In 2025, Nigerian unicorn Moniepoint processed ₦412 trillion in transactions, positioning itself as one of Nigeria’s largest payment platforms. In its 2025 Year in Review, the company also notes that approximately 3% of all transfers were for church or tithes. Placed in a section describing how Nigerians moved money by value, alongside categories such as business, food, and utilities, the figure likely represents a fraction of the total transaction value, rather than simply transaction count. Based on this assumption, churches may have received roughly ₦8.1 trillion, representing ₦667.5 billion per month, or about ₦21.95 billion per day, through Moniepoint alone. The data shows that religious giving is increasingly processed through fintech infrastructure, and Moniepoint has effectively become a conduit for one of Nigeria’s largest, least-examined financial flows. Faith-based finance calculation The road to ₦8 trillion is a process of deduction. Starting with Moniepoint’s total 2025 transaction value of ₦412 trillion, we first subtract the ₦25 trillion processed through its web gateway, Monnify. We then account for the company’s massive dominance in physical retail, where it claims to power 8 out of 10 in-person payments. Based on a disclosed monthly average of ₦10 trillion for its 1 million terminals, we remove approximately ₦120 trillion in POS (Point of Sale) transactions, leaving an estimated ₦267 trillion purely in the digital transfer bucket. When we apply Moniepoint’s official metric that 3% of all transfers are for "church/tithe," the result is a staggering ₦8.01 trillion. This figure represents a deliberate redirection of wealth that exceeds the total annual spend on essential categories like bakeries (₦1.7 trillion) and fuel (₦3.1 trillion), positioning the church as a primary, non-commercial pillar of Nigeria's digital financial flow. Traditionally, church donations were made in cash. Digital adoption through bank transfers, QR codes, and app payments has, however, made the flow trackable and measurable at scale. In this context, faith functions as a reliable, recurring payment vertical, comparable in scale to salaries, utility bills, and family support transfers. The numbers suggest that while they don't pay taxes, churches may be among the largest beneficiaries of digital payment infrastructure, even surpassing many small businesses or individual users in total transaction value. Even with conservative assumptions, religious payments via Moniepoint represent a multi-trillion naira flow in Nigeria. Moniepoint released its 2025 Year in Review in January 2026, offering a rare, platform-level snapshot of how Nigerians moved money over the past year. According to the report, the top five spending categories by value were family support, business, food, salary/wages, and utilities, reflecting both household survival patterns and the scale of informal economic activity routed through digital payments. The review also breaks down everyday consumption, showing, for instance, that Nigerians spent trillions of naira collectively on basic food items such as bread and cooked meals, underscoring how deeply Moniepoint’s infrastructure is embedded in daily life, from subsistence spending to large institutional transfers.
