looked towards a business that blended technology and financial services.

Although Arthur, neither had the technology nor financial services background- he was more into knowledge management and communications specialities- just what the business needed to make some necessary ‘noise’ in the marketplace. 

This is how Service Cops was born- in 2009, as a Business Process Outsourcing entity that mainly focused on improving customer service experience in the corporate private sector. 

Mathias the founding Managing Director, who still leads the business to date, says that having worked in the financial services industry for some time, they had identified an opportunity in creating third party customer service solutions to improve the state of service in the industry.  

“Given our expertise at the time, we were driven by the passion to leverage technology to create innovative solutions that allowed our customers to focus on their core business while letting us handle their customer service issues,” he explains.

In 2010 Service Cops, signed their first deal, to manage Stanbic Bank’s outbound telesales services to drive the growth of the bank’s card business and personal loans asset book. This would prove to be a breakthrough in many ways. Stanbic Bank, a market leader in customer numbers and branch footprint then gave them a dive-at-the-deep-end experience and blessing in disguise as well. While it stretched them to the core, it also sharpened them as well as earned them the necessary profile and confidence that they needed to approach other players in the market.

In 2012, they signed another major contract with Centenary Bank, this time to run a Digital marketing Campaign Platform for the bank’s consumer campaign- known as Beera Muloodi. At the time, Centenary Bank was the third-largest bank by footprint and customer numbers. Having successfully managed Beera Muloodi, Service Cops was awarded a Transactional Alerts deal by the bank. The deal involved building an enterprise transactional alerts management platform that enabled customers to be alerted via SMS and email every time they transacted on their accounts. This service was the first of its kind of this magnitude in Uganda and revoluti0nalised the way customers related with the Bank and it soon became a game-changer for all customers who used to trek to the Bank to check their balances and or confirm if salaries or certain payments had reached their accounts. The success at Centenary Bank opened doors to other Banks where to date this service is still being offered.

Again, following a job well done, in 2014, they were awarded another deal by the Bank, this time to run the Centenary Bank Contact Centre.  

“Our vision from the start had always been to build a leading Financial Technology and Business Processes Outsourcing business, which creates opportunities across the world,” explains Mathias, adding: “At the onset of the new millennium, most organisations and individuals were going global―acting locally but with a global mindset. As such customers’ expectations started rising exponentially because they wanted to benchmark against what was happening out there. As Service Cops, we saw an opportunity to create financial technology innovative solutions, within the financial services sector, not just in Uganda but across the region, where most Uganda travelled too often.”

This is how and why Service Cops opened its first unit out of Uganda- Service Cops Rwanda in 2012.

The Creation of SchoolPay- a robust Education Industry Value Chain platform

Back at home, Service Cops pursued opportunities for horizontal growth within the banking industry that they were already servicing and well versed with.

“As we worked with banks and other private sector players, our other product solutions kept evolving around the needs we identified following the concerns we picked. Hence, our product solutions largely are informed by the challenges our clients faced in dealing with their customers,” says Ndiho, who has since grown to become the company’s Board Chairman.

That is how SchoolPay, a new education industry value chain platform was born.

At its basic, SchoolPay is a simple, secure and convenient payments solution for all players in Uganda’s education ecosystem. It allows students/guardians to make school fees/tuition payments through banks and or mobile money. It also allows schools to monitor the payments in real-time and make reconciliations. It also allows guardians and parents, especially to monitor if the students have paid. This became key for parents as days of kids misappropriating fees were gone.

For schools, SchoolPay creates one central place to manage tuition fees, thus eliminating the need to maintain multiple school collection accounts with many payment providers. Schools no longer have to issue bank slips, thus making huge savings on stationery costs, while creating convenience for parents. For parents, guardians and students, the platform creates a unique students’ code that can flexibly be used across multiple channels- banks or mobile money. Parents, guardians and students can monitor outstanding fees and or payments history. It is that easy— no bank slips and or queues at the banks.

For banks and other payments solutions providers, it creates real-time reconciliation with the schools and has helped decongest the banking halls at the opening of the school terms. As such banks, are now able to accommodate and serve more clients, and of course, earn more revenues.

It is such benefits that have endeared SchoolPay to 13 banks in Uganda and the three leading telecoms i.e. MTN Uganda, Airtel Uganda and Uganda Telecom to date.

In its first year, SchoolPay was able to enrol 55,136 students, running some 28,670 transactions, worth over UGX11 billion. Once the benefits of SchoolPay became known to the players in the education ecosystem, its growth has been rapid like fire in the dry season. For example, the number of students registered on the system has since 2016 grown by an impressive Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 94%, notching 2,946,000 students by mid this year. Cumulatively SchoolPay has to date processed over 6.33 million school payments worth over UGX1.8 trillion!

The pandemic and the resulting inactivity of several education institutions has seen both the number of transactions and value transacted drop by at least 40-50% but this is expected to rebound once the Education industry fully opens up.

