How Tosin Eniolorunda Built Moniepoint Into Nigeria’s SME Money Machine

In Summary

• Moniepoint processes over 1 billion transactions monthly, valued at $22 billion, making it Nigeria’s largest SME-focused financial platform.
• Founded in 2015 by Tosin Eniolorunda, the company achieved unicorn status in 2024 after raising $110 million from investors including Google, Visa, and DPI.
• With expansion into Kenya and the UK, Moniepoint is redefining African fintech through profitability, inclusion, and data-backed innovation.

Deep Dive!!

Lagos, Nigeria, Friday, October 24 - Tosin Eniolorunda is the founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of Moniepoint Inc.. This Nigerian financial technology company provides end-to-end banking, payment, and credit solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). 

Established in 2015, the company began as TeamApt, a software infrastructure provider building enterprise payment systems for Nigerian banks. It has since evolved into a full-service business bank with nationwide reach and an expanding international footprint.

Though its parent entity, Moniepoint Inc., is domiciled in the United States hence the “Inc.” designation, the company remains deeply Nigerian in origin, leadership, and operations. Its core business, workforce, and customer base are all rooted in Nigeria, operating locally through Moniepoint MFB Limited, which is fully licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria. This structure allows Moniepoint to expand globally while retaining its identity as a Nigerian-founded fintech driving Africa’s digital transformation.

Moniepoint currently powers over 600,000 businesses and facilitates more than one billion transactions monthly, with a total value surpassing $22 billion. The company operates under full Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) licensing and provides tools that enable merchants to accept payments, access working capital, manage payroll, and conduct digital bookkeeping in real time. Its agent network covers all 36 states of Nigeria, giving it one of the widest financial distribution channels in the country.

Under Eniolorunda’s leadership, Moniepoint has built one of Africa’s most resilient fintech business models, profitable, compliant, and technology-driven. The company achieved unicorn valuation in 2024 following a $110 million investment round led by Google, Visa, and Development Partners International. By 2025, its expansion into Kenya and the United Kingdom signaled its transition from a national player to a cross-border digital bank for Africa’s growing SME economy.

Moniepoint’s rise reflects a new phase in African fintech. It shows a shift from transaction-led growth to enterprise infrastructure and financial inclusion at scale. 

This article traces how Tosin Eniolorunda’s technical expertise, leadership discipline, and market understanding turned a local software venture into a billion-dollar institution driving the continent’s digital economy.

Early Life, Education, and Experience

Tosin Eniolorunda was born in September 1985 in Lagos, Nigeria, and hails from Ose Local Government Area in Ondo State. Though born in Lagos, much of his formative life unfolded in Ibadan, Oyo State, a city whose mix of academia, enterprise, and resilience would later shape his worldview. 

The first of three children, Tosin grew up in a middle-class home. His father, Rotimi Eniolorunda, was an engineering contractor, while his mother, Ajoke, was a teacher. This combination of technical precision and educational discipline would later reflect in the balance between innovation and structure that defines his leadership style.

He began his early education at the University of Ibadan Staff School (1990–1995) before proceeding to Command Day Secondary School, Odogbo, Ibadan (1995–2001). During his secondary school years, Tosin was an active member of the Junior Engineers, Technicians, and Scientists (JETS) Club, a program designed to nurture young innovators. Peers recall him as a natural problem-solver, often called upon to repair gadgets or find solutions to technical issues. It was in these years that his curiosity for engineering began to take root.

In 2002, he gained admission into Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2007. His years at OAU were defined by intellectual rigor and experimentation. He participated in various student-led projects, building both hardware and software prototypes. However, as he began to understand the scalability potential of technology, Tosin gradually shifted focus from hardware to software, convinced that Africa’s biggest structural challenges could be solved through scalable digital systems.

