Few technology companies born in Uganda have successfully broken beyond the country’s borders and built products that influence how institutions operate across Africa. Service Cops is becoming a notable exception. From an outsourcing start-up founded by a group of university friends, the company has evolved into a financial-technology, enterprise-software and business-process-outsourcing group connecting banks, telecom operators, schools, insurers, merchants and consumers across several African markets. At the centre of that journey is Managing Director Mathias Kamugasho—but the story is also one of co-founders, engineers, senior executives, employees and institutional partners building solutions around distinctly African problems.
In 2009, Mathias Kamugasho and a group of friends began chasing an idea that had followed them from university into their professional lives. They were young, employed and increasingly convinced that something was fundamentally wrong with the way customers were being served in Uganda. Their conversations, often held over coffee at what was then Café Javas on Bombo Road in Kampala, repeatedly returned to one question: could they build something of their own that would improve service delivery? “There has to be an issue with how service is given in Uganda,” Kamugasho recalled during a recent interview broadcast on the Service Cops YouTube channel. “Perhaps that’s the reason why our company is called Service Cops.” Kamugasho had already spent six or seven years in banking. He understood financial institutions from the inside: their processes, customers, controls and limitations. But the original plan was not to build a fintech company. It was more straightforward. “Let’s start an outsourcing company,” he remembered the group deciding. “Let’s go to the telecoms, go to the banks, go to the industries. Show them how it’s done. Let’s start a call centre, for example. Give people service.”
Seventeen years later, that service-delivery experiment has become one of Uganda’s more consequential technology stories. Service Cops now describes itself as a financial-technology, proprietary enterprise-platform and business-process-outsourcing company with operations extending beyond Uganda into markets including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia,African Startups Ethiopia, South Sudan, Mauritius, Mozambique, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. Its portfolio ranges from education payments and agency banking to enterprise middleware, digital lending, insurance platforms, remittances, customer-management systems and contact-centre operations. Its rise is noteworthy not simply because Service Cops has crossed borders. It is because comparatively few Ugandan-founded technology companies have managed to turn local problem-solving into a repeatable African business model.