BLOG
backIf I asked you to name someone really good at their craft, you might say Stephen King, who has a way of immersing his readers in his story settings so they can feel every bit of emotion portrayed.
But if you let me put you on, you could also say Nancy. The data engineer at Moniepoint who worked on a "search engine" for our finance data. Before this conversational analytics tool, if someone on the finance team wanted to know a specific number, like the "contribution margin", they had to ask a data engineer to write complex code, extract the raw data, and perform the calculations for them. Nancy’s project empowers non-technical staff to get the answers they need instantly, without needing a data expert every single time.
The finance systems’ conversational analytics tool, led by Nancy, which sits atop a semantic-layer infrastructure called Open Metadata, is but one reason to acknowledge her craft. So let me give you four more in a couple of minutes. The defence calls its first exhibit.
Exhibit A: First few weeks at Moniepoint
I want to preface this with a little lesson on judgment dimensions. At Moniepoint, we measure our values against eight judgment dimensions that guide how we live them out. They are the standard every DreamMaker works toward and the cadence that turns belief into consistent decisions and action, every single day.
On Craft, we say: A DreamMaker never stops working to master their craft. The standard we hold ourselves to is to work with the information we have, make our trade-offs clear, and always find a way to produce something better than expected. Good work is a baseline, not an occasion.
Now, in her first weeks of resumption, Nancy's manager, Wole, introduced her to a new project called Assurance, one of the team’s objectives for the year. She describes the finance systems team as a "team for teams"; its purpose is to take data produced by other teams (cards, payments, loans, credit, treasury, etc.) and turn it into tools that empower the finance business teams to move from being reactive to proactive and strategic.
The assurance project, in plain terms, is about ensuring that every revenue generated or expense incurred from every single transaction in Moniepoint that should leave a financial footprint actually does so. When a payment goes through on any Moniepoint system, the revenue and/or expense posting should generate a corresponding entry in the company’s general ledger. The assurance model checks that this is happening, and when it is not, it flags the gap so the finance business partners can investigate and resolve it.
Nancy didn't start from zero; there was an existing reconciliation project that she studied and used as a reference, talking to people and reading existing documentation to understand the approach before making her contributions to Assurance. Her contribution was extending the pattern to a new domain and building it to be easily scalable (so adding new accounts later would be quick, rather than manual rework). This also required leaning on cross-team collaboration, cards, payments and loans, meaning she was working within infrastructure and domain knowledge owned and maintained by other teams.
Nancy tells me she hates manual work, not necessarily because she finds it tedious; she says it’s just the way she is. So when she is building something, she is already thinking about the next person who will have to touch it, and the version of herself who will need to return to it six months from now, and she is designing for both of them. She worked on the assurance model so that adding a new account would require nothing more than a copy-and-paste. She built it so she would never have to rebuild it.
This is literally our stand on systemisation as a judgment dimension. You see, there is a particular anxiety that comes with being new somewhere, and if you’ve ever tried new things, you’d know what I’m talking about. Most people manage it by staying quiet, learning the rhythms of the place, waiting to be handed something to do. Nancy managed it entirely differently.
Exhibit B: Nancy is recognised for her craft
At some point after the assurance project was underway, her manager came to Nancy with a question. It was a relatively simple one: how could the finance business teams track changes to the definition of a business metric over time?
For instance, 'contribution margin' is calculated using a formula. When that formula changes, every dashboard, pipeline, and document that references it needs to be updated. Teams need to be notified, and the old version needs to be archived somewhere that anyone can find it. In practice, none of this happened cleanly, and as a result, different teams sometimes presented different numbers for the same metric, each convinced that theirs was correct.
Nancy proposed a semantic layer as the solution: a single source-of-truth analytical layer on top of the data warehouse, so changes to a metric's definition apply automatically everywhere and version history is trackable. She wrote documentation to pitch this approach.
This evolved into a bigger idea: a conversational analytics tool where business teams could simply ask natural-language questions about their numbers and get direct answers, rather than digging through tables themselves.
Nancy then researched and compared underlying technology options (CubeJS, dbt, DataHub, OpenMetadata), writing a detailed comparison document (with screenshots) and ultimately recommending OpenMetadata, largely because more of its features were available in open source. She led the deployment of OpenMetadata and set up the data assets needed to answer questions for a proof of concept. By December 2025, the proof of concept was working and able to answer questions on specific data assets.
During our town hall in June 2026, Nancy was publicly recognised by Tosin, our Group CEO. She had been at Moniepoint for fourteen months at this time, and the recognition was for her embodiment of the judgment dimension, Craft.
I could say more, but with these few points of mine, I hope I’ve been able to convince, not confuse you, that the next time you think about craft, don't forget Nancy.
If you're looking to master your craft at Moniepoint, our careers page is a great place to start.
