Expensya Visionaries Launch Thunder Code as Kenya Deepens Digital Finance with KEPSS Reform

Today’s business headlines are buzzing with two distinct yet equally significant developments signaling a profound shift in the global digital landscape. From the launch of a new AI-powered software testing venture by the seasoned founders of Expensya to Kenya’s strategic extension of its national real-time payment system’s operating hours, these moves underscore a relentless drive towards efficiency, innovation, and digital inclusivity. These narratives, though geographically distant, converge on a common theme: the accelerating pace of digital transformation and the pivotal role of technology in reshaping industries and economies worldwide.

Expensya Founders Pivot to AI: Thunder Code Raises $9M Seed to Revolutionize Software Testing

The Return of Visionaries: From Expense Management to AI-Driven QA

In a compelling comeback that has captured the attention of the tech world, Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani, the entrepreneurial duo behind the highly successful fintech startup Expensya, have unveiled their latest venture: Thunder Code. The France- and Tunisia-based startup has secured an impressive $9 million in seed funding, signaling strong investor confidence in their ambitious goal to disrupt the software testing industry using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Jouini and Othmani’s return to the startup arena comes nearly two years after the sale of Expensya to Swedish software company Medius in 2023. While the exact terms of the acquisition were not publicly disclosed, reports indicate the deal’s value exceeded $120 million, marking one of Africa’s most significant tech exits to date. Post-acquisition, Jouini briefly served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Medius, but the allure of groundbreaking AI innovation proved too strong to resist. This entrepreneurial re-engagement, particularly into the rapidly evolving AI space, highlights the immense potential and draw of this transformative technology for seasoned founders.

The Pain Points of Traditional Software Testing

For decades, software testing has been an indispensable, yet often cumbersome, phase in the software development lifecycle. Traditional methods, whether manual or automated, grapple with a multitude of challenges that impede efficiency, inflate costs, and can introduce delays:

• Time-Consuming and Resource-Intensive: Manual testing, while crucial for user experience validation, is inherently slow and demands significant human effort. Even automated testing requires considerable time for script creation, maintenance, and execution, especially for large and complex applications.
• Limited Test Coverage: Ensuring comprehensive test coverage across all possible scenarios, permutations, and user interactions is a perpetual struggle. Inadequate test coverage can lead to critical bugs slipping through, resulting in costly post-release fixes and reputational damage.
• Test Data Management: Creating, managing, and maintaining realistic and diverse test data for various testing scenarios (e.g., performance, security, functional) is a complex and often inefficient process.
• Brittleness of Automated Tests: Traditional automation scripts can be fragile, breaking with minor UI changes or application updates, leading to frequent maintenance overhead and false positives/negatives.
• Communication Gaps: In distributed teams, miscommunication between developers, testers, and product managers can lead to misunderstandings in requirements, impacting the effectiveness of testing.
• Evolving Requirements: In agile development environments, frequently changing requirements can make it difficult for testing teams to keep pace, often leading to reworks and delayed releases.
• Lack of Skilled Testers: The demand for highly skilled QA engineers, particularly those proficient in automation and specialized testing (e.g., performance, security), often outstrips supply, leading to talent gaps.

These challenges contribute to inefficient development cycles, increased time-to-market, and compromised software quality, making the software testing market ripe for disruption.

Generative AI: The New Frontier in Quality Assurance

Thunder Code aims to tackle these entrenched problems head-on by leveraging the power of generative AI. Generative AI, known for its ability to create new content (text, images, code, data), is poised to revolutionize software testing in several key ways:

• Automated Test Case Generation: Instead of manual script writing, generative AI can analyze design specifications, user stories, and existing codebases to autonomously generate comprehensive test cases. This includes functional, integration, and even performance test scenarios, significantly accelerating the test design phase.
• Smart Test Data Creation: AI can create realistic, diverse, and relevant test data on demand, addressing the challenges of data privacy (by generating synthetic data) and ensuring adequate test coverage for various edge cases.
• Bug Prediction and Identification: By analyzing code changes, historical defect data, and execution logs, generative AI can predict potential areas of failure or identify subtle bugs that human testers might miss. AI-powered “agents” can simulate human interactions, detecting UI/UX issues and anomalous behavior.
• Self-Healing Tests: One of the most significant advancements is the concept of “self-healing” tests. When minor UI changes occur, AI can intelligently adapt existing test scripts to accommodate these changes, reducing maintenance overhead and ensuring test suite stability.
• Faster Feedback Loops: With AI automating much of the repetitive testing, developers receive quicker feedback on their code changes, enabling them to identify and fix defects earlier in the development cycle, a cornerstone of efficient DevOps practices.
• Reduction in Manual Effort and Costs: Automating routine and complex testing tasks frees up human QA engineers to focus on more strategic, exploratory testing, and complex problem-solving, leading to substantial cost savings and improved resource allocation.

