3 Questions Moniepoint must answer now

Moniepoint, one of the latest additions to the African unicorn club, has positioned itself as the backbone of Nigeria’s entrepreneurial economy.

With an over $200 million Series C round and a claim to power eight out of every ten in-person payments in the country, it has become the operating system for businesses across the country. And as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s April 1st deadline for PoS banking exclusivity approaches, many agents are ditching their service providers for Moniepoint over factors like internet speed and general reliability.

As the company transitions from a fast-growing startup to a systemic financial utility, concerns arise on whether its growth is masking underlying structural vulnerabilities, prompting the following critical questions.

1. Are your automated loan systems failing?

Moniepoint’s lending engine is celebrated for its reliance on data. By analyzing real-time transaction velocity on its PoS terminals, the company claims to assess creditworthiness with precision that traditional banks cannot match. However, the recent collapse of high-profile facilities like the ₦5 billion loan to e-commerce startup Alerzo and the ₦2.4 billion facility to Retail Supermarkets Limited (ShopRite) has exposed a dangerous blind spot in this automated model.

Moniepoint’s 2025 Year in Review emphasizes that it disbursed over ₦1 trillion in credit to approximately 70,000 small and informal businesses.

Since the lending engine was designed to empower the grassroots ‘provision store’, the large-scale facilities granted to capital-intensive entities like Alerzo and ShopRite represent a strategic pivot that falls far outside the scope of their demonstrated SME-lending expertise. The result? Court cases over significant defaults.

Moniepoint’s algorithms excel at seeing revenue, but they appear unable to account for operational burn, the true cost of running an asset-heavy business like Alerzo’s logistics fleet or ShopRite’s physical retail overhead. 

By early 2025, Alerzo had already survived three grueling years of structural decline, marked by several rounds of mass layoffs that slashed its workforce from 2,000 to fewer than 800 people and forced the closure of 14 warehouses. These were clear, publicly documented signals that the company’s venture-backed growth model had stalled, yet Moniepoint’s algorithms seemingly ignored these red flags.

Instead of recognizing a company that venture investors had probably stopped funding because of unsustainable unit economics, Moniepoint treated Alerzo’s transaction velocity as a guarantee of future solvency, essentially mistaking a company struggling to survive for one positioned to thrive.

If your systems can process 80% of the nation’s payments, how did they miss the fact that these borrowers were facing structural insolvency? So, I ask, are you over-relying on transaction velocity while remaining blind to the operational burn that ultimately kills a business?

2. Are you empowering PoS agents or exploiting them?

The heartbeat of Moniepoint’s success is its million-strong agent network. And it appears even more agents are choosing them as the clock ticks down to the CBN exclusivity deadline of April 1. Yet, beneath the promise of financial inclusion lies a fee structure that many agents find confusing. Take the mandatory ₦1,500 “insurance fee” bundled into the activation cost. For many agents, this is a ghost fee.

When a merchant gets a Moniepoint PoS, they pay a total of ₦25,000-₦26,500, broken down into a ₦12,500 caution fee, a ₦12,500 logistics/activation fee, and a ₦1,500 insurance fee for 1 year, according to Moniepoint business relationship managers. Because the ₦1,500 is bundled into the startup cost, most merchants view it as a one-time tax to get the business started and not an active insurance policy they can leverage.

My interaction with some PoS agents in Ekiti State reveals a safety net that is actually a trap. One agent, a five-year veteran, said he had always paid the insurance but didn’t know what exactly it was meant for. 

“No one prays for insurance problems,” he said. 

He assumed it covered cases of fraudulent debits and theft. But he was wrong. A Moniepoint relationship manager told me that the insurance does not cover theft. If an agent is robbed at gunpoint, the insurance they paid for offers zero relief. Instead, the agent is slapped with a ₦100,000 bill for a replacement terminal. 

When I asked a Moniepoint relationship manager about the “Not Activated” status on an agent’s terminal, she said Moniepoint employees sometimes forget to activate the payment. She even recalled an instance of herself forgetting to do so. While the money is taken, the human-led system sometimes fails to flip the switch. 

