In October 2021, I was asked by Mario Gabriele, founder of online publication The Generalist, to write about a startup in Africa that I thought more Americans and Europeans should know about.
I chose Moniepoint, the Nigerian business and personal banking platform then known as TeamApt, and identified it as one of the continent’s most promising companies, noting it “could, in short order, join Africa’s list of unicorns.”
Ten months later, I had a fascinating conversation with CEO Tosin Eniolorunda.
In August 2022, when most African fintechs were battling a funding winter and market volatility, Tosin Eniolorunda sat down for an interview that now reads like a playbook for building a billion-dollar company.
Speaking just days after his company announced a ~$50 million funding round, the soft-spoken founder laid out a vision that seemed almost impossibly ambitious. He planned to transform the Nigerian payments company into a global financial services platform processing hundreds of billions in transactions.
Two years later, that vision became a reality. In October 2024, Moniepoint became Nigeria’s newest unicorn with a $110 million Series C round.
Today, the company processes over 1 billion transactions worth $22 billion every month for ten million businesses and individuals. But perhaps most remarkably, almost everything Eniolorunda predicted in that 2022 conversation has come to pass.
The customer obsession formula
During the 2022 interview, Eniolorunda emphasized what he called the cornerstone of Moniepoint’s success: “Customer obsession is extremely key. The boss of all of us, the chairman of all of us are the customers.”
This wasn’t typical startup rhetoric. Eniolorunda backed it up with specifics that would prove prophetic. He described how the company had “pioneered a method of dispute resolution that allowed us to be able to refund customers of failed transactions proactively” in under 24-48 hours, compared to the industry standard of 5-10 working days.
“We’re literally obsessed about ensuring that our platforms are reliable,” he said. “We have this huge sense of guilt, huge sense of remorse when things inevitably go wrong sometimes.”
That obsession with reliability would become crucial during Nigeria’s cash crisis in early 2023, when the Central Bank’s currency redesign left traditional banks overwhelmed. While established banks struggled with system failures, Moniepoint’s infrastructure held firm, processing millions of transactions and cementing its reputation as the “gold standard of reliability” in Nigerian fintech.
The period proved to be a turning point, “solidifying [the company’s] user base and proving its indispensability in the financial landscape,” as one industry analysis observed.
From agents to everything
In 2022, Eniolorunda was already signaling that Moniepoint wouldn’t remain just an “agent banking” company. “We’ve gone beyond agent banking now,” he emphasized, “so we generally use the description ‘business banking platform’.”
“We service all kinds of businesses — from agents to merchants… grocery stores, filling stations, schools, bureau de change, car washes, restaurants, eateries.”
This expansion strategy wasn’t random. Eniolorunda explained how customer feedback drove product development: “Our customers began to demand for certain things… If you listen closely to them, they’ll tell you what it is.”
The approach has paid off. Moniepoint experienced 2,000% growth in customers of its new personal finance business line in the year before its Series C round while growing revenue at “over 150% CAGR in recent years.”
By 2024, Moniepoint had evolved into exactly what Eniolorunda envisioned: a comprehensive business and personal banking platform offering “payment acceptance, offline and online…, credit…, business operations tools like expense cards, accounting, and bookkeeping.”
The global vision
Perhaps most striking was Eniolorunda’s global ambition. In 2022, when many startups across Africa were focused on trying to master their home markets, he was already thinking worldwide.
“Nigeria is our starting market and we’re currently doing deals outside Nigeria — hopefully, they’ll be announced soon. But we’re more or less focused on a world TAM,” he said. “Even in important economies as big as the UK, you don’t have platforms that put all those needs in a cohesive, simple-to-use interface for small businesses.”
He positioned his company’s mission in global terms: “Being able to replicate this even in the most advanced countries in Europe and outside of Africa — LATAM for example — is a huge opportunity.”
Today, it’s clear that this wasn’t just talk.
One of @Moniepoint's East African M&A targets is now public@CAK_Kenya just approved the 100% acquisition of @KopoKopoInc, a Kenyan SME-focused payments & digital financial services provider, by the Nigerian business banking platform https://t.co/CC1zSZx31t pic.twitter.com/kcW26Wj4yM
— Emeka Ajene ✍🏽 (@eajene) August 22, 2023
The company attempted and received regulatory approval to acquire Kenyan merchant services platform Kopo Kopo, but the deal collapsed. Undeterred, the company continued with its ‘Nigeria then the world’ strategy.
In April 2025, the company launched MonieWorld, a remittance product targeting Nigerians living in the UK. “Our goal is not just remittances but a full-fledged financial services platform to serve the African diaspora,” Eniolorunda remarked.
And just like remittances are an initial product wedge, the UK is an initial beachhead territory. “We also have a dedicated team exploring new markets… That’s why we set up Moniepoint GB as a separate entity — so we could scale responsibly and compliantly from day one.”
Two months later, in June 2025, Moniepoint received approval to acquire a 78% stake in Nairobi-based Sumac, a deposit-taking microfinance bank with a 4% market share, marking its official entry into Kenya.
Today, Moniepoint is no longer just a Nigerian giant. While Africa’s most populous country remains its stronghold, it has credible footholds in East Africa and the United Kingdom, and has assembled a robust corporate development team to make the vision of a world TAM a reality.
The talent strategy
Eniolorunda’s 2022 comments about talent acquisition now seem strikingly forward-thinking. “We are increasingly needing to and hiring globally now,” he said. “A very, very large portion of our management team… are all living and working outside Nigeria, our home country.”
