Moniepoint and our business units

Hi there!

Thanks for taking the time to visit and read this :) Here is a document, where we’ll dive into
details about how we are structured, and about the different product lines / business verticals
inside Moniepoint today. This is not an exhaustive list, but should provide clarity on many
aspects of our business.

So, at Moniepoint, from a product and technology perspective, we have split up the company
into different business units, which have their own PnL, and their own dedicated product,
engineering and operations teams. Product owns the go-to-market strategy decisions, the
direction of the business line, and works collaboratively with all other departments to get
products into the hands of customers.

In each business unit, there is a business leader, the SVP, or in other words, the business line
CEO. And underneath this SVP, the typical set up is as follows. There’s:

1. A program manager who oversees basically, all the product areas / product slices within
the business unit, and making sure these pieces and everything they do fits together as
a whole, from a product perspective. And then, you have Enterprise Architects,
Technical Product Managers, a full stack team of engineers, embedded in each cross
functional team, which owns a specific product area / product slice, which is a part of the
bigger product vertical.

2. There’s a VP of Engineering who oversees from an engineering perspective, all of

the…technology, the engineers, the EAs and makes sure it all fits together, and
especially ensures from a infrastructure and organizational perspective that the products
and teams are able to scale exponentially, and that the team is performing at a high level

3. Also, we will over time build this out - a finance partner within each business vertical who
helps to manage the P&L of that business as an embedded team member, supporting
with the financial reporting of the specific vertical.

4. Within each product vertical, you also have an operations and monitoring pillar

So within this technology pillar, you have a role we call Enterprise Architect. It’s basically an
engineering manager, who supervises a full stack of engineers (be, fe, mobile, QA) an agile
team… this person, functionally speaking, in addition to the engineers, reports into the Technical
Product Manager.
The better way of thinking about it is, the Technical PM is the line manager for their specific
product area/slice, and they lead the engineers and as the leader they are ensuring the team is
shipping high quality products at a very fast pace.

From a supervision of craft perspective, this is why we have these VP Engineering (VPE) roles,
for checking code and making sure there are no bugs and things are done with a great practice,
the VPE is more of the technical supervisor and leader for the engineering craft.

Then, there’s Ops and Monitoring, which is keeping an eye on making sure everything is
running correctly, if there are issues escalated, and bugs and things, that this team will provide
the technical support.

This pattern, of a) a person in charge of the product / the overall business, the chunk of the
business, cards, for example, being supported, by these two legs of enginserting resources,
that’s sort of the pattern we repeat EVERYWHERE in the company.

MONIEPOINT PAYMENTS
Payments is the bread and butter, the key economic engine of the company, currently the
revenue engine of the company.

The Payments business unit, caries out payments at scale. Not only do we have our own switch
for integrating into banks directly and for routing, processing, and settling our payments at scale
(which is a seperate entity, TeamApt, more about this down below), we carry out payments
through all our customer facing apps as well, within Moniepoint’s banking entity (Moniepoint
Microfinance Bank). Payments here entails the channels through which the customers carry out
their payments on the web and mobile apps. These payments are powered by services and
frameworks underneath the user facing products, which is handled by the payments team,
which basically acts as a client to TeamApt, our payment switch.

TeamApt
TeamApt provides interconnectivity, to the banks, and other payment providers. TeamApt is the
core that allows us to be successful, and is at the center of the broader payments ecosystem.
Today, TeamApt plays a crucial, systemic role in the payments ecosystem, and processes close
to 15M transactions daily, and over 60% of all POS transactions in Nigeria. At a Birds Eye view,
you will find we, Moniepoint, is the largest payment processor for POS transactions in the
country, and those transactions are routed through TeamApt’s switching infrastructure.

Next to this, we have our next big product, BUSINESS LOANS AND SALARY ADVANCE.
Credit - Business Loans and Salary Advance
Now that we’ve built a payment system used by 1M+ businesses, we know a lot about those
businesses, so based on that knowledge we can choose to lend to some of them. Tobi Amira
has been heading up that business, he has a big chunk of that org here.

Under Tobi, we have a programme manager, an SVP of engineering (Chidum), but he’s playing
a similar role, overseeing the engineering of the whole business unit. So, we have the salary
advance team as well, and then CREDIT ONBOARDING.

