Tosin Eniolorunda in 2015 founded TeamApt, together with his band of ambitious colleagues, they decided to change Nigeria’s financial services landscape, they were guided by a vision and the right set of skills and personnel to make their mark and they made it big in a very short time.
TeamApt started out by building digital banking solutions for top Nigerian banks such as; Zenith, FCMB, Sterling, First Bank, and the likes. The young firm had the opportunity to help banks build their mobile and web application from scratch when none was existent in the country, in order to meet the needs of their customers. This first chapter in Fintech’s story would prove decisive in shaping and sharpening its focus on solving the financial inclusion challenge in the financial services market.
The company has over the years kept a low profile, choosing rather, to let its performance do the talking, and only made the news when it raised $5.5 million capital in Series A round in 2019.
Nigeria has a very huge unbanked population, TeamApt having built digital infrastructures for banks between 2015 and 2018 had a deeper understanding of the market, and used this acquired knowledge to offer its solution to millions of Nigerians across the country. The tech startup capitalized on the existing gap between bank infrastructures, such as bank branches, Automated Teller Machines (ATM), and the underserved market to deploy its financial services targeted directly at consumers and agents. The company rolled out its two-pronged financial services products namely Moniepoint – agency banking solution and Monnify – a payment solution.
Moniepoint has grown to become the largest agency banking service in Nigeria in a market where other competitors such as Firstmonie, Paga, OPay also operate.
Shared Agent Network Expansion Facilities (SANEF) report shows that Moniepoint has a controlling market share of 74 percent. The platform processes N1.4 trillion monthly across 68,000,000 transactions, through its about 100,000 agents scattered in different parts of the country.
The Moniepoint solution can be accessed as a Point of Sale (POS) service, a mobile app or web application by its agents in servicing customers’ monetary needs, either for cash withdrawal or deposit.
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Speaking on a recent EFinA report which states that 36.1 percent of Nigerian adults remain in the unbanked bracket and how Moniepoint plans to include this demography in the financial system, Tosin Eniolorunda stated, “The EFinA report actually explains why many people are unbanked.
The problems are poverty, some people feel they do not have enough money to save. The second problem is people have poor access, where they live or work is far from financial services providers. Also, there is institutional exclusion, this is when a financial services provider builds a product that does not understand the customers it is meant to serve, an example of institutional exclusion is there are certain forms of identification that are required (as a regulatory need), for customers to open a bank account, they either need a voters card, NIN, driver’s license, international passport, but some people do not have these identification documents.
What Moniepoint is doing to solve these problems is firstly, solving the problem of access. The fact that we have agents proliferated all over the country means that we are closer to everybody in the country than any bank which solves the first problem of banks or financial services providers being far from where people live or work.
Secondly, by using local influences such that people are not institutionally locked out. The banking and financial services provided is done by locals, they are people that you know or grew up with and you trust that will be your bankers. So, with these two major approach we are democratizing banking, where it esentially is banking of the people by the people for the people.
That is how Moniepoint is essentially going to solve this problem and bring financial happiness to a lot more people.”
TeamApt currently has 300 direct employees on its payroll and about 1,000 contractors.
The company plans to make an announcement on new value offerings in the coming weeks.
