Before Hubtel: 

A fast-growing food chain that needed a payment system as consistent as its branches 

Pizzaman Chickenman is one of Ghana’s most recognisable fast-food chains. With more than 90 branches spread across nearly every region in the country, it serves thousands of customers every day. The business has been growing steadily, opening new branches and expanding its reach. But as the branch network grew, the payment infrastructure holding it had to be improved to match up. 

Before Hubtel, the business collected payments through a USSD-based service, and bank POS machines. These two channels were supposed to cover every customer at every branch. However, neither was reliable enough. 

The USSD service experienced frequent downtime. When it went down, it went down across all branches at the same time. A customer paying at the counter would find the payment failing. The cashier had no alternative to offer beyond the bank POS, which was a separate device and a separate process. Queues built. Customers sometimes left frustrated. Sales were lost. 

The problem did not stop at the counter. It moved down the chain. Cashiers across 90 branches were left trying to manage payment failures in real time with no tool to fix them. The accounting team at the end of each day had to reconcile everything manually, matching what came in across multiple channels without a single system to pull it together. Settlement was slow, which meant the business could not move its money quickly after a day’s work. 

There was a third problem that sat away from the customer entirely. Managing petty cash across 90 branches was done by hand. If a branch needed funds for a supplier payment, a staff expense, or a day-to-day operational cost, funds had to be manually transferred to each branch individually. Across 90 locations, that added up to a significant administrative burden every week. 

Bringing Clarity 

One platform to collect, pay out, and manage money across every branch 

Pizzaman operates a customer ordering app called Chris B. The first step was integrating our online checkout API into that app so customers could pay for their orders from their phones. From that point, every order placed through Chris B had a reliable digital payment option behind it. 

From there, Hubtel’s USSD was introduced into the in-store payment flow, giving branch cashiers a faster and more reliable option for customers who preferred to pay by mobile money. The USSD process was shorter and simpler than what the previous provider had offered. 

The deeper change came when our Receive Money solution was integrated directly into Pizzaman’s POS system. This meant that when a customer placed an order, the cashier could push a payment prompt directly to the customer’s phone from the same POS screen they were already using to process the order. The customer did not need to dial a code. They received a prompt, approved it, and the transaction was done. For customers who could not complete the USSD flow, the push prompt gave cashiers an immediate alternative. 

Alongside the customer-facing payment tools, we also provided a merchant dashboard to manage all payments. Everything that had previously required a manual transfer can now be processed from one place.  

The Hubtel tools Pizzaman uses across its operation: 

Putting Management in Control: 

Visibility across 90 branches from a single dashboard 

Before Hubtel, the accounting team at Pizzaman had no single view of what had been collected across the branch network. Each branch ran through its own set of transactions and the process of pulling everything together was manual, time-consuming, and always a step behind. 

The Hubtel merchant dashboard changed that. Pizzaman’s management can now monitor transaction activity across all branches in real time. Payments coming in, the channel they came through, and the branch they came from are all visible from one place. There is no waiting for end-of-day reports from individual branches. 

Settlement runs on a one-hour cycle. When a branch closes at the end of its trading day, the funds collected through Hubtel arrive quickly. The accounting team can begin reconciliation the same evening rather than the next morning.  

The portal also simplified a part of the business that had been administrative. Paying suppliers, processing staff expenses, and transferring operational funds to branches now all happen from the same portal that handles payments. Having both inflows and outflows on the same platform means the full picture of daily cash movement is in one place. 

The before and after is clearest here: the business went from using multiple channels managed separately, each requiring its own process and its own reconciliation, to a single dashboard that handles payments and settles within an hour. 

Pursuing Growth: 

What happens when all 90 branches run on the same payment platform 

When Pizzaman joined Hubtel in late 2023, the amounts flowing through the platform were small. In the final three months of 2023, combined transaction value across both channels was GHS 905,260. That was the starting point. 

In 2024, as the platform was rolled out more broadly across the branch network, combined transaction value grew to GHS 14.22 million across 107,235 transactions.  

Figure 1: Annual transaction value, Receive Money and Send Money (GHS Millions) 

In 2025, Pizzaman processed GHS 107.24 million through Hubtel across 675,806 transactions. That is the highest year on record and represents a 654% increase on 2024. The business went from GHS 14 million to GHS 107 million in a single year. 

Figure 2: Monthly combined transaction value, October 2023 to May 2026 (GHS Millions) 

The jump in May 2025 lines up with when Hubtel’s payment system was fully connected to PizzaMan’s POS across all branches. Cashiers could now trigger a payment prompt from the same screen they used to take orders. Customers approved it on their phones and the sale was done. More customers began paying digitally, and the monthly volumes reflected that immediately. 

From that point, collections through the platform have stayed consistently above GHS 10 million every month. 

The year-by-year breakdown: 

The relationship between Pizzaman and Hubtel has grown in one consistent direction. Every branch that opens joins the platform on day one. Every new payment need the business has identified, from in-store checkouts to supplier payments to staff disbursements, has been solved within the same platform rather than by adding another provider. What started as an integration into one ordering app has become the payment infrastructure for an entire national food chain.