Such was the success of SchoolPay that it has attracted the attention of strategic partners, such as the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) which has funded the development of School Pay solution into a fully-fledged enterprise platform that now extends to education finance, education saving, education wallet and micro-insurance among other products.

In Zambia, where Service Cops Limited has been running a subsidiary for the last one and a half years, SchoolPay, together with MTN Zambia also attracted funding from the Financial Sector Deeping Zambia and the Government of Zambia to run a SchoolPay pilot in a number of government schools. Following the success of the pilot scheme, SchoolPay and is now being expanded to another 1,000 government schools and the program is expected to be grown further to cover over 4,000 government schools. 

The digitization of school fees payment in government schools is delivered on behalf of FSD Zambia together with the Ministry of General Education and is now operational at MTN, Airtel, ZAMTEL and partner Banks like ZANACO Bank, Atlas Mara with the expected addition of several Banks in the coming year.

“Service Cops Limited is eyeing becoming the leading provider of digital solutions in the education industry in Zambia,” Mathias says.

“In Rwanda, Service Cops fully launched SchoolPay with Coge Bank and MTN Rwanda as partners about two years ago. The project is currently undergoing review before we can commence again. Rwanda’s appetite for digital uptake is very high and Service Cops is looking to ride on this to develop and deliver market-relevant digital solutions especially in the education, payments and banking industry,” Mathias says.  

Joseph Kiiza Ndiho, the Board Chairman says Service Cops’ platforms and solutions are built on service-oriented architecture, created to solve everyday life-related challenges and add value to the marketplace.

“Our winning approach is the blue ocean strategy by creating unique solutions that solve everyday challenges which then translate into typical business,” he says.

Ndiho also notes that in pursuing excellence, Service Cops had developed, implemented and maintains systems and controls that meet international standards. For example, Service Cops Limited is an ISO9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:13 certified company for Quality and Information Security Management System (ISMS) respectively.

Serving up a digital payments storm across the Great Lakes Region

Today, over 10 years later the company has proven itself, earning the respect of and attracting strategic partnerships. Over and above Rwanda and Zambia, Service Cops has also spread its wings to Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia.

Across this footprint, the company has partnered with a total of 16 commercial banks, five mobile money operators and other payment aggregators in the region. 

“Service Cops solutions are utilized by over three million clients per month across our operations and this is projected to reach 10 million customers in the next three years,” Ndiho says.

The company is now a fully-fledged Financial Technology and Business Processes Outsourcing (BPO) business, serving telecoms, finance, and banking; insurance, education, microfinance & SACCOs; trade, commerce, and hospitality as well as the agricultural sectors. The Service Cops team has expanded to now over 100 permanent employees, the majority of who are below 35 years of age. The company is also a gender-sensitive workplace with female employees making 60% of the workforce.

“Service Cops has evolved into a strong and committed company, which is so good at what they do. Through cooperation, coordination and teamwork, all our key core business processes have been streamlined to ensure effective delivery of products, services and solutions while ensuring satisfaction for all our clients and partners,” says Mathias, adding: “We have built a very solid team with wide expertise in; financial technology platforms, complex integrations within telecoms and banking environments and bespoke ICT solutions.” 

Service Cops new Technology frontier

Service Cops as usual is leading the innovations space with the new technology paradigm of artificial intelligence, data science and big data. It is leading the messaging Artificial Intelligence and its integration to day to day operations.

For example, the Service Cops team has integrated its SchoolPay platform over WhatsApp messaging platform to afford its customers to be served at their convenience. A simple chat to the SchoolPay chatbot  0773676857 will return a menu for managing all services under the school pay proposition. Simplified as it may appear, the team has put together countless hours of engineering to make it as simple as possible. 

Another trailblazing product is a recent collaboration between NEON INC, an Insuretech firm contracted by the Insurance Regulatory Authority, to bring the Motor Third Party proposition to Whatsapp. The Motor Third Party platform where Service Cops is the primary technical partner is now available via a WhatsApp chatbot called Neo. A simple hi to the bot 0707900124 shall return all services available on the Motor Third-Party digital platform.

On the Bancassurance front, the company has delivered the first truly digitized Bancassurance platform for Centenary Bank where the entire insurance journey is fully digitized. With the use of this platform, the Bank can underwrite different Insurance products from the various branches for different partner Insurance companies in real-time. Premium payments are pushed directly to the partner insurance companies and policy documents are instant and delivered to the emails of clients. This has improved the typical insurance process at the Bank allowing for paperless and cashless processes, thereby reducing the time frame from more than 24 hours to under 20 minutes to deliver an insurance policy.

Service Cops has over the years has built a reputation for developing reputable enterprise platforms specifically on a service-oriented architecture with open API capabilities for the financial and general services industry delivered on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The company has now morphed beyond its flagship “Bill Pay” third parties aggregation platform used in several Banks in the region to the development of a fully-fledged Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform “Sunlyte” that is being implemented at Centenary Bank in Uganda.

“Such seamless collaborations between systems is only the beginning of our innovations to make our customer service experiences better,” reiterates a very buoyant and optimistic Mathias.