During his undergraduate studies, Tosin interned at Schlumberger Limited in Port Harcourt in 2005, gaining early exposure to large-scale engineering operations. This experience deepened his understanding of systems design, project execution, and the discipline required to operate in structured, high-stakes environments.

After completing his degree, Tosin joined Interswitch Limited in 2009 as a software engineer. Interswitch, one of Nigeria’s earliest fintech pioneers, was then expanding electronic payment systems across the country. Tosin’s technical expertise and problem-solving capacity quickly earned him promotions through multiple roles from Software Engineer to Senior Software Manager, and later Unit Head of Application Development (Industry Verticals & Solutions) by 2013. In this position, he managed teams that designed and implemented enterprise-grade financial software for banks and payment processors.

One of Tosin’s most notable achievements at Interswitch was programming the company’s first point-of-sale (POS) software, which became widely adopted across Nigeria. This innovation played a significant role in accelerating the country’s migration toward digital payments. Working at the intersection of technology, finance, and commerce, Tosin developed a deep understanding of payment infrastructures, merchant behavior, and the operational bottlenecks small businesses faced when interacting with traditional financial systems.

Over his six-year tenure, he gained firsthand insight into how fragmented payment systems and poor user experience limited growth for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These experiences planted the seed for what would later become Moniepoint’s mission to simplify financial access for businesses and individuals underserved by traditional banking structures.

In 2015, drawing on his experience at Interswitch, Tosin co-founded TeamApt alongside Felix Ike. The startup began as a software provider for Nigerian banks, building automation and payment infrastructure tools that streamlined back-end operations. TeamApt’s early success came from its ability to provide reliable, real-time solutions to institutions like Zenith Bank, First Bank, and Access Bank. This background in high-stakes enterprise systems laid the technological foundation for what would later evolve into Moniepoint Inc., one of Africa’s most successful financial technology companies.

His experiences across education, engineering, and fintech provided him with a rare 360-degree understanding of how Africa’s financial ecosystem works and, more importantly, how it could work better.

Inspiration to Start Moniepoint Inc.

The inspiration behind Moniepoint Inc. began long before its founding in 2015. As a software engineer at Interswitch, Tosin Eniolorunda helped build Nigeria’s early digital banking infrastructure. While banks were becoming more connected, millions of small businesses and informal traders still lacked access to reliable financial systems. That disconnect between progress and access became the driving force behind what would become Moniepoint.

In 2015, Eniolorunda co-founded TeamApt with a small team of engineers, creating digital solutions that helped banks automate transactions and improve internal operations. Early products like Moneytor and AptPay revealed how deeply traditional systems failed to support small business insights that shaped TeamApt’s next move.

By 2018, Eniolorunda shifted focus from building tools for banks to empowering the people excluded from them. True financial inclusion, he realized, meant more than opening accounts. That realization gave birth to Moniepoint, a platform offering payments, banking, and credit services in one ecosystem.

The company’s evolution from a bank software provider to a full-scale business banking platform reflected this vision. By 2022, Moniepoint had expanded into credit, savings, and operations management to help SMEs grow, not just transact. When TeamApt rebranded as Moniepoint Inc. in January 2023, it marked a full embrace of this mission. By then, the company had processed over $170 billion in annualized Total Payments Volume (TPV) and served more than 600,000 businesses across Nigeria proving that inclusion and profitability could coexist.

Yet Eniolorunda’s vision extends beyond Nigeria. He believes African technology can solve global financial access challenges and has set his sights on Europe’s 13 million unbanked adults. 

Beyond business, Eniolorunda invests in education and innovation. In 2024, he funded a CAD/CAM Design Laboratory at Obafemi Awolowo University to foster local STEM talent reflecting Moniepoint’s broader goal of empowering future African engineers and entrepreneurs.

What Problem Moniepoint Solves

At its foundation, Moniepoint Inc. was created to tackle one of Africa’s most persistent challenges which is the exclusion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from accessible, affordable, and reliable financial services. 