Thunder Code’s approach involves “AI agents” that can simulate the tasks of human quality assurance testers. These agents are designed to identify interface issues, learn from user input, and accelerate development workflows. The company achieved a minimum viable product (MVP) within a remarkable six weeks, demonstrating a rapid execution philosophy, a lesson learned from Jouini’s prior experience with Expensya. This agile development, combined with a focus on core features and attracting top talent, underpins their strategy in a competitive market projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027.

Market Opportunity and Future Outlook

The software testing market is indeed vast and continually expanding as software becomes more complex and integral to every industry. While established players like Tricentis and BrowserStack dominate, Thunder Code’s founders believe these incumbents have been slow to integrate cutting-edge AI. This presents a significant opportunity for a nimble, AI-native solution.

Thunder Code has already gained traction, securing paying customers and pilot programs across the U.S., Canada, France, and Tunisia. Initially focused on web application testing, the team has ambitious plans to expand into mobile, desktop, and API testing by the end of 2025. The $9 million seed round, led by investors like Silicon Badia, Janngo Capital, Titan Seed Fund, and strategic angels including Roxanne Varza (Director of Station F) and Karim Beguir (co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep), underscores the confidence in their vision and the founders’ proven track record. The participation of former and current Expensya employees, who benefited from the acquisition, further reinforces this vote of confidence.

The implications for the software industry are profound. Generative AI in testing promises not just faster release cycles but higher quality software, reduced technical debt, and a shift in the role of human testers towards more strategic, high-value activities. Thunder Code’s launch is a significant milestone in the ongoing AI revolution, signaling a future where software quality assurance is more intelligent, efficient, and deeply integrated into the development process.

Kenya’s Bold Move: KEPSS Extends Operating Hours, Paving the Way for a 24/7 Digital Economy and Enhanced Financial Inclusion

Modernizing Payments: A Leap Towards a Seamless Digital Future

Kenya has taken a momentous step towards modernizing its financial infrastructure with the strategic extension of the operating hours for its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the Kenya Electronic Payment and Settlement System (KEPSS). Effective July 1, 2025, KEPSS will operate from 7 AM to 7 PM on business days, a significant expansion from its previous schedule of 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. This move, announced by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), is poised to enhance the nation’s financial sector, making it more competitive, inclusive, and responsive to the demands of a rapidly evolving digital economy.

KEPSS serves as Kenya’s version of an RTGS system, which is a critical piece of central infrastructure utilized by central banks globally for securely processing large-value, time-sensitive payments between financial institutions. Unlike systems that batch payments for net settlement at the end of the day, RTGS systems ensure that transactions are cleared and settled individually and continuously in “real-time.” This continuous, gross settlement significantly reduces systemic risk, as each payment is final and irreversible once processed, providing immediate certainty of funds transfer. For commercial banks, it means their accounts at the Central Bank are debited and credited instantly, allowing for optimal liquidity management throughout the day.

The Significance of Extended Hours: Fueling Economic Activity

The decision to extend KEPSS operating hours is a strategic enhancement aimed at improving the efficiency, accessibility, and resilience of Kenya’s payments ecosystem. Its benefits are far-reaching:

• Enhanced Convenience for Businesses and Government: Businesses, large corporations, and government institutions will gain greater flexibility to process high-value payments. This means faster settlement for critical transactions like supply chain payments, payroll disbursements, and tax remittances, leading to improved cash flow management and reduced end-of-day settlement risks. It enables earlier initiation and later completion of financial obligations, aligning with the extended operational hours of many modern businesses.
• Boosting International Trade: Longer operational hours facilitate seamless transactions across different time zones. Kenyan businesses engaged in international trade will find it easier to settle payments with partners in Europe, Asia, or America within their respective business hours, increasing Kenya’s competitiveness as a regional financial hub.
• Improved Liquidity Management for Banks: Commercial banks can manage their liquidity more effectively with a wider window for interbank transfers. This optimizes the use of their reserves held at the CBK, potentially reducing the need for costly overnight borrowing.
• Supporting a 24/7 Digital Economy Vision: This extension is a crucial step towards President William Ruto’s broader vision for a truly 24/7 digital economy in Kenya. The Central Bank of Kenya’s National Payments Strategy 2022–2025 explicitly outlines the goal of more efficient, cost-effective, and faster 24/7/365 payments. By expanding the time window for settlements, the CBK is laying foundational infrastructure that supports continuous digital transactions, a hallmark of advanced digital economies.
• Greater Financial Inclusion: While KEPSS primarily handles large-value transactions, extending its hours reinforces the CBK’s commitment to greater financial inclusion. By strengthening the overall formal financial system, it allows more individuals and entities to engage with formal banking channels with ease, even if indirectly through their banks.

