\nHi, I'm Adrian, and this piece is an attempt at rolling back the last 8 years of my career, which is also 8 years of working at Moniepoint. Here's to connecting the dots backwards, hopefully painting the picture of what growth within an organisation can look like!\nFirst, you set the stage.\nSince 2015, I’ve had the privilege of working and building impactful financial products and doing what I call the greatest job ever. I remember my interview with Tosin 8 years ago, more like a chat, really. I had just completed the mandatory NYSC after I graduated with a first class degree, and was looking at a couple of options for where to work. A number of companies were hiring at the time - Interswitch, PWC, etc. So, here I was, trying to decide where I'd fit in when my friend Felix reached out to me -  he had left Interswitch to start TeamApt Inc. (which is now Moniepoint Inc.),  and he asked me to join the company.\nI went to see Tosin at the TeamApt office, which at the time was also Tosin’s home at 1004 Apartments (one of Nigeria’s oldest housing estates) and we had this conversation where Tosin was painting a good picture about the dream he had for this company he was building, and how his goal was to create Financial Happiness.\nThe first thing that struck me that day was how atypical the interview was - I knew interviews were meant to be these straight-jacketed meetings, where things were formal. It was the first time I was hearing about stock options, equity, and things in that bucket. At that time, the mental model for jobs was - get a job, work at it, and keep getting promoted until you reach senior management. This was completely different.\nThe second thing was Tosin’s energy. He was so full of life and could describe in detail what the future would look like (for us and for customers/clients) if we were able to make a good impact. 
It was really an inspired conversation, and I thought to myself, “I'm young. I’ve got nothing to lose, and I’m among friends. Let’s do this!”.\nThat was it. I just gave it a shot and joined.\n\nNext, you go all in and do hard things.\nOne of the benefits and sometimes drawbacks (depending on how lucky you get), of taking a leap is that you have to go all in. There are no what-ifs, second-guessing, or being polarised.\nWhen I took the leap of joining Tosin as against going the traditional job-growth route, I went all in. At that time, we were a service business, working within the banks, and improving their internal tools. And it was fast-paced! Requirements came in frequently and fast! I was conscious of how high-stakes an environment it was; delivering excellently was paramount, or the bank could lose money.\nOur first major project was automating the Settlement and Reconciliation arm of Fidelity Bank. We also worked with a couple of banks on a project basis and built a suite of solutions that focused on automating backend processes for these banks. \nEvery day was as challenging as it was interesting, and I loved it! Coming in and doing that kind of work that you probably wouldn't do until you get to senior management was refreshing. \nWe made decisions on things that had a lot of ramifications, so it forced us to grow up quickly. We were building things that impacted the lives of people. So from that early stage, I already had a different way of thinking, knowing that what I was building was shaping a lot of people’s lives.\nA particular scenario that crystallised this for me, was after we automated Fidelity Bank’s customer support platform, which was a project I handled from A-Z. \nOne day, I was coming to work; I was living in Jakande at the time. On the bus I was in, there was a lady on the phone, talking about how good their new Customer Support Platform was. Apparently, she was a Fidelity Bank employee, working out of one of the branches. She was praising the Customer Support Platform, and she had no clue the person who built it was in the same vehicle as her. It was a mind-blowing, serendipitous moment for me.\nI've seen members of my team have moments like this over and over, which gives them renewed vigour and sheer joy. It makes them proud that the thing they are working on is really helping people - "I'm not just doing a job, but I'm actually helping people" because you can see the impact of your work in society.\nLesson: \nGo hard at things and build impact-driven solutions.\n\nYou evolve as the company evolves & pivot roles.\nAs we began to expand, to build more products, and build other things, more Engineers came in. The next major iteration was building for the bank's customers, this was now our 3rd/4th year, so we were gradually going from B2B to B2B2C. We worked on a couple of banking applications like Sterling 1pay, and Unified by Unity. \nThis required more engineers, and with more engineers came the need for me to be in charge of giving clear-cut directions on projects and products. This precipitated my being moved by Tosin into management, and being in charge of products at a new level and what a switch-up that was! 
