How TeamApt got inside Nigeria’s payment rails

When Tosin Eniolorunda brought Dennis Ajalie into TeamApt as a senior business development officer in 2018, the company was still building software for financial institutions.

TeamApt had, in Ajalie’s words, “two and a half products,” which were mostly focused on helping banks reconcile the messy reality of manual tracking. 

The year Ajalie joined TeamApt, the fintech sector in Nigeria was still taking shape. That year, startups in the space raised a record $103.4 million, but regulation remained uncertain. A draft policy from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) proposed new licensing requirements that signalled tighter oversight and higher capital thresholds for operators.

Even though fintechs were central to the CBN’s financial inclusion and cashless ambitions, the sector had no dedicated regulatory framework and was still evolving, according to global advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). 

Nigeria’s fintech sector has since scaled rapidly, raising $520 million in equity funding in 2024 alone, while the Central Bank has emerged as the de facto regulator of the ecosystem. What was once an emerging space is now central to how money moves in the country

Moniepoint Group, which Eniolorunda now leads, is one of the largest SME-focused fintechs in Nigeria and recently raised $200 million. Ajalie, who is also a software developer, now leads TeamApt as its chief executive officer, operating it as a subsidiary within the Moniepoint group.

Together, they have transformed what began as a bank-focused software company into something far more strategic: an infrastructure business that sits directly inside the flow of money.

From tools to rails 

Digital payment runs on an invisible infrastructure.

Every transfer or card payment passes through switches, gateways, processors, and settlement systems that connect banks, fintechs, and merchants. 

Founded in 2015 as a software solution provider for banks, TeamApt’s early goal was to bridge the gap between the front-end applications customers interacted with, mobile apps, and point of sale (PoS) terminals, and the complex back-end systems banks relied on to process transactions.

In the early days, Eniolorunda believed that if the company could build products that could sit between people and banks, it would have won. 

“Money and happiness are fundamental to human existence. At the centre of money and happiness is the banks because that’s where people save their money. We believed that if we could build technology solutions that implement these properly, we would have won because it is not going to change till Jesus comes,” Eniolorunda said in this 2018 feature. 

One of TeamApt’s early products, Olympos, launched in 2016, was an acquiring solution to help banks automate payment collections and their acquiring process, especially for PoS merchants. 

Before this, every failed PoS transaction or mismatched transfer required people to resolve. 

As smartphone adoption increased, the company added a mobile app component to the product and later evolved it into Moneytor by 2018, a digital banking service for financial institutions to track transactions with web and mobile interfaces. 

Commercial banks used Moneytor to power mobile products, including Sterling Bank’s OnePay and Unity Bank’s Unifi app. 

“We did some user interface (UI) work with FCMB and Stanbic,” Ajalie recalled. “Almost all the banks were on the acquiring side. We worked on mobile apps as well.”

But Olympus and Moneytor were not TeamApt’s first products.

Before digital banking became widely automated, banks relied heavily on operations teams to manually track transactions, match incoming payments to the correct customers, resolve failed or duplicate transfers, and ensure accurate account balances.

TeamApt built Profectus in 2016 to automate this process. 

“It was the first product that we launched,” Ajalie said. “It was not just successful in Nigeria—banks like Zenith, FCMB, and Sterling used it. It was also used in Ghana.” 

While banks are its current core customers, TeamApt’s first client was Computer Warehouse Group, a Nigerian information technology services and infrastructure firm. 

“To start, we closed a deal with Computer Warehouse Group to build a payment solution for them, and that’s how we started bootstrapping,” Eniolorunda said in 2019.

After this,  Fidelity Bank, a Nigerian tier one bank, became its first bank customer. 

These early products gave TeamApt visibility into how money actually moves across Nigeria’s banking system—how transactions pass through switches, how banks match incoming payments to customers, and how failures, reversals, and delays are resolved behind the scenes.

Becoming the rail

Instead of just building tools for banks, TeamApt wanted to sit within the transaction flow itself and built its payment switching engine, AptPay. 