1. Limited Access to Business Banking

Before Moniepoint, small traders and micro-entrepreneurs faced systemic neglect from formal financial institutions. Opening and maintaining business accounts was costly, credit was inaccessible, and payment infrastructure was unreliable. These inefficiencies led to over 38 million unbanked or underbanked adults in Nigeria, according to EFInA’s 2023 Financial Inclusion Report.

Moniepoint solved this by building a digital-first banking platform designed specifically for small businesses. It provided instant account creation, real-time settlement, and a network of over 1.6 million payment terminals, ensuring every merchant urban or rural could accept digital payments. This infrastructure bridged the access gap that banks had overlooked for decades.

2. Payment Reliability and Transaction Failures

Nigeria’s payment ecosystem has long suffered from instability. Moniepoint engineered a proprietary transaction processing layer that drastically reduced failure rates through redundant routing and localized agent servicing.

By 2024, Moniepoint processed over $250 billion in annualized transaction value, making it one of the most stable and trusted platforms for Nigerian SMEs.

3. The SME Credit Gap

Access to credit remains one of the biggest obstacles to SME growth across Africa. Banks often lacked reliable data to assess risk and thus avoided lending to the informal sector.

Moniepoint addressed this by embedding data-driven lending directly into its ecosystem. Instead of relying on collateral or lengthy forms, it used merchants’ real-time transaction histories to evaluate creditworthiness. Through this model, Moniepoint has disbursed thousands of working-capital loans allowing traders to restock, farmers to expand, and service businesses to scale sustainably.

4. Fragmented Financial Management

Beyond payments and credit, small businesses struggled with everyday financial management manual bookkeeping, disjointed payroll, and a lack of oversight. Moniepoint’s business dashboard centralized these operations. This integration helped businesses move from cash-based operations to measurable financial systems, laying the groundwork for tax compliance and formal growth.

5. Lack of Inclusive Digital Infrastructure

At a national level, Moniepoint solved a macroeconomic challenge, the infrastructure gap in financial access. By partnering with over 600,000 agents and merchants, the company turned local entrepreneurs into access points for financial services. This human infrastructure extended the reach of digital banking into rural and peri-urban zones, effectively operationalizing the Central Bank’s financial inclusion mandate.

Milestones Achieved To-Date

Over the past five years, Moniepoint Inc. has grown into one of Africa’s most successful fintech institutions. Its impact lies in measurable progress toward financial inclusion and SME empowerment across Nigeria and beyond.

Between 2022 and 2024, Moniepoint recorded some of the continent’s highest fintech transaction volumes. In 2022, it processed over US$100 billion across 1.7 billion transactions. By 2023, this rose to US$150 billion and 5.2 billion transactions, a 205% year-on-year increase. In just the first quarter of that year, it handled US$43 billion in transactions and gained 500,000 new app users. By 2024, Moniepoint was processing more than one billion transactions monthly, maintaining 99% uptime and US$17 billion in monthly value, the highest reliability benchmark in Nigeria’s payment sector.

The company now operates over 1.6 million POS terminals and serves more than 600,000 active merchants, forming one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest merchant networks. Data shows that two in three Nigerian adults use a Moniepoint terminal monthly, underscoring its reach in everyday commerce. Its lending arm, powered by real-time transaction data, has issued thousands of working-capital loans to small businesses while keeping default rates below 1%, a sign of prudent credit management.

Investor confidence has matched its growth. In October 2024, Moniepoint raised US$110 million in a Series C round led by Development Partners International (DPI), with participation from Google’s Africa Investment Fund, Verod Capital, and Lightrock, pushing its valuation past US$1 billion. A year later, it secured an additional US$90 million, bringing total Series C funding to US$200 million. Global players such as Visa Inc., the IFC, and LeapFrog Investments backed this round, funding its expansion across Africa and into Europe.