This global talent strategy, unusual for African startups at the time, reflected Eniolorunda’s understanding of what it would take to build a company that could successfully compete anywhere in the world. “We’re embracing the fact that there’s global talent mobility and people can live and work from anywhere and we’re actually competing for talent in the global market,” he explained.
The approach required significant investment in employee packages: “What this implies are things like compensation and benefits internally need to be matched with global scales and global skills.”
And it also required expertise in what Eniolorunda calls the “four M’s” of building high-performing teams: Meaning, Mastery, Membership, and Money.
“Make sure the things that you’re working on have meaning. People can see why they are doing it and they can see it has a global, social impact,” he explained.
“The last M is money. Make sure that people are compensated well enough.”
This framework appears to have offered a solid foundation, with Moniepoint not only attracting top-tier global talent but top-tier global investors who value the company’s approach and describe it as having “an excellent leadership team with clear strategic vision.”
Vision + strategic execution
Eniolorunda’s 2022 analysis of the fintech opportunity across Africa proved prescient. He identified the key drivers: “There’s a strong tailwind of digitization that’s going on everywhere in the world. Inevitably cash will be replaced by digital payments.”
But he also understood the execution challenges. “There are tons of challenges to be solved… regulatory challenges of ensuring that you build an innovative yet compliant solution… macro challenges… talent challenges.”
His approach to these challenges was methodical. Rather than trying to solve everything at once, Moniepoint focused on building the most reliable infrastructure first, then layering on additional services as customer demand emerged.
The strategy worked. And it goes a long way towards explaining why not only is the company among the fastest-growing fintechs on the continent, it’s also operating profitably with “industry leading gross profit and EBITDA margins.”
The credit opportunity
In 2022, Eniolorunda was already excited about credit as the next major growth driver for the business.
“Credit for us is an important next major thing… [for] a large, large population. Businesses are still excluded from credit because banks don’t have the means to underwrite their credit requirements at scale.”
He saw Moniepoint’s advantage clearly: “With the strength of our distribution network and the fact that we have a business predicated on the true business turnover on payments, this gives us extra advantages in being able to reach and underwrite credit.”
So having the support of QED, the lead investor in the $50M round, made particular sense in this context. “QED is a known, respected investor in credit businesses… having been founded by some of the founders of Capital One… Having backed Klarna also for a while, Credit Karma, Wagestream, Nubank.”
Today, credit has indeed become a major focus, with Moniepoint using transaction data to underwrite loans for small businesses, enabling many to borrow for the first time after being excluded from formal credit markets.
Lessons in founder psychology
Beyond strategy and tactics, the 2022 interview revealed important insights about Eniolorunda’s mindset as a founder.
When asked about his motivation, he was characteristically thoughtful: “I think I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I have always wanted to create a world-class company.”
He emphasized the importance of genuine passion: “You must first of all be sure that this is what you want to do and you actually enjoy it — it’s not because you want it for the fame or necessarily for the money.”
This authentic motivation appears to have sustained him through the challenges of building a unicorn in rough terrain. His advice to other founders reflects hard-won wisdom: “Choose your markets wisely… make sure that you actually know your business… create an environment that people enjoy working in.”
The prediction realized
Perhaps the most striking aspect of reviewing Eniolorunda’s 2022 interview is how accurately it predicted Moniepoint’s trajectory.
When asked about reaching a billion-dollar valuation, he was diplomatic but confident: “I am looking forward to us making a proper announcement hopefully soon.”
He understood the market dynamics: “The market is down. People’s valuations are now worth between 20 to 40 percent of what they used to be worth before.” But he also recognized quality: “Even in such a bear market, we still find investors interested in us to that scale and that magnitude which is an indication of the quality of the business that we are building.”
Two years later, that quality was validated with unicorn status and backing from some of the world’s most sophisticated investors.
The blueprint for African markets
Moniepoint’s journey from regional payments processor to billion-dollar unicorn offers a blueprint for success in African markets that’s applicable beyond the fintech sector. The key elements, all outlined in Eniolorunda’s 2022 interview, include:
- Relentless customer focus: Building products that solve real problems, with obsessive attention to reliability and user experience.
- Strategic diversification: Expanding services based on genuine customer demand rather than theoretical market opportunities.
- Global talent and perspective: Thinking beyond local markets from day one and building teams capable of global competition.
- Infrastructure-first approach: Prioritizing reliable, scalable technology foundation before adding bells and whistles.
- Patient capital strategy: Working with investors who understand African markets and long-term value creation.
Looking Forward
In his 2022 interview, Eniolorunda positioned Moniepoint as “the Square of Africa and beyond.”
Today, with unicorn status achieved, expansion underway, and over $20B in monthly TPV, that comparison no longer seems overly ambitious — it seems within reach.
As the company eyes further growth across the world and Africa in particular, Moniepoint’s success “shows we are in a moment of great opportunity” for the continent’s fintech space.
For entrepreneurs across Africa, the blueprint Eniolorunda laid out in 2022 offers a solid roadmap: focus obsessively on customers, build top-notch teams, think globally from day one, and execute with patience and precision. Most importantly, as he emphasized then and has proven since: “Make sure you have fun doing it.”
The interview that perhaps seemed wildly optimistic in 2022 now reads as somewhat understated. For Moniepoint, joining the short list of billion-dollar unicorns in Africa isn’t the end goal — it’s simply validation of a strategy that was years in the making and proof that African startups can compete on the global stage.
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