Moniepoint, a Nigeria-based fintech offering an all-in-one banking, credit, and cross-border payment solution for African businesses and their customers, is on a mission to help businesses and individuals digitise their operations.
Named Africa’s fastest-growing fintech company by the Financial Times for two years running, Moniepoint has secured investment from major players including payment giant Visa and tech behemoth Google.
To find out more about Moniepoint’s rapid growth, mission and future plans, The Fintech Times spoke to Felix Ike, the company’s co-founder and CTO.
Tell us about Moniepoint’s story to date
Tosin Eniolorunda and I initially co-founded Moniepoint Inc. to provide infrastructure and payment solutions for banks and financial institutions. In 2019, we pivoted to focus on helping millions of businesses and individuals access seamless payments, banking, credit and business management tools, trusted by millions of businesses.
Today, we have built an all-in-one banking, credit, and cross-border payment solution for African businesses and their customers. We are Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, powering most of the country’s Point of Sale (POS) transactions.
As well as our business solutions, we now offer services to individual consumers. In August 2023, we launched our personal banking solution through Moniepoint’s subsidiary, Moniepoint Microfinance Bank, offering a reliable debit card which can be used at ATMs, POS terminals, and online; alongside a personal banking app where users can make transfers, pay bills and buy airtime. We saw 2000 per cent growth in personal finance customers across 2024 – emphasising the appeal of the personal banking solution to consumers.
Today, we process over one billion transactions monthly, with total payment volume exceeding $22billion; enabling businesses and individuals in Nigeria to digitise their operations and thrive in its rapidly evolving economy.
How is Moniepoint supporting the underbanked?
Financial inclusion and access to credit continue to be a hurdle for businesses – especially SMEs – and individuals in Nigeria. However, Africa’s large youthful, digitally savvy population and growing mobile usage provide the foundation for fintechs to help support the underbanked.
Fintechs can offer reduced transaction costs, as well as efficient payment tools, which widen accessibility and bring many previously unbanked merchants and underbanked consumers into the formal financial system.
Moniepoint’s success in broadening access to the financial system has resulted in millions of businesses accessing the system for the first time. This impact has been recognised by the Central Bank of Nigeria, which awarded the Company with the National Inclusive Payment Initiative Award in 2022 and Financially Inclusive Fintech of the Year in 2024.
How big an opportunity does the underbanked population represent in Africa?
Huge, for both businesses and individuals. The general consensus has been that cash is king due to its ease of use in low-trust environments. However, we are starting to see a shift and an increasing use of banking and payment solutions to help serve the underbanked population.
The ease of accessibility of Moniepoint’s products and services not only unlocks the spending power of consumers, revitalising the economy, but also helps to formalise the underbanked business landscape.
Currently, around 90 per cent of Nigerian businesses operate in the informal economy – facing barriers to growth, credit, and accessing customers. Access to banking services has been difficult for businesses in the informal economy, as they often did not meet the requirements demanded by traditional players when seeking financial services.
How is Moniepoint helping businesses overcome these barriers?
Moniepoint provides banking services for these businesses, in line with existing regulations, enabling many of them to transition to a more formalised system. Our simplified onboarding process and supportive distribution system, which relies on local presence and agency banking support to provide digital payment solutions, meets them where they are. As digital payments remain on the rise, these businesses are better positioned to thrive as they can keep up with evolving payment systems.
We have also simplified access to credit. In the informal economy, 30 per cent of businesses which receive working capital loans from Moniepoint say it is the first time they’ve ever been able to access credit. For the other 70 per cent of businesses, Moniepoint often provides them with two to three times the last loan they could obtain from typical financial institutions.
Opening access to credit and loans thereby enhances the credibility and growth of SMEs who were previously underbanked – supercharging entrepreneurism across Nigeria.
What challenges remain to achieving Moniepoint’s financial inclusion goals?
There are two challenges we see in Nigeria. As touched upon earlier, cash has been ‘king’, and while this is a trend we see shifting, ensuring businesses and individuals trust the solutions fintechs provide is key.
Solutions which are (i) easily accessible and (ii) reliable, are vital for ensuring businesses in the informal economy can reach their potential; driving economic growth and prosperity across the continent.
Additionally, the informal economy still accounts for 83 per cent of employment across Africa – representing a vast number of underserved and underbanked citizens who fundamentally need to be served better by financial institutions.
In Nigeria specifically, financial services have not historically been distributed at scale – with regions and communities underserved. Our business model enables us to onboard these underbanked businesses at a grassroots level, providing them – and their customers – with access to digital solutions and banking, further increasing financial inclusion.
Widening financial inclusion creates a snowball effect. Fuelling local economies and boosting national GDP has significant benefits for all. We are already witnessing the positive effects of this transformation, which will only become more pronounced as fintech continues to evolve.
How is Moniepoint making banking more accessible in rural areas?
Great question. It is important all stakeholders across the finance sector cooperate to make banking more accessible in rural areas.
With SMEs being the foundation of Nigeria’s economy; driving job creation; rural industrialization and innovation is important to all stakeholders. Many rural communities across Nigeria lack a local central bank branch. The rise of tech-driven solutions can, however, put banking straight into people’s hands whether via their smartphones, physical cards, or POS terminals – creating a tangible beneficial impact for underbanked populations.
Our system is built around scalable infrastructure which leverages low-latency internet access that helps us deliver efficient banking services to its customers without them encountering any lag when using our banking platform. Closely aligned with this is that we have automated transactional processes which would take up to eight hours into 10 minutes. This has translated into growing the volume of customers relying on Moniepoint, as more businesses become confident in our seamless and secure services.
How has investment from major players like Visa and Google supported your aims?
We are delighted to secure investment from world-leading investors, including Visa and Google. Their investments mark an important milestone in our aim of advancing financial inclusion and shaping the future of digital payments while fostering SME growth across Africa. Their support means we can accelerate our growth and power the dreams of millions of businesses and their customers across Africa and the diaspora.
As Africa’s fintech landscape continues to evolve rapidly driven by a dynamic ecosystem and a focus on bridging the financial inclusion gap, investment from large, global institutions can only support the growth of the African fintech landscape.
What kind of engineering and infrastructure does it take to support over a billion monthly transactions, especially in rural areas with unreliable internet and power?
Our guiding principle is woven around engineering financial happiness for everybody irrespective of their social class or standing. Even if you are underbanked and in a remote area, you should be getting access to the best financial products available.
Moniepoint runs a hybrid infrastructure with some services running on-premises for regulatory reasons, while analytics and high traffic transaction workloads run on Google Cloud. We needed a technology infrastructure that was reliable, mature, affordable, and most importantly easy to use and with the support we have built an infrastructure that grew with our business without straining our resources.
We also found that one of the biggest pain points for underbanked communities was reliability of service and we have been able to solve that challenge with the best technology layer we can provide.
What’s next for Moniepoint? Are there any new products or services in the pipeline?
Last year was hugely successful for Moniepoint, both from an operational and financial point of view, and we look forward to continuing this growth as we transform the fintech landscape.
This year, we will continue to widen financial inclusion and support Africa’s entrepreneurial potential. This has always been a consistent focus for the company; expanding access to formal financial systems for businesses operating in the informal economy.
Proceeds from our recent milestone Series C funding round will be used to accelerate Moniepoint’s growth across Africa – and into other markets – building an all-in-one, seamlessly integrated platform for African businesses of all sizes. This platform will include services such as digital payments, banking, foreign exchange (FX), credit, and business management tools, making it a one-stop shop for business solutions.