This is a professional breach of staggering proportions. The ₦1,500 fee is automatically deducted from the agent’s startup capital, but the actual cover is left to the memory of a busy field agent. If they forget, the agent carries the risk alone, while the company keeps the cash.

One agent said the insurance fee was “for the federal government”, while another, a woman, said her money was being deducted for insurance but she didn’t know what it was all about. Of the seven agents interviewed, only two appeared to have some understanding of the insurance fee they paid to get their terminal and when to claim it.

The scale of this extraction is monumental. With a million terminals owned by Moniepoint alone, a ₦1,500 mandatory fee generates ₦1.5 billion in revenue for the fintech. If this money is being collected without being activated, and if it excludes the risk of theft or loss, it is not insurance; it is a mandatory donation. 

Because the merchant is leasing the device (Rule #1: “You don’t own it”), the insurance is effectively a maintenance fund for the fintech, paid for by the merchant. It is like a tenant paying for a landlord’s structural insurance after paying rent and a caution fee.

And as if that’s not enough, Moniepoint’s marketing adds a layer of gaslighting. In their official guide, they promise to reward agents with ₦10,000 if a terminal is returned in great condition. A forensic look at their fee structure, however, reveals that this isn’t a reward at all but the agent’s own caution fee (the caution fee was still N10,000 in January 2023, when Moniepoint last updated the page) being returned. By rebranding a legal refund as a corporate reward, Moniepoint creates a system where the agent is grateful to receive their own money back, all while the company maintains the sole power to decide if the device is clean enough to warrant the payout.

And to make matters worse, a Moniepoint business relationship manager confirmed to me that the ₦12,000 caution fee, money meant to be held in trust, comes with an expiration date. If an agent remains on the platform for more than a year, the fee becomes non-refundable. This policy effectively punishes loyalty; the longer an agent serves the company, the more of their initial capital is swallowed by the system. It transforms a “refundable deposit” into a mandatory donation by stealth.

All these raise a serious question about the power dynamic in the field. So, I ask, is Moniepoint’s rapid growth being subsidized by the very people it claims to be including, or is this a deliberate extraction of wealth from Nigeria’s most vulnerable micro-entrepreneurs?

3. Why do your public numbers disagree?

In high finance, credibility is built on the consistency of one’s metrics. Unfortunately, Moniepoint’s public reporting has become a moving target. Analyses have identified a staggering discrepancy in the company’s transaction data: official reports for 2025 cite 14 billion transactions for the year, while internal documents leaked to the press claimed a monthly average of 1.67 billion, a velocity gap that leaves approximately 6 billion transactions unaccounted for.

This isn’t the first time the maths has defied logic; a similar $32 billion discrepancy in 2023 TPV figures (the size of Nigeria’s national budget) remains a lingering shadow over the company’s reporting standards. When figures fluctuate between press-ready snapshots and investor-ready year-end reviews, it becomes nearly impossible for stakeholders to determine the company’s true growth trajectory. So I ask, as you seek to cement your position as a continental financial leader, can the market trust your metrics, or are we witnessing a growth story written in pencil?

Why I ask

The questions posed here are not meant to undermine Moniepoint’s achievements but to hold them to the standard their market position now requires. If the company is to remain the “operating system” for millions of Nigerian businesses, it must prove that its automated risk models can account for the nuance of real-world operational reality, that its relationship with its agents is built on equitable partnership rather than hidden extraction, and that its growth narrative is anchored in verifiable, consistent data.

The fintech revolution in Nigeria promised to bridge the gap in financial inclusion. However, true inclusion cannot be built on ghost fees or opaque growth metrics. As the industry matures, the companies that will define the future of African finance should be those that demonstrate the highest levels of trust.

The ball is now in Moniepoint’s court: evolve from a disruptor into a responsible, transparent leader, or risk hard-won reputation on the very practices you once set out to displace.

Last updated: March 13, 2026