Moniepoint is an Africa-focused financial technology company offering digital banking solutions to individuals and businesses. By introducing POS transfers and its Monnify web payments product, Moniepoint has tapped into the massive market of small-to-medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria, reaching 3 million active business customers processing $182 billion in transactions in 2023. It is now poised to expand into Kenya and the United Kingdom.
The Alliance spoke with co-founder and CEO Tosin Eniolorunda about the factors enabling Moniepoint to reach under-served MSMEs and women in particular. For more on that, take a look at their case study on funding Nigeria’s women-owned businesses.
Alliance: Tell us about Moniepoint’s core business. What gap are you filling in the market?
Tosin Eniolorunda (TE): Moniepoint is an all-in-one payments and banking platform, and one of the fastest-growing companies in Africa. Our core business revolves around empowering businesses and their customers with seamless payment, banking, credit, and management tools. We provide near-perfect reliability with a 99% transaction success rate, instant settlement for businesses, and a robust network of relationship managers in every community. This ensures that we offer digital payment solutions but also drive financial inclusion and support businesses in underserved areas with limited access to banking services.
Alliance: Who is your target customer and where are they located?
TE: We serve businesses of all sizes but are particularly focused on small and medium-sized enterprises, which traditional financial institutions often overlook. Our customers are everywhere in Nigeria, from the busy city streets to underserved and rural areas across the country. We serve over 3 million users, providing them with business banking products, payment solutions, and working capital loans. Our extensive distribution network, with tens of thousands of relationship managers, ensures that we reach customers wherever they are, offering support in their local languages and making our services accessible even to those with limited digital literacy. We are also building products to allow these businesses to trade easily on a global scale.
Alliance: How have you designed your sales funnel to reach and impact women?
TE: We have implemented a gender-intelligent sales funnel that recognizes and addresses women’s unique barriers to accessing financial services. By disaggregating KPIs at all stages of the sales funnel and systematically addressing gender disparities, we have increased our female customer conversion rates. Our approach includes offering tailored digital payments, banking services, and working capital loans, specifically catering to sectors where women thrive, such as retail and trade, food and drinks, beauty, and personal care. We also ensure that our relationship managers are equipped to support women entrepreneurs, making our services inclusive and accessible.
Our portfolio is rich with stories of women we have empowered in various dimensions. From entrepreneurs preserving family legacies, to those who, after losing a supportive loved one, found no help until we stepped in, to innovators disrupting traditional industries with fresh approaches. Women entrepreneurs are experiencing our impact nationwide.
Alliance: Do you capture sex-disaggregated data and what does it tell you about your women clients?
TE: We are actively capturing sex-disaggregated data, which has been instrumental in shaping our products and services to better serve women clients. Our analysis reveals that women-owned businesses have a non-performing loan ratio 87.5% lower than their male counterparts, highlighting their reliability as a credit segment. This data has shown us that women are thriving in sectors such as retail, trade, food, drinks, beauty, and personal care. These insights help us design loan products that meet the specific needs of women entrepreneurs, ensuring they receive the right amount of funding without over-leveraging them.
Alliance: You recently partnered on our 2024 Alliance Hack. How does this partnership align with your vision for the women’s markets?
TE: This partnership with the Alliance Hack perfectly aligns with our vision to support Women’s Markets by fostering innovation in gender-intelligent fintech solutions. We aim to encourage fintech teams to develop scalable solutions addressing key challenges faced by the female economy, such as financing women-owned businesses and building business capabilities for female entrepreneurs. This initiative reflects our commitment to driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment for women, ensuring they have the tools and resources to thrive.
Alliance: Why did you decide to join the Alliance and what are you looking forward to learning from and/or sharing with the network?
TE: Joining the Financial Alliance for Women allows us to collaborate with a network of financial organizations dedicated to championing the growth of the global Female Economy. We can’t wait to learn from the strategies and best practices shared by other members, which will help us refine our approach to serving women entrepreneurs. The Alliance provides us with valuable insights and resources that are not readily available elsewhere, particularly in understanding the unique financial needs of women and how to address them effectively.
We look forward to sharing our experiences and successes in supporting women-owned businesses and contributing to the collective knowledge and growth of the network. The support from the Alliance in fostering a more gender-intelligent fintech sector will help us achieve our financial inclusion and empowerment goals for women.