The engine was ready in 2018, but it didn’t go live until TeamApt got a switching licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria in April 2019. This started the transition of the company from a business-to-business software-as-a-service provider to a direct participant in the country’s payment flow. 

Switches sit at the centre of digital payments, routing transactions between banks, fintechs, and payment networks. Whoever operates the switch sits at a critical point in the financial system.

But entering that layer meant taking on entrenched incumbents.

For interbank transfers, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) dominates through its NIP platform. Integration with NIP is effectively mandatory for financial institutions, making it one of the most powerful pieces of infrastructure in the ecosystem.

“We had incumbents,” Ajalie said. “For account transfers, you had NIBSS and their NIP solution. For NIP transactions, integration is practically mandatory for financial institutions. So we were going up against the juggernauts.”

The challenge forced the company to rethink its strategy.

Instead of focusing on large commercial banks, TeamApt turned its attention to other financial institutions (OFIs), including microfinance banks and fintech startups.

“We realised that down the line OFIs would become systemic to the industry,” Ajalie said.

At the time, however, those institutions generated relatively little transaction volume.

Moniepoint: solving distribution and volume

In 2019, TeamApt launched Moniepoint as a mobile money and agency banking platform targeting Nigeria’s informal economy. That year, it raised $5.5 million in a Series A round, after years of bootstrapping. 

Through a network of PoS terminals, Moniepoint agents could offer basic banking services, including cash withdrawals, deposits, and transfers, to people with limited access to traditional bank branches.

By building its own distribution network of agents and merchants, TeamApt ensured that a growing share of transactions could be originated, routed, and processed on its own infrastructure. Instead of competing for volume from banks and fintechs, it generated its own, and kept it within its ecosystem.

It now has over one million active PoS terminals. Nigeria had 5.90 million active terminals as of March 2025. 

Moniepoint was not another product layered on top of TeamApt’s infrastructure; it became a distribution engine for TeamApt’s infrastructure.

By 2020, processing up to $7 billion monthly in over 120 million transactions. Today, it processes  $250 billion annually from over 14 billion transactions while serving over 20 million businesses and individuals. 

The virtual account breakthrough

While building Moniepoint, TeamApt developed virtual accounts. The idea emerged while trying to solve a simple reconciliation problem.

“Tosin was trying to solve a problem of paying estate dues,” Ajalie said.

Residents would transfer funds to a shared bank account, but there was often no easy way to identify the payer for each payment.

To solve this, TeamApt created a system that generated unique account numbers for each payer. Payments sent to those accounts could automatically identify the sender and reconcile the transaction.

“We kept on plumbing, tooling, and retooling,” Ajalie said. “We had a hackathon at a hotel with some staff members. That was where we created the virtual account engine.”

Working with Providus Bank, Nigeria’s ninth-largest bank by assets, the system was launched and quickly adopted by fintech startups like PiggyVest and Cowrywise.

What began as a workaround became foundational infrastructure.

Virtual accounts transformed unstructured bank transfers into traceable, programmable payments, making it easier for fintech companies to collect funds at scale and manage reconciliation efficiently.

The product evolved into Monnify in 2019, TeamApt’s payment gateway and collections platform that allows formal businesses to collect payments seamlessly through web and mobile. 

In 2025, Monnify processed ₦25 trillion ($18.03 billion). This pales in comparison to the ₦412 trillion ($297 billion) Moniepoint processed in 2023.

TeamApt’s CEO explained that the disparity is expected because Moniepoint serves the informal market. 

Moniepoint’s scale has come from making itself indispensable to daily commerce, with its PoS terminals, instant settlements, and agency banking services woven into how these businesses operate. It has become one of the biggest payment providers for millions of Nigeria’s micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which contribute around 45% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and provide more than 80% of jobs. 

While Moniepoint’s volume depends on PoS terminals, which are the fastest-growing payment mode in the country, Monnify’s volume depends on people engaging with it through a computer or phone. 

Becoming the infrastructure behind Moniepoint

As Moniepoint grew, its brand began to overshadow the company behind it.

