Driving real-time growth: Africa's mobile payments and scale- Part 1
From bustling city centres to remote regions where mobile wallets outpace bank branches, Africa’s gaming landscape thrives on instant, reliable payments. In this interview with SiGMA News, Tola Mobile’s Simon Pepper reveals how the company is powering that momentum: building stable rails, refining mobile-first journeys, and scaling real-time transactions across 23 Sub-Saharan markets to support the continent’s fast-evolving iGaming sector.
Expansion and coverage
As mentioned, Tola Mobile’s presence spans across many Sub-Saharan African regions, creating a complex operational landscape for payment support. Simon Pepper explains how expansion has shaped the company’s execution strategy, platform architecture, and commitment to delivering a predictable, unified experience for iGaming operators.
SiGMA: Tola recently expanded mobile money support to Botswana, covering 23 Sub-Saharan African regions. How has scaling to these diverse markets changed your strategy for supporting iGaming operators?
Simon: This has always been our strategy: to provide the widest and most reliable Mobile Money coverage across Sub-Saharan Africa. We started more than ten years ago with one of the earliest integrations to Safaricom’s M-Pesa, long before push-based payments existed. Since then, we’ve expanded steadily, learning market by market how to design for stability, integrity, performance, and true scale.
As we’ve grown into 23 regions, what has changed is not our core strategy, but the way we execute it. Supporting iGaming operators in this landscape requires much more than adding new integrations. We’ve had to evolve our platform into a consistent, unified orchestration layer that hides the complexity of each African market. Every country has its own behaviours, payment methods, and network nuances, so we’ve focused on delivering a single predictable payment experience for operators regardless of region.
The foundation remains the same, stability stays key, transaction integrity stays vital, and performance, resilience, and scalability demand years of design, building, testing, revising, refactoring, and improvement, strengthened by millions of transactions and billions in processed value. Scaling has pushed us to invest in smarter processing, monitoring, and a more sophisticated API layer. That consistency across very diverse markets is now the core of how we support iGaming operators as they expand.
Real-time deposit mechanism
Instant deposits are a defining requirement in high-velocity betting environments. Simon Pepper explains how Tola’s direct-settlement model eliminates delays, strengthens player confidence, and gives operators cleared funds the moment a transaction occurs.
SiGMA: You have mentioned that with Tola’s model, “when a player makes a deposit, the funds are instantly transferred to the operator.” Could you explain how this direct-settlement model works, and why it matters so much for betting platforms?
Simon: Yes, our Direct Settlement model enables real-time deposits for betting operators. When a player completes a mobile money payment, the funds do not pass through a third party or wait for batch settlement. They move instantly and directly into the operator’s merchant account.
Because the operator receives cleared funds at the exact moment the player makes the deposit, the player’s balance can be updated immediately, and they can stake in real time. This model removes the common issues we see with intermediated settlement models, such as two-to-three-day delays, reconciliation gaps, and disputes where a player believes they have paid, but the operator has not yet received the money.
For betting platforms, this certainty is essential. A deposit is not just a payment; it becomes a live stake. If a bet wins, the operator must pay out instantly, so they must have absolute clarity that the funds are already in their hands. Our model ensures that deposits are final, immediate, and fully reconciled, giving both the player and the operator complete confidence in the transaction.
Risk & fraud mitigation
With cybercrime increasing alongside Africa’s booming mobile payments market, Tola has had to fortify its infrastructure. Pepper outlines the layered security framework protecting operators and players, from encrypted connections to handset-level validation.
SiGMA: Given how Africa’s mobile payment boom is attracting cybercriminals, what security measures has Tola built into its payment orchestration to protect both players and iGaming operators?
Simon: At the platform level, all of our environments are access-controlled, monitored and hosted in secure data centres. Our 60-plus direct connections to mobile network operators and payment partners run over encrypted channels or dedicated VPNs, ensuring end-to-end protection between Tola and the payment source.
On the merchant side, every API request is authenticated and encrypted, so we always know precisely who is initiating a transaction, for which player, and for what amount. That traceability is essential for fraud prevention.
Crucially, every deposit or withdrawal is approved by the player themselves on their device. Whether through mobile money push, in-app approval, SMS OTP, or USSD, there is always a form of two-factor authentication that ties the payment to the player’s handset. That drastically reduces the risk of unauthorised transactions, account takeover, or scripted fraud.
Cybercriminals will always probe for weaknesses, but by combining hardened infrastructure, secure operator channels, strict API authentication, coupled with handset-level verification, we significantly reduce the attack surface for both operators and players.
KYC & compliance
Balancing speed with compliance is vital in mobile-driven gaming markets. In this segment, Simon explains how leveraging built-in KYC from mobile money ecosystems allows Tola to maintain regulatory rigour without slowing the player experience.
SiGMA: You’ve noted that Tola embeds KYC at both ends of the transaction to ensure compliance. How do you balance rigorous KYC with the need for fast, seamless payments in high-velocity gaming environments?
Simon: In Africa’s mobile money ecosystem, a great deal of KYC happens before the player even reaches us. Mobile network operators and e-wallet providers carry out strict KYC checks before issuing a mobile money wallet or account. They verify the individual’s identity, SIM registration, tax status, and compliance with local financial regulations. The same is true for merchants, who must pass their own due diligence processes before being issued a business wallet or merchant account.
Because the payment suppliers already enforce strong regulatory onboarding at both ends of the transaction, we can maintain a light operational footprint while remaining fully compliant. When an operator integrates with Tola, we also conduct our own due diligence on the entity, directors, ownership, etc.
The balance comes from not duplicating processes unnecessarily. We leverage the KYC and regulatory controls built into the mobile money ecosystem, while adding our own verification on the operator side. This balance allows us to keep the end-user experience fast and frictionless, which is critical for high-velocity gaming environments, without compromising on the compliance standards required in each market.
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