The senior pastor at The Purpose Center Church in Nairobi Julian Kyula is the creator of Mobile Decisioning Company (MoDe), a fintech company that is spread across over 26 countries, 14 African nations and several Middle Eastern states.
The company was created in 2010 to make a niche for themselves in the airtime industry, and 8 years later it is reported to be one of the largest airtime companies in the world.
The CEO Kyula was interviewed by Forbes magazine in 2013, he described MoDe as a Nano-finance company that lends credit worldwide, for as low as $0.5 (Ksh50), through mobile phones.
“When you need cash at 3 a.m and you can’t access the ATM, or you run out of internet bundles somewhere in Africa, or want a bus coupon or need to buy a day’s worth of electricity in a prepai9d facility, that is when MoDe steps in,” he explained.
In another of his interviews in how we made it in Africa in 2015, he explained that his journey into entrepreneurship began when he worked with a real estate agent from the UK where he helped in evaluating assets.
Like every other success story, he did not just start from there, he worked as a waiter and driver and was even rejected when he applied as a security guard at an establishment.
By 2018, MoDe was reported to be giving more than 6 million loans per day and had lent an aggregate credit amount of over Ksh80 billion in 2017.
According to Kyula, his biggest motivator in the business and entrepreneurship world is Jesus, Bill Gates, Myles Munroe and the lessons he acquired while doing those jobs early on in his career.
He said and I quote:
“My biggest mentor in business is a man called Jesus. He worked himself out of a job and ceded control in three years. If you study Jesus as a leader, his articulate training of leaders and his decisions to go away so that his disciples could do what he taught them, is perhaps one of the biggest secrets of leadership that a lot of people have not been able to tap into”
Kyula also founded Beulah Holding which he is the chairman of, and they focus on housing projects across Kenya with a drive of providing affordable housing solutions for the lower and middle-income brackets.
He has recognitions under his belt, for example, CNBC East Africa Entrepreneur of the Year 2015, IBM Global Entrepreneur 2012 and has been a Top 40 under 40 entrepreneurs twice in Kenya.
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He has various features/interviews in global publications like Forbes Magazine, Bloomberg International, New York Times, and local publications too.
He has been opportune to speak at various platforms across the world like Oxford University, various events in Silicon Valley, SIBOS in Singapore and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi during the visit of former US President Barrack Obama among others. As of 2018, Kyula stepped down from being the CEO of MoDe and decided to play background roles in the company.
