Nigerian Fintech, Moniepoint stands as one of Africa's fastest rising powerhouses, providing financial services to millions of Nigerians and beyond. What started as Teamapt in 2015—a backend software provider building infrastructure for commercial banks has since transitioned into a full banking business—serving millions of merchants and powering billions in monthly transactions.

The company's rebrand, strategic transition and rapid dominance in the fintech market remains a conversations that continues to spark attention, raising questions about how Moniepoint was able to quickly go from an Infrastructure provider for commercial banks to one of the continent's most influential financial platforms.

ORIGIN OF TeamApt

Moniepoint was founded in 2015 under the name, TeamApt by business executives Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike. Before founding TeamApt, Rosin Eniolorunda worked at Interswitch—an African-focused technology company that digitises payments and commerce—as a software engineer and product manager, experiences that shaped the work he would do at TeamApt.

When it was created, TeamApt had the aim of providing "financial happiness" by creating infrastructure and payment solutions for financial institutions and banks. According to a 2023 blog post on the Moniepoint page; "We needed an apt team, so the name “TeamApt” came naturally, but a lot has changed since then".

According to the World Bank, Nigeria had 4.3 bank branches per 100,000 people in 2018, thereby leaving many of its 200 million population either unserved or underserved. Understanding this, they understood that TeamApt couldn't possibly achieve this so they sought to try a different approach and achieve their mission more directly.

From a four-man team in their flat in 1004 Estate, TeamApt’s co-founders had bootstrapped the company and built MoneyTor and AptPay, which serviced virtually all the commercial banks in Nigeria.

However, it was Moniepoint, the product it launched next, that skyrocketed the company to near-unicorn status. Moniepoint, their flagship product started off by offering financial solutions to merchants. With time, Moniepoint grew to become an all-in-one tool for businesses, offering a comprehensive solution that includes payments, business banking, credit, and business management.

In 2018, the company transitioned from purely B2B (bank software) to B2C merchant payments. Moniepoint began processing payments, withdrawal, and deposit services targeting underbanked users through an army of agents mostly in mom-and-pop stores across the country.

The agency banking space at this time was heating up, with Opay, Pagan and FirstMonie aggressively acquiring agents nationwide. In 2019, when OPay announced a total of $170 million in fundraising from two rounds and marched thousands of point-of-sale (POS) terminal-wielding footmen across the country to convert agents and successfully grow agency banking in the country, Moniepoint launched that September after a beta-testing phase, with about 1,000 agents.

Sharing the experience, Moniepoint's Head of Growth, Tolu Adetuyi said "We didn’t have money then, so we were taking terminals from banks and manually sending them to agents, individually, in other parts of the country. That was so base and hectic."

In March 2019, Moniepoint announced funding of $5.5 million in a Series A fundraising from Quantum Capital Partners. Following this raise, TeamApt had enough to order terminals directly from China and invaded the markets. In 2021, the company announced an undisclosed capital in a Series B Funding round led by Novastar Ventures. It also fundraised the $50 million in pre-series C funding led by QED investors

In 2022, Moniepoint secured a banking license, launched business banking, and processed 5.2 billion transactions. This licence was a Microfinance Bank (MFB) license that allowed Moniepoint to operate fully as a business bank.

Also in 2022, Moniepoint processed the majority of the POS transactions in Nigeria with an annualised Total Payments Volume (TPV) of more than $170 billion.

In July 2023, Moniepoint launched a personal banking service and by late 2023, Moniepoint was processing over $4 billion monthly, servicing 18 million unique customers, and had over 120,000 active merchants in almost all of Nigeria’s 774 local government areas (LGA) and according to a post from Tech Cabal—only the terror-prone LGAs in the country’s northern regions are left out. At this point, the company reported full operational profitability.

According to a publication made on the Moniepoint's blog a month ago, Moniepoint announced that it has raised over US$200 million in equity financing in a recently closed Series C funding round.

Investments came in from various companies like LeapFrog Investments, Lightrock, Alder Tree Investments, Google’s Africa Investment Fund, Visa, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Proparco, Swedfund, and Verod Capital Management.

This feat established Moniepoint as one of the few fintech globally and the only African fintech to have achieved profitability at Unicorn scale while driving financial inclusion.

TeamApt REBRANDS AS MONIEPOINT

In January 2023, the leadership of TeamApt decided to rebrand and name TeamApt after it's flagship project, Moniepoint. The company saw this as a move to bring the brand as close to the people as Moniepoint is now. To the company, this move was a testament to the incredible success, Moniepoint had achieved in such a short time.

The company in a statement shared that "The Moniepoint brand is already an established and trusted name among its customer base in Nigeria, and adopting it as the name means one less layer between the brand and the people it intends to serve."

This decision coincided with Moniepoint's plan to move it's headquarters to London. Moniepoint explained that this move was made to position the company as “an employer of choice, not just in Africa, but globally”. When this decision was made, however, there were no plans to expand to the UK but plans were made to expand into East Africa and North Africa, which will depend on “identifying large markets where millions of businesses are underserved”.

This rebranding helped shine the light to the company behind the flagship project, Moniepoint. By aligning the company with it's flagship project, TeamApt now Moniepoint established itself as a brand capable of driving financial inclusion, scaling operations and delivering banking solutions to millions of Nigerian and African businesses.

From their humble beginnings—a team of four building from an apartment, Moniepoint has transformed the financial technology landscape positioning itself as the leading financial technology brand.