On a busy afternoon in Lagos, payments move quietly but constantly. A shopkeeper taps a screen, a receipt prints, another customer steps forward. Somewhere behind that moment, Moniepoint records another transaction. And another. At its current pace, the Lagos-based fintech processes about 444 transactions every second, a figure that has become a useful shorthand for how deeply digital payments are now woven into Nigeria’s daily life.
Founded ten years ago by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike, Moniepoint started with a simple idea: that financial services should work for everyone. Over a decade, that belief has been tested, refined and scaled across markets, shops and small businesses. Today, the company says eight out of every 10 in-person payments in Nigeria pass through its systems, making it the country’s largest merchant acquirer and one of the clearest mirrors of how money moves across Africa’s most populous economy.
Moniepoint builds Nigeria’s commerce backbone
The numbers behind that mirror have grown quickly. In the two years since Moniepoint last publicly disclosed transaction volumes, activity across its subsidiaries has nearly tripled, rising from 5.2 billion transactions to more than 14 billion, according to an internal company presentation. In 2025 alone, Moniepoint averaged 1.67 billion transactions each month, up 169.44 percent from the 433 million recorded in 2023. The value of those payments reached more than N412 trillion, or $294.03 billion, almost double the roughly $150 billion processed two years earlier.
Those flows are not abstract. They come from provision stores, food sellers, supermarkets, fuel stations, building materials merchants and wholesalers—businesses that handle cash daily and form the backbone of local commerce. Through its platforms, Moniepoint Inc. now processes over $250 billion annually, even as it competes with well-funded rivals such as Opay, PalmPay and Kuda in a crowded fintech market.
Eniolorunda has often framed the company’s growth in personal terms. Reflecting on its progress, he wrote on LinkedIn that Moniepoint began with the belief that everyone deserves financial happiness, then came to see that small businesses needed systems that actually worked for them. “As we look back at 2025,” he said, “Moniepoint Group has evolved from just enabling transactions to steadily becoming a banking institution that powers Nigeria’s economic engine.”
That evolution traces back to 2015, when Eniolorunda and Felix Ike founded the company as TeamApt after spotting an opening while working at Interswitch. Early years were steady rather than spectacular, but momentum built in 2019 when the firm raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Quantum Capital Partners. Later that year, it secured a switching license from the Central Bank of Nigeria, a regulatory milestone that allowed it to deepen its role in payments infrastructure. A Series B round led by Novastar Ventures followed in 2021, alongside $50 million in pre-Series C funding from QED Investors.
From payments to lending at scale
Expansion continued in stages. In February 2022, Moniepoint received a microfinance banking licence, widening its scope beyond payments. By March 2023, it was writing checks itself, leading a $3 million seed round for Nigerian neobank Payday. Personal banking services followed in July 2023. In October 2024, the company crossed another threshold, becoming Africa’s eighth unicorn after announcing a $110 million Series C round led by Development Partners International’s ADP III fund and Google’s Africa Investment Fund.
Licensing and capital have translated into scale. Four years after securing its microfinance licence, Moniepoint says it now serves more than six million active businesses and 16 million banked customers. In 2025, its card user base grew by 200 percent, with cards used about 1.7 million times each day. The same transaction data that powers payments has also opened the door to credit. Last year, Moniepoint disbursed over N1 trillion, or $713.66 million, in loans to small businesses, reporting a 36 percent increase in transaction value after credit was issued.
The borrowers are familiar faces in Nigerian commerce: shop owners, traders, manufacturers and wholesalers with steady turnover but limited access to traditional bank loans. About 30 percent of those loans are recurring, taken again after earlier repayments. Moniepoint says defaults remain low, in part because it underwrites credit using real payment data that shows cash-flow patterns in real time. To support lending and deposits, the company relaunched its savings product in 2025, though uptake has been slower than expected.
For Eniolorunda, the milestone in lending is less about totals than outcomes. He has spoken about seeing growth reflected in payrolls, inventory shelves and expanded shops. “Every now and then, I’ll text Felix and say, ‘Bro… look at this,’” he wrote, describing moments of appreciation rather than surprise at how far the company has come.
Moniepoint transactions reflect Nigeria’s economy
Processing so many payments gives Moniepoint a close look at everyday spending. In 2025, customers spent about N2 billion ($1.43 million) each day on food, adding up to more than N730 billion ($542.39 million) over the year. The platform handled over 500,000 data renewals daily. Nigerians spent around N90 million ($64,264) each day at gyms. Bakeries accounted for more than N1.7 trillion ($1.21 billion) in spending. At bars, clubs and lounges, transactions ran at about three per second, amounting to more than 90 million transactions daily across Moniepoint’s systems.
The company has also begun to look outward. In April 2025, it launched Monieworld, a remittance product allowing United Kingdom residents to send money directly to Nigerian bank accounts. While transaction figures were not disclosed, Moniepoint says adoption has been driven largely by word of mouth. In August it introduced Moniebook, a business management platform that has since signed clients including energy firm Shafa Energy and beverage company Fruitylife. Its microfinance bank licence was upgraded to a national licence the same year, expanding its reach across Nigeria. TeamApt, the switching arm, also secured Visa and Mastercard certifications, enabling international card payments for itself and other businesses.
At 444 transactions a second, Moniepoint’s systems quietly capture the rhythms of Nigerian commerce—from small purchases to billion-naira flows. The figures tell a story of scale, but the daily payments, loans and deposits tell another, more grounded one: of an economy increasingly run on taps, swipes and data, and of a fintech that has placed itself at the center of that movement by focusing, first and foremost, on how people actually do business.