We have two types of lending:

1. Working Capital Loans - if u are a merchant and u need more money to sell more and
get more inventory, you get this loan
2. If you are a moniepoint client, and you have employees, if you get them to bank with us,
we will extend them a salary advance, and they can get their paycheck a few days
earlier.

Within Credit, end-to-end, the VERTICALS are:

1. Appraisals - hey, like, who is credit worthy? To whom should we offer loans?
2. Credit onboarding. We bring customers in.
3. There is a field credit organization out there…a few hundred people literally going from
business to business, it’s a human heavy hi overhead approach, they go and check,
does the biz exist, is what they put in their application true? They use a whole bunch of
tools. This is called the skill credit assessment and KYE (know ur employee) system.
Tools we have to manage the whole process. This team of several hundred…this is the
field office work force.
4. Salary advance. Getting employees of these businesses to get their paycheck a lil bit
early. Same structure. They all have an EA (Enterprise Architect)...in short, there’s a tech
team reporting into this Product Manager.

Then, for all of these loans that we issue, we expect some of them not to pay back, so we have
A RECOVERIES ORGANIZATION. A whole bunch of people who collect. They use a bunch of
tools, a recovery tools vertical. So there is the Recoveries org, and then right next to them the
tooling team, building tools for recoveries field team.

The tooling = a bunch of software on tablets, phones, to do what they do. Then, we have an ops
team for working capital loans.
So, this is the LENDING BUSINESS. This is soon to be launched at scale, we are about to role
it out across nigeria.

The business loan business is what Kopo Kopo has been doing in kenya. They don't do
business payments processing because in kenya M-PESA and other players does all that. The
business they built was working capital loans on top of ____ infrastructure.

Other businesses getting built?

FX / Moniesend
With recent changes in foreign currency transactions, with Nigeria, with the base free float of the
Naira, and convertibility of the Naira, we will launch an FX product for businesses who need to
buy and sell foreign currency. We are going to lean into what Tosin has done with the product
organization, which is also to get a lot more bank deposits (another vertical we are setting up).

We need to lean in and get ourselves into a better spot with the way we deliver bank cards to
people. So, we already have debit cards. The logistics and delivery of that need to be improved.
That’s something to really pay attention to. We have a skeleton crew here, but neither of these
are staffed.

We have been building but put on ice a product called money business management tools, this
is accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing tools for Business owners, to take the data they have and
the transactions, and processing, and whatever else and help them with their business’ financial
reporting.

Then, we also have our consumer banking vertical which has just launched at the end of
August.

Monnify - our Online Payment Gateway

Check out this talk with Tobi, who was a part of the team building up Monnify from scratch.

This is a robust team, actually. They follow a similar pattern of engineering and product people.
W/o diving into deets, they are a stripe competitor. A payment gateway competitor to stripe,
where any biz online can use to accept payments. We have that, it’s less than 10% of revenue
but part of the service offering.

The other competitors = flutterwave and paystack among others. I also mentioned TOOLS and
CHANNELS.
All these products/things we have, are delivered across a number of…

Channels
Channels is a team on its own, which acts as a horizontal layer, sitting on top of all the other
business units, focusing on the user experience primarily, and ensuring there’s a great UX, all
the way from initial interactions with our product, to onboarding and offboarding as customers.

These channels are:

1. USSD - the supplementary data on cell phones. There are ppl who dont have big data
plans, but cell phones can send small amounts of data, and you can do quite a bit by
keying in codes and data and stuff.
2. Theres the web version of our biz banking app
3. The mobile version of our biz banking app
4. Theres a mobile version of our personal banking app.
5. We are not currently doing web version of personal banking.

The channels through which the customers (both consumer and B2B) interact with our
payments services, is about channels. This is the Channels department responsibility.

Recently, the channels organization has split up into two business units, one focused on offline /
POS transactions (more about POS further down), and one for Other Channels - Mobile, Web,
USSD.

For the Mobile, Web, and USSD Channels, this is all about user experience. This team focuses
heavily on how the users feel, how we are reducing the number of buttons/clicks to press in
order to achieve an objective. How do you keep the user focused on the app? How do you
make the app very easy and fun to use? This team is focused on user experience. The
Channels team is responsible for the end user experience on all the channels where we interact
with them. This is across all of our product verticals, but with a big focus on the mobile apps,
web interface and USSD apps.

Then, there is

POS
We also have BRM web channels. BRM = Business Relationship Managers. These are the 7,
going on 8, going on to 10,000 sales people in the field who mainly have sold and take care of
POS terminals. The offline payment processing infrastructure.