“Moniepoint was supposed to be the engine for the informal sector,” Ajalie said. “It became the bigger brand, and this necessitated the big change.” 

TeamApt reorganised, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer responsible for switching, processing, and integrations, while Moniepoint became the primary customer-facing brand. In 2023, TeamApt rebranded into the identity of its flagship product, Moniepoint, and became a subsidiary under it. 

By then, it had raised a total of $85.5 million across four funding rounds. 

Today, TeamApt’s infrastructure connects 16 banks and supports transaction flows across the broader Moniepoint ecosystem, according to its CEO. These include tier-one banks, except for First Bank. 

“All of those connections to the banks that TeamApt built over the years form part of the reliability Moniepoint currently offers,” Ajalie said.

In 2019, TeamApt claimed to have 26 African bank clients and processed $160 million in monthly transactions, according to company data. 

While the infrastructure powers much of Moniepoint’s services, it is not alone. 

“Moniepoint cannot rely on a single rail to deliver the kind of value, ease, and reliability that customers experience,” Ajalie said. “But we are probably the most efficient rail that Moniepoint has. This efficiency is not just in processing capabilities but in reconciliation capabilities that have been built into TeamApt.” 

Expanding into global payments

To capture more value across the payment chain, TeamApt has expanded into card processing. 

After receiving certifications from Visa and Mastercard, the company can now process card transactions directly for merchants and financial institutions. This places it among a small group of Nigerian players, including Interswitch and Unified Payments, that can locally process international card payments.

For Moniepoint, this also means its PoS terminals can now accept foreign Visa and Mastercard cards, enabling higher-value transactions, particularly for cross-border payments and international customers.

While Nigeria’s payments conversation has shifted toward transfers and account-based payments, card volumes remain significant, especially in merchant payments and cross-border transactions, where they are still the dominant rail.

In 2025, Moniepoint said its cards were used 1.7 million times every day. Verve, a payment card scheme operated by Nigerian fintech company Interswitch, grew its number of issued cards to 100 million in 2025. 

According to the CBN, payment card usage in the country has evolved in terms of acceptance, infrastructure, and operational efficiency, especially with the boom of PoS terminals. 

By moving into card processing, TeamApt is positioning itself to capture a share of that volume, while hedging against a future where no single payment rail dominates.

How TeamApt makes money

TeamApt’s model is built on capturing value at multiple points in the movement of money.

Across payments, fees are typically split between several players, including switches, processors, gateways, issuing banks, and networks, each taking a small cut of every transaction. 

For instance, a merchant can charge 1.25% of a PoS transaction value, subject to a maximum of ₦2,000. But it is shared among the issuer (30%), acquirer (32.5%), payment terminal owner (25%), local switch (5%), and payment terminal service aggregator (7.5%). 

Bank transfers and collections typically generate lower, flat fees of less than 1% shared across providers.

By operating across multiple layers, including collections through Monnify, switching infrastructure, and now card processing, TeamApt can participate in several parts of that fee stack simultaneously.

Individually, each take rate is low. But at scale, across millions of daily transactions and trillions of naira in annual volume, those fractions compound into a steady and defensible revenue stream.

Building on top of the rails

Owning infrastructure creates a second advantage: the ability to build additional financial services on top of it.

TeamApt says it is now expanding into value-added offerings such as direct debits and pensions.

Through a partnership with Awabah, a licenced pension agent, informal workers can register for pensions, tokenise their cards, and set up recurring contributions through Moniepoint’s network.

“Direct debits will be our major product for 2026,” Ajalie said. “We want to make it mainstream in the informal sector.”

Direct debits provide a secure framework for automated, recurring payments from a customer’s bank account to a biller. These mandates must be authorised by the customer and enable automated, efficient cashless settlement, reducing manual payments. 

As of the first half of 2024, direct debits accounted for only 0.44% of the country’s total payment volume. 

After nearly a decade of building payment technology, TeamApt’s strategy is increasingly clear: control the infrastructure that moves money, and then build financial services on top of it.