Tosin Eniolorunda: The Engineer Building the Financial Infrastructure Behind Africa’s Businesses

By GINAGIDA Editorial Team

LAGOS, Nigeria — When Tosin Eniolorunda started TeamApt in 2015 with Felix Ike, the ambition was not to build one of Nigeria’s best-known fintech companies.

The company began by building technology for banks.

Today, the business is known as Moniepoint, and it has grown into a major financial technology platform serving businesses and consumers, with products spanning payments, business banking, credit, foreign exchange and other financial services. Moniepoint identifies Eniolorunda as its Founder and Group CEO.

The journey from TeamApt to Moniepoint is also the story of Eniolorunda’s own evolution — from an engineer who wanted to build things to an entrepreneur building financial infrastructure for millions of businesses.

A builder from the beginning

Long before Moniepoint became a major name in African fintech, Eniolorunda was interested in building.

In an interview with TechCabal, he recalled that he had been building things since secondary school and university. His technical background eventually led him to work at Interswitch, one of Nigeria’s pioneering payments technology companies.

That experience would prove important.

Working inside the payments industry exposed him to the problems that financial institutions faced and, more importantly, the problems their customers experienced.

It was an education that would eventually influence the company he would build.

Eniolorunda studied mechanical engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University. His university years were not without difficulties. He has spoken about failing his first year and how the experience forced him to reconsider his approach to excellence and focus.

The setback became part of the education.

He learned something that would become important later in his entrepreneurial career: complicated problems have to be broken down to their fundamentals.

From Interswitch to entrepreneurship

For a while, Eniolorunda had a comfortable career at Interswitch.

But the desire to build something of his own eventually became stronger.

In 2015, he and Felix Ike founded TeamApt.

The early TeamApt was not the Moniepoint that millions of Nigerians would later recognize.

The company was focused on building technology for financial institutions.

Its products helped banks improve parts of their operations, including payment processing and reconciliation. According to Moniepoint, its early financial products were eventually deployed across a large majority of Nigerian banks.

That experience gave TeamApt something many young startups did not have: a close understanding of how Nigeria’s financial system worked from the inside.

And then the founders began asking a different question.

What if they stopped building only for the banks and started building directly for the people and businesses using financial services?

That question changed the company.

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The Moniepoint opportunity

By 2018, TeamApt had already achieved some success providing enterprise solutions to banks.

But Eniolorunda and his team saw another opportunity.

Nigeria had a huge network of small businesses and informal entrepreneurs. Many needed reliable ways to receive payments, withdraw and transfer money, access financial services and manage their businesses.

The opportunity was enormous.

The challenge was infrastructure.

In 2019, TeamApt began putting much greater focus on Moniepoint and its agency banking business. TechCabal reported that Eniolorunda refocused more than 80% of the team on Moniepoint as the product began showing significant potential.

What followed was rapid growth.

Moniepoint provided point-of-sale terminals and financial services through a network of agents and businesses, bringing banking services closer to customers who might not have easy access to traditional branches.

The company was no longer simply helping banks operate.

It was building a financial network of its own.

Building for the businesses behind the economy

This is where Eniolorunda’s story becomes particularly interesting.

Moniepoint did not build its business around a narrow group of wealthy consumers.

It focused heavily on the small businesses that make up a huge part of Nigeria’s economy.

The trader.

The shop owner.

The restaurant.

The pharmacy.

The distributor.

The small manufacturer.

The growing company trying to manage its employees and cash flow.

These businesses may not always make headlines, but they are central to everyday economic activity.

Eniolorunda’s approach was to build financial products around their actual needs.

That meant payments, but it could not stop there.

Businesses also need bank accounts.

They need credit.

They need cards.

They need foreign exchange.

They need tools to manage money.

And increasingly, they need ways to connect with customers and markets outside their immediate location.

Moniepoint has gradually expanded into these areas.

The company now describes itself as a financial platform offering digital payments, business and personal banking, credit, cross-border payments and business management tools.

From payments to financial infrastructure

The transformation of TeamApt into Moniepoint reflects a broader change in the way African fintech companies are thinking about financial services.

The first generation of African fintech companies often focused on individual problems — payments, transfers, lending or digital banking.

The next generation is increasingly trying to build infrastructure that connects several of those services.

Moniepoint is following that path.

Its payments network gives the company information about how businesses transact.

That information can potentially help determine how businesses access credit.

And credit can help businesses expand.

This is an area Eniolorunda continues to emphasize.

In June 2026, as Nigeria introduced its Payments System Vision 2028 framework, he argued that the next stage of development in the country’s payments ecosystem could involve building credit products on top of existing payment infrastructure and using transaction data to improve access to financing for underserved businesses.

The idea is straightforward.

A business that has a history of receiving payments may already have evidence of its economic activity.

Traditional credit systems may not always capture that activity.

Technology can help bridge the gap.

A company reaches unicorn status

Moniepoint’s growth eventually attracted significant international investment.