There's a bunch of tooling we have to manage the sales force. This BRM web channel is
basically that INFRA. Each one of those BRMs has their web portal, it shows you all of the web
terminals they have sold, or put in the field. How much those terminals are transacting, and
therefore what kind of commission they get. We have a similar thing here for managing online
sales.

Then, we have this massive organization, it’s a separate channel. It’s a massive channel, the
POS channel, basically the POS devices / terminals themselves. There are hundreds of
thousands of them out in the field. We have over 700,000 terminals in the hands of our
customers today.

There are kind of two things related to this:

1. The software on the terminal itself

2. The tools we use to keep track of the terminals, to monitor performance, their status in
the field (are they working or under repair, or?).
3. Then a whole kind of monkey real world element to this.
a. Repairs and insurance - repair shops all over the country to get these things
fixed.
b. Also, distribution and logistics, just getting the physical devices out to all 36
states in nigeria.

So, that’s our POS business.

Then, there are core systems, this is basically our very core banking app. We built our own
backend for all the banking solutions, and core systems are all around that.

1. Identity management within the system

2. Then, settlement and reconciliation management tools. A tool related to specific
functions. We process vast amounts of transactions. So we need really good tools for
reconciling and settling those transactions.

They involve counterparty banks, there's a whole bunch of hair here that makes this
complicated. Like the fact the banks share reporting and they delay, there are annoyances but
we have a team building tooling for it. Tools for the accounting team. The customer is an internal
customer.

Then, Customer Success = basically user support but with a product, automation lens. Where
we have thoughtful ways baked in for users to resolve issues themselves. It’s really a product of
customer success rather than just manual user support. Live customer support and issue
resolution.

Lastly, we have separated our UX function, over time we will wanna fold it into product teams.
Theres our VP of Design, who oversees uniformity of the UI, the design, etc.
By the way, on another subject, here’s a bit of information about Tosin and Felix, our
co-founders!

Tosin, our CEO

An interview with Tosin about the early days of founding TeamApt/Moniepoint
An interview with Tosin about his childhood, and founding experience (start at 2:32 if you
want to go straight into the story behind TeamApt/Moniepoint)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tosin-eniolorunda-46833618/
Tosin is an extremely passionate, deeply technical, visionary leader. He’s really passionate
about our mission, to help millions of business owners to achieve financial happiness.

He spent a great deal of his career as a software engineer, and started selling his services as a
developer, and built websites and computers and whatever you could think of to make money,
so he’s been entrepreneurial for a long time. At Interswitch, he programmed/wrote the code for
the first Point of Sale software, which the majority of POS terminals are being run on today, in
Nigeria.

He over-indexes on fundamental principles, and wants people to join the company who have
TECHNICAL DEPTH - which connects to what Felix shared in the doc I shared earlier. If you
have built a digital ledger before, expect him to ask you to explain to you how double entry
bookkeeping works.

Tosin plays the role of CEO, founder, Chief Product Officer, and many other things. He’s a
visionary and has a great understanding of the opportunities coming up, and is constantly
pushing boundaries to build and launch new products.

You can find quite a few interesting interviews of him online if you feel like checking any of them
out ahead of time!!

Felix, our CTO

I don’t have too much to say about Felix, he’s great ;) Here’s some words I jotted down when he
was talking to me about the engineering culture, maybe worth a quick read!
Did you know Moniepoint isn’t his first start-up? Supposedly he founded a company before that
which failed!! Also, he first started working with Tosin, the CEO, at Interswitch, where they both
worked on real time transaction clearing for banks and beyond. They did system integrations for
banks as well, and Moniepoint used to be an engineering firm building stuff for banks!

I asked Felix recently, the following question:

“What personal values do you and Tosin share in common which has caused there to be
a strong bond and the ability for you both to build Moniepoint and to accomplish
something so significant? Really curious, because, I've interviewed so many
entrepreneurs, and so often, there are problems in the founding team which prevents
anything from ever happening.”

And Felix replied saying

“It's more of complementary traits than similarities - so Tosin is the "let's go let's go" kind of
person while I on the other hand take my time to analyse situations before acting...so we
balance each other...his drive to move fast pulls me out of my overly analytical head...and my
inclination to analyse before acting forces him to put things in perspective and consider some
blind spots before jumping but constantly there is always the mutual respect for each others
perspective”