The Fintech Frontier: A Call for Direct Access

This development is particularly significant in the ongoing debate surrounding fintech companies’ and telecommunications providers’ access to core payment infrastructure. Currently, direct access to KEPSS is largely restricted to banks and a select few highly regulated institutions. This exclusivity has long been a point of contention for many fintech founders and users.

The core argument from the fintech sector revolves around affordability and competition. Many view the absence of public infrastructure for direct customer-to-business (C2B) payments as a major obstacle. In Kenya, mobile money platforms, largely operated by telecommunication companies, have dominated the C2B payment landscape. While incredibly successful in driving financial inclusion, these platforms often operate with their own fee structures, which some argue can be costly, especially for small businesses and frequent transactions.

Fintechs argue that direct or more streamlined access to an RTGS layer like KEPSS would:

• Lower Entry Barriers: Reduce the need for costly third-party integrations and reliance on existing banking partners, enabling smaller fintechs to develop and scale innovative alternative offerings more easily.
• Foster Competition: Introduce more players into the payment processing space, potentially driving down transaction fees and encouraging a wider array of innovative financial products and services.
• Enhance Interoperability: Promote seamless interaction between various payment service providers, leading to a more unified and efficient payments ecosystem.

The CBK has, in its National Payments System Vision and Strategy, expressed a commitment to establishing a regulatory landscape conducive to innovation and embracing open banking. However, it also emphasizes balancing innovation with minimizing risks related to cybersecurity, data privacy, and financial stability. The current expansion of KEPSS hours, while not directly granting non-bank access, suggests a gradualist approach by the regulator, preparing the system for broader reforms.

Global Parallels and Kenya’s Path Forward

Kenya’s move aligns with a global trend of central banks modernizing their payment systems to support digital economies. Many countries have already adopted or are in the process of implementing 24/7 real-time payment systems, often with varying degrees of non-bank participation:

• India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI): Launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI is a prime example of a wildly successful real-time payment system that facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions 24/7. It allows users to link multiple bank accounts to a single mobile app and transact using a unique UPI ID. Importantly, UPI has seen rapid adoption due to its low-to-no transaction fees for most consumer transactions, making it a highly affordable and competitive option. India now accounts for nearly half of all global digital payments, with UPI driving 83% of all digital transactions in the country. This system demonstrates that a public infrastructure can indeed drive massive scale and financial inclusion, even with non-bank participation through third-party apps like Google Pay and Paytm.
• Singapore’s PayNow: Launched in 2017, PayNow enables retail customers of participating banks and e-wallet providers to send and receive Singapore Dollar funds instantly using just their mobile number, NRIC/FIN, or Virtual Payment Address (VPA). It operates on Singapore’s existing Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) rail, providing an enhanced, convenient, and real-time funds transfer experience. PayNow emphasizes user-friendly identifiers rather than complex account numbers, simplifying digital payments.
• Europe’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst): The European Union has also made significant strides with its Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), requiring banks and payment companies in the eurozone to comply with the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme by January 2025. This mandates euro-denominated instant payments to be settled within 10 seconds, 24/7. While primarily focused on interbank transfers initially, the goal is to enhance competition and support financial inclusion by making instant payments accessible under the same conditions as traditional credit transfers.

Kenya’s decision to extend KEPSS hours could be the first of several steps in this direction. While the CBK has not yet announced explicit plans to allow licensed non-bank entities direct access, this move creates the operational readiness for such a shift. Future reforms could include the development of a tiered access model, allowing fintechs indirect participation, or even the creation of a separate, but interoperable, real-time layer specifically for retail or C2B payments, much like India’s UPI sits atop its RTGS equivalent (IMPS). Such a move would significantly lower entry barriers for innovators, reduce dependence on costly third-party integrations, and enable fintechs to scale alternative offerings that truly cater to the needs of the diverse Kenyan market.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

While the expansion of KEPSS hours is overwhelmingly positive, the path to a fully operational 24/7 digital economy and broader financial inclusion is not without its challenges. These include:

• Cybersecurity and System Stability: Operating a high-value payment system for extended hours increases its exposure to cyber threats. Robust security protocols and continuous monitoring will be paramount.
• Infrastructure Investment: Banks and other financial institutions will need to ensure their internal systems and processes are equipped to handle the extended operating window, potentially requiring further IT investments.
• Regulatory Framework Evolution: The CBK will need to continuously adapt its regulatory framework to keep pace with technological advancements and new business models, especially if non-bank entities are eventually granted greater access.
• Ensuring Equitable Access: While mobile money has driven inclusion, ensuring that marginalized populations in remote areas also benefit from these advancements will require continued efforts in digital literacy and infrastructure expansion.

Kenya’s strategic decision to extend KEPSS operating hours is a testament to its commitment to building a resilient, efficient, and inclusive financial system. By aligning with global best practices and preparing the groundwork for future reforms, Kenya is solidifying its position as a digital leader on the African continent, ready to unlock the full potential of its rapidly growing digital economy.

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Photo source: Google

By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

19th June, 202