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backIf I had to guess, I’d say there’s a good chance you’re closer to a POS terminal than you are to a bank branch right now.
Don’t believe me? Take a quick stroll and observe. You may see one with an agent, huddled under an umbrella for shade. Or you’ll find one in a small kiosk selling everything from sachet water to chewing gum. Don’t forget the fuel station, or the vendor who sells fruits by the roadside.
You’ll come across several POS terminals on your little stroll, and I’m willing to bet more than a handful of them will be blue. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s because, for the past decade, Moniepoint has worked diligently to bring your bank closer to you.
A decade ago, we started as TeamApt, on a mission to create tech solutions for banks. We reached millions of their customers, but we also identified a gap. Across Nigeria, millions of people faced barriers to accessing reliable, easy-to-use financial services. This was true whether they were running a bustling market stall, steering a growing company or managing their personal finances. Small businesses, especially, needed solutions built for them. Despite their contributions to the economy, they still faced challenges that kept them out of the financial ecosystem.
To fill this gap, we became a direct financial service provider and built Moniepoint, creating solutions that power dreams for businesses and their customers.
Since then, we’ve been on a mission to create financial happiness for every African. A key step in fulfilling this mission is ensuring we can meet people wherever they are. “Wherever” isn’t just a geographical term; it also means meeting people at the specific points of their financial needs because financial access isn’t one-size-fits-all.
A trader in a busy market, a farmer in a remote community and an informal business owner all need access to financial services, but not always in the same way. The trader might need credit or a POS terminal to accept digital payments. The farmer could need USSD or a debit card to access their money without needing a smartphone. Every tool addresses a different financial need and provides a different entry point into the formal financial economy. And, to be truly inclusive, every tool must reach deep into even the most remote communities, meeting people where they live and do business, even when these places aren’t commercial hotspots.
Painting Nigeria blue
We’ve spent the last 10 years building a nationwide payment infrastructure so anyone, anywhere in Nigeria, can access financial services through Moniepoint.
In a country as geographically and demographically diverse as Nigeria, this has meant building to meet people across different realities. We’ve had to account for differences in digital literacy, access to technology, and how people manage their financial lives, and create channels that work for each reality.
For example, customers with smartphones can request debit cards through their mobile apps, while customers without smartphones can get their cards from designated neighbourhood agents. Our POS terminal network extends across all 774 local government areas in Nigeria, creating a distribution infrastructure that reaches far beyond major commercial centres. Through this network, we’ve laid the foundation for making our financial tools available to people and businesses with very different needs and circumstances.
We see the value of this infrastructure every day in the sheer number of people it gives access to financial services.
In 2025, 100 million people paid at Moniepoint POS terminals with businesses of all sizes.
Our customers completed 300 million transactions using their debit cards.
5 million people across remote communities used our USSD service to manage day-to-day transactions.
Each of these transactions represents a person or business that may have otherwise been excluded without our tools. Taken together, they paint a picture of what truly inclusive access looks like.
They also show us what this access means beyond payments. For example, most of our customers' debit card transactions were driven by food-related purchases and happened at neighbourhood provisions shops where households buy everyday items like eggs for breakfast or soap for laundry. We’ve met traders in Onitsha, Uyo and Ibadan for whom the loud beep from our POS terminal has become a marker of business success. In a small community in Borno, we met farmers who have found ease because they can manage their business’s finances entirely by USSD and access their money with debit cards.
Our mission is to create a world where every African can experience financial happiness. We believe that happiness begins with access. We’ve spent the last 10 years creating that access for our customers, watching them progress and ultimately experience financial happiness. Read more about how we’ve taken financial inclusion to the last mile in our latest Impact Report.
