In just six years, his fintech startup has gone from three employees to close to a hundred. It also won several awards and recognitions.  

Idriss Marcial Monthe (photo) is a Cameroonian entrepreneur and co-founder of fintech startup CinetPay. The startup based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, allows companies and institutions operating in Francophone Africa to collect payments via mobile money, bank cards, and related financial solutions. 

According to Martial, CinetPay is a convenient solution to the challenges faced by digital entrepreneurs when it comes to collecting payments. As he explains, online bank payment solutions are the most popular means but, they are not suited to the African market. Meanwhile, it was hard to integrate mobile money, which is possibly the most used payment means on the continent.  

Currently, the platform plans to cover all of the 15 Francophone African countries by 2025. For that purpose, in December 2021, Martial announced a US$2.4 million seed funding secured from 4DX Ventures and Flutterwave. Gone are the days when the payment aggregator had to support its expansion plans with funds won during competitions and programs. According to the co-founder, in its onset, in 2016, CinetPay was supported by a US$5,000 grant from the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Program. In 2017, it also won US$2,000 during the Euromena Awards organized in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. 

Thanks to the funds raised in December 2021, the fintech startup will expand its presence and become the leading payment aggregator in Francophone Africa. Its growth is to some extent due to the decade of professional experience garnered by Marcial in the African tech industry. In 2005, the same year when he graduated from ENSIT Côte d’Ivoire with a computer science engineering degree, he joined the e-commerce startup Cimarket, which went bankrupt in 2007. In 2009, he co-founded the e-services platform Cinetcore. Between 2015 and 2020, he was the manager of IT solutions company SOCITECH’s Veritas and Oracle business unit.  Since September 2005, he is the manager of the Linux and freeware department of AI3L, an Ivorian non-profit association that trains young people in mobile technologies.  

Melchior Koba