In October 2024, the company announced a $110 million Series C funding round led by Development Partners International, with participation from Google’s Africa Investment Fund, Verod Capital and Lightrock.

The investment valued the company at more than $1 billion.

For Eniolorunda, it was a major milestone.

The business he had started almost a decade earlier had become one of Africa’s technology unicorns.

But the valuation was only one measure of the company’s growth.

The more important achievement was the infrastructure that had been built underneath it.

Moniepoint had evolved from a company building technology for banks into a platform increasingly serving businesses directly.

Beyond Nigeria

The company’s ambitions have also moved beyond Nigeria.

In 2025, Moniepoint entered the UK market with MonieWorld, a service initially focused on making it easier for people in the United Kingdom to send money to Nigeria.

The move reflected a growing understanding of the relationship between Africa and its diaspora.

Money moves between African countries and the rest of the world every day.

Families support one another.

Businesses pay suppliers.

Entrepreneurs receive international payments.

Professionals working abroad send money home.

Moniepoint sees an opportunity to build financial products around those relationships.

Eniolorunda described the African diaspora as an important market that remains fragmented and in need of better financial services.

For a company that began by building infrastructure for Nigerian banks, the move represents a significant change in ambition.

The market is no longer simply Nigeria.

It is Africans wherever they are.

A decade of building

By 2025, Moniepoint was marking its tenth anniversary.

The company reported that its financial services infrastructure had processed ₦412 trillion in transaction value during the year across more than 14 billion transactions.

It also reported that its microfinance bank had disbursed more than ₦1 trillion in credit during 2025.

Those are company-reported figures, but they demonstrate the scale the organization has reached.

The company has also continued to attract international attention. In 2025, it was recognized by CNBC among the UK’s leading fintech companies, reflecting its growing international presence.

For Eniolorunda, however, the numbers appear to point toward something larger.

The objective is not simply to process more transactions.

It is to build systems that make it easier for businesses to operate.

The next challenge: credit

If payments were the foundation of Moniepoint’s first major phase, credit could become an important part of its next one.

Millions of small businesses need financing to purchase stock, expand locations, hire employees or manage periods when cash flow is tight.

But many businesses do not have the traditional records banks typically require when assessing borrowers.

This creates what Eniolorunda sees as an opportunity for technology.

Transaction history can provide evidence.

Payment patterns can reveal business activity.

Digital records can help create a more complete picture of a business.

That could make it possible to extend credit to entrepreneurs who might otherwise struggle to obtain it.

It is a natural progression for a company that already sits inside the financial lives of millions of businesses.

The philosophy behind the company

There is a recurring idea in Eniolorunda’s career.

Build.

He has repeatedly described himself as someone who enjoys building things.

That philosophy can be seen in the evolution from TeamApt to Moniepoint.

The company did not remain attached to its original business model simply because it had worked.

It changed.

It moved closer to customers.

It identified new problems.

It built new products.

And it kept expanding the definition of what the company could become.

That willingness to evolve may ultimately prove more important than any single product Moniepoint has created.

What Tosin Eniolorunda’s story teaches entrepreneurs

There are several lessons in the journey.

The first is that a business does not always have to begin with a grand vision.

TeamApt began by solving problems for banks.

Those problems gave the founders insight into a much larger opportunity.

The second is that infrastructure can be a powerful business.

The most visible companies are often consumer brands, but behind them are payment systems, financial networks, logistics systems and technology platforms.

Those systems can become businesses in their own right.

The third is that markets evolve.

The company that started as TeamApt is not the same company it is today.

Its products changed because its understanding of the market changed.

And perhaps the most important lesson is that Africa’s biggest business opportunities may lie in solving problems that have existed for decades.

Financial access is one of those problems.

The technology may be new.

The need is not.

The road ahead

Tosin Eniolorunda has spent the past decade building financial technology around one of Africa’s most important economic groups: its businesses.

The first chapter was about helping banks.

The second was about bringing financial services closer to businesses and consumers.

The next chapter could be about using that infrastructure to provide more sophisticated financial services, particularly credit and cross-border products.

The opportunity is enormous.

So are the challenges.

Africa’s financial systems remain fragmented. Regulation differs from country to country. Millions of businesses still operate outside formal financial systems. And building reliable financial infrastructure at scale requires trust, security and consistency.

But those challenges are also precisely what make the opportunity so significant.

Eniolorunda’s story is therefore not simply the story of a Nigerian fintech founder.

It is the story of an engineer who saw the machinery behind an economy and decided it could work better.

He started by building software.

He ended up building infrastructure.

And if Moniepoint’s next decade is anything like its first, the most important part of his story may still be ahead.

About Tosin Eniolorunda

Tosin Eniolorunda is the Founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint. He co-founded TeamApt with Felix Ike in 2015. The company initially built technology for financial institutions before developing Moniepoint into a major financial platform focused on businesses and consumers.