Cellulant (Tingg)
Cellulant is a Kenya-headquartered payment aggregator operating across Africa. Their product, Tingg, provides a unified API for collecting payments via mobile money and cards in Zambia and other markets.
At a glance
| Product | Tingg (by Cellulant) |
| Supports | MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, Zamtel Kwacha, cards |
| API style | REST — Tingg Global API (BEEP.postPayment) |
| Integration flows | Express (hosted checkout) and Custom API |
| Transaction fee | Not publicly listed. Negotiated per merchant. |
| HQ | Nairobi, Kenya |
| Support | onboarding-tech-support@cellulant.io |
Integration flows
Cellulant offers two paths:
Express checkout. Cellulant hosts the payment page. Your application redirects the customer to Tingg, where they choose a payment method (MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, Zamtel Kwacha, or card) and complete the transaction. This is the faster path to go live.
Custom API. You build the payment UI yourself and call the Tingg Global API directly. The
underlying method for both flows is BEEP.postPayment.
Note that IP whitelisting is required to view transactions on Cellulant’s merchant dashboard.
Sandbox reliability
The sandbox is the primary friction point during integration.
- The sandbox is shared between Express and Custom API flows. When it goes down, there is no alternative testing path.
- Sandbox simulations have been intermittently broken for specific payment methods. MTN and Zamtel simulations tend to recover first, while Airtel and card simulations may remain broken longer.
- Outages can last weeks and may require multiple follow-ups with support to resolve.
- When a simulation is broken, Cellulant reviews internally — there is no self-service fix or workaround available to merchants.
Integration timelines should account for potential sandbox downtime.
Onboarding timeline
Onboarding typically takes 1+ months from first contact to production readiness.
Long onboarding is common among African payment aggregators. Projects with fixed launch dates should begin the Cellulant integration early.
Support
Support is handled via onboarding-tech-support@cellulant.io.
The support team operates on East Africa Time (EAT, UTC+3), which is one hour ahead of Zambia’s Central Africa Time (CAT, UTC+2).
Production reliability
The Tingg Global API (BEEP.postPayment) has returned HTTP 503 errors in production, affecting
real-time payment processing. Because the API is shared infrastructure, outages affect all merchants
using the same endpoint.
For time-sensitive transactions (e.g. electricity token purchases), implement retry logic and handle upstream API unavailability gracefully.
Fees
Not publicly listed. Pricing is negotiated per merchant. No public rate card is available.
Open questions
- What are the actual transaction fees for Zambian mobile money and card payments?
- What is Cellulant’s uptime SLA, if any?
- Are there documented webhook/callback reliability issues similar to those reported with other aggregators?
Contributions welcome — open a PR.