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backWhat does success sound like?
For athletes, it’s the roar of a crowd at the finish line. For bakers, it’s the soft ding of an oven telling them the cake’s ready. For businesses that use Moniepoint POS terminals, it’s a short, sharp beep confirming a payment has come through.
In markets and stores across Nigeria, our blue POS terminal has become a familiar sight, and its beep an unmistakable sound. The story of how that beep came to be begins with empathy and a team of DreamMakers’ determination to solve an “impossible” problem.
In the beginning…
The year was 2022. Moniepoint had just launched POS transfers, a groundbreaking solution that lets business owners instantly view and approve incoming transfers to their POS terminals. This helps to combat fraud and simplifies the previously tedious manual payment confirmation process.
Empathy is one of our core values at Moniepoint; it shapes how we think, build and innovate. We’ve always believed that the only way to help our customers truly is to see the world through their eyes. After we launched the POS transfer solution, this value helped us notice something important.
Walk into almost any store or market stall in Nigeria and you’ll see it too: a blur of activity. Business owners and/or their attendants serving multiple customers at once, packing goods, answering questions, counting cash. In the middle of all that, it’s easy to miss when a transfer comes in, and often the customer has to point it out before the merchant realises the money has landed. It’s like having your phone on silent mode. If you’re not looking, you could miss an important notification.
POS transfers were great, but we realised that we had to go a step further to make them truly seamless. We had to give them a sound.
But there was a problem.
Solving the “impossible”
The terminals we were using at the time didn’t have media files, so there was no way to configure sound into the hardware. Even if we found a way to do this, we already had millions of POS devices out in circulation. Recalling them would put a significant strain on millions of Nigerians who relied on them every day. At face value, the problem seemed “impossible” to solve.
But grit is also one of our core values. For us, it means that the word “impossible” doesn’t exist in our vocabulary. It means the same thing to Paul, Iyanuoluwa, Awal and Feranmi, who made up the POS Engineering team at the time. Faced with this problem, they didn’t see a dead end; they saw constraints waiting to be solved. The first step? Reaching out to the manufacturer.
I know what you’re thinking: very few stories of people reaching out to manufacturers end the way you hope. Spoiler alert! Ours did. The manufacturer was responsive and understood the challenge. Within hours, they had sent over an SDK file that would be key to helping us solve the problem.
An SDK, short for Software Development Kit, is a package of tools and resources provided by a platform owner to help developers build software for a specific system, device, or platform. For example, if you wanted to create an app for the iPhone, you’d need Apple’s iOS SDK to ensure your app works properly on iPhones. With the manufacturer's SDK, the team could proceed to the next step: extending the existing codebase.
While the SDK included a built-in sound, it wasn’t as simple as turning it on. The team had to decide how long the sound should play. Too short, and merchants might miss it. Too long, and it would eventually become an annoyance. They ultimately settled on a second. The length of a quick breath: long enough to be noticed, but short enough not to be disruptive.
Then came the next and final step: rolling out the sound across our devices.
The short, sharp beep
The entire process of solving this problem took two days. That’s what you get when a team is built on mastery and technical depth. The impact, however, has reached far beyond those 48 hours.
Beyond being useful, the short, sharp beep has quickly become a unique identifier of the Moniepoint experience. In markets and stores across Nigeria, that sound means the payment has landed, that business can continue, and that everyone can move forward.
For merchants, the beep solves a practical problem. They no longer need to stop what they're doing to check if a payment has arrived. Even in the busiest stores, the beep cuts through the noise. It confirms the transaction instantly, allowing business to keep moving.
For customers, the beep provides certainty. The question "Did my payment go through?" disappears. They hear the confirmation immediately, even before the merchant acknowledges it verbally. This is particularly important for people still building trust in digital payments over cash.
And for us, this innovation is one more step towards fulfilling our mission of creating financial happiness for every African, everywhere.
If you’d like to join a team building impactful products that create true financial happiness, check out our careers page.