Moniepoint’s international growth is already underway. In 2024, it received approval from Kenya’s Competition and Markets Authority (CAK) to acquire a majority stake in a local microfinance bank, its first step into East Africa. That same year, it launched MonieWorld, a cross-border payment solution serving African diasporas in the UK and Europe, positioning the company as one of the few African fintechs with dual-continent operations.

Financially, Moniepoint stands out as one of the few profitable fintechs at scale. Between 2021 and 2024, it achieved a 150% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) with strong profit margins and positive EBITDA successfully expanding without relying on venture capital subsidies.

Recently, Nigerian fintech giant Moniepoint raised $200 million in funding to accelerate the expansion of its digital financial services across Africa. The capital injection aims to strengthen the company’s platform, enhance payment solutions, and support small and medium-sized businesses in accessing more seamless financial tools.

Beyond numbers, Moniepoint’s social impact is equally profound. Its merchant network supports an estimated three million jobs across Nigeria and advances the Central Bank’s 95% financial inclusion target for 2025. By providing banking and credit access to informal businesses, Moniepoint has reshaped the structure of financial access in West Africa.

Lessons for Other Entrepreneurs

1. Deep problem ownership before innovation.

Tosin Eniolorunda’s approach highlights that innovation starts with firsthand problem ownership. Before launching Moniepoint, his experience at Interswitch exposed him to the structural gaps in Nigeria’s payment system that prevented micro and small businesses from transacting efficiently. This understanding shaped Moniepoint’s model solving Africa’s liquidity and access challenges from the ground up. For African entrepreneurs, this reaffirms that true innovation begins where personal experience meets societal necessity.

2. Building infrastructure before scale.

Unlike many fintech startups that prioritize user acquisition before system stability, Moniepoint invested first in the invisible foundation infrastructure, compliance, and uptime. With a 99% service availability rate and nationwide regulatory compliance through Moniepoint Microfinance Bank, it built trust as a prerequisite for growth. This operational discipline is now a benchmark in African fintech, proving that reliability can be a competitive advantage in a market where system failures often define user perception.

3. Data-driven financial inclusion.

Moniepoint’s use of real-time merchant data for lending decisions demonstrates how analytics can drive sustainable inclusion. Instead of collateral-based lending, the company leverages daily transaction insights to extend credit to over 200,000 active SMEs, maintaining a default rate below 1%. This model offers a replicable framework for inclusive finance, one where technology reduces risk and human bias simultaneously.

4. Profitability as a principle, not a milestone.

In an ecosystem where startups often prioritize valuation over sustainability, Moniepoint’s profitability represents a fundamental shift. Moniepoint shows that African fintech can be both impactful and financially self-sufficient. Entrepreneurs can draw from this to see profit not as the end of innovation, but as its validation.

5. Strategic Pan-Africanism through partnerships.

Moniepoint’s expansion beyond Nigeria reflects a philosophy of Pan-African integration rooted in collaboration rather than competition. Its entry into Kenya and remittance corridors in the UK and Europe were data-informed strategies that aligned financial connectivity with Africa’s diaspora economics. By partnering with regional regulators, telecoms, and global investors like the IFC and Visa, the company modeled a cooperative approach to continental growth. For African founders, this signals that scale is not achieved through dominance, but through synergy.

6. Governance and institutional structure.

The company’s internal governance is another silent differentiator. With independent directors, structured compliance, and performance accountability frameworks, Moniepoint operates with institutional maturity rare among early-stage African startups. This reinforces that sustainable African enterprises must evolve beyond founder-led charisma into data-driven, process-oriented systems capable of outlasting their founders.

7. Technology with social intention.

Perhaps the most defining lesson is that technology, in Africa’s context, must serve people before profit. Moniepoint’s platforms have enabled over 600,000 businesses to digitize operations, boosting transaction transparency and income stability. It has also contributed indirectly to women’s economic participation. According to a 2025 Moniepoint report, 35% of businesses in Nigeria's informal economy are female-led.

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