I had to manage people, which was a different ball game entirely from doing the work yourself  - managing people, managing the products, managing what engineers were building. Testing, getting the requirements, all that good stuff. It was a change of pace and it was more hectic, with more responsibilities and more adventures for me.\nThe developers that came in, have today become Product Managers in their own rights. They're no longer developers because they've built within the company for a while. It was a natural progression. You come in as a developer, you grow - you can become an Enterprise Architect EA (for those who want to remain engineers), TPM or BPM (Technical PM or Business PM). You find your way up, or you are forced up because the reward for hard work is more hard work.\nSomewhere along the line, evolving and my innate passion for design met.\nI’ve forgotten what the motivation is now. But throughout my time from the beginning, I've always been design-inclined. Yes, I wrote code, but I liked designing more. I liked working on UI elements. I could translate almost anything into its design. Translation essentially means taking a design and converting it into something a user can interact with on a client - a website, an online software solution, a mobile app, etc.\nIt's one of the skills I have that I'm incredibly proud of, being able to translate any view. So, as my role evolved, it naturally tilted towards design, and I took on the aspect of product management that focused on design.\nLesson:\n Natural progression is always up when you are doing great work.\n\n\nYou lead and build out the Product Design team.\nFast forward to 6 years, I began officially handling the User Experience arm of the company, and I'd like to think of it as the homecoming my heart yearned for.\nThe first thing I did was restructure Design within the company. At the time, the team was structured such that every sub-product or channel had its own designer. And I recognised that we needed a cohesive experience for our users. So I took all the designers from all the teams and brought them into one funnel.\nI take all my experience of being a PM, being a developer, and being a designer, to vet all the requirements coming in from business and the PMs, to say, “Okay, this is what I think you should correct, this what I think we should do” so we just set up that funnel to make things a bit more efficient design-wise.\nIn a way, I’m the referee who tells everybody what everybody else is doing so that we are all on the same page. I am the interface between the requirements and design while being the information architect.\nA good example is with the BRM earnings. They earn commissions on different things - cards, POS, account deposits, etc. Every product team wanted to show their own commissions, but I felt that since the person earning these commissions was one person, all the money they earned would be shown on one dashboard regardless of where they were coming from.\nIn addition to structuring the team, the next thing I did was to set up a design language. We called it \nKamona\n, which is a growing library of all the elements you see anywhere on any app. \nToday all the UIs for all the user types across all the products Monnify, Moniepoint, Moniepoint business and personal and the Brms, the state coordinators, Moniepoint Kenya, Websites, etc, have a holistic design.\nDesigners no longer have to design from scratch. There's a library they can reuse and the output is very quick. It's very efficient and really good. Right now, we are a team of 7 designers and 1 illustrator.\nOf course, the team is young and still growing, right now we're trying to expand the team, make it a bit more mature, and improve the way we handle business requirements - marrying them with pain points we discover from our users during the discovery phase, removing biases. Getting more feedback channels in place to better serve our customers.\nWhat’s Next?\nI used to think I’d like to retire when I’m in my 40s, buy a boat and just sail across the Atlantic. But I know I’d get bored after a couple of months. I love how engaging my work at Moniepoint is. It feels like I started this journey yesterday, so I'm excited to continue being obsessed with maturing our User Experience.\nThere are new things we're doing, new processes we are implementing, and maturing as we go global. The frontiers are there, and we keep breaking the status quo, which gives me great joy. 
I'm evolving as the company's evolving. Everybody is learning and growing upwards. It's nice to say that after eight years, we still have that DNA of relentless growth that is still very strong.\n

Fullstack Engineer to SVP of Design: What 8 Years of Evolving within a Company Looks Like

\nMoniepoint’s products are often praised for their speed and reliability. From our terminals to our personal banking application, millions of our customers can trust that their transactions will not just go through, but do so at lightning speed. For a company of our scale, there are quite a few factors that contribute to this, but connecting them all, is our core banking application, and here’s the story of how it came alive.\nSimple origins\nA core banking application is a back-end system that handles banking transactions and financial records. Things like deposits, withdrawals, loans and more are all made possible by the core banking application.\nFor what Moniepoint initially was - an agency banking solution, these functions were handled by a simple table. It was a wallet table where the balances were saved and could be changed when a transaction occurred—just a basic database.\nThe problem with this was that it was too simplistic, prone to error and not at all scalable.\nBy the start of 2020, around a year after Moniepoint’s agency banking solution was first launched and had begun to gain traction, the risks associated with using the current system far outweighed whatever benefits of simplicity it brought. It was time to switch to a proper core banking application.\nOur first attempt at getting a CBA\nCaleb, who’s currently a project manager at Moniepoint, had spent less than a year at the company when the project he’d been working on was put on hold. He was excited to get on something new, and while he sought what that could be, he got a call from Felix about our plan to switch to a CBA.\nUntil this point, most of the transactions performed on Moniepoint were withdrawals and deposits. But the people who used the product were beginning to request more features, like loans, for example. And this was something to take into cognisance as we explored getting a new core banking application.\nThe first option was finding an open-source CBA that could handle our needs. Caleb spoke with Adrian, SVP of UX (who was a project manager at the time), about these needs. They started looking at assets, liabilities, expenses, and many other accounting terms and concepts they needed to familiarise themselves with to make sense of the project they were about to embark on.\nAfter doing this for a couple of days, he was called to work with Sulaiman, an enterprise architect,  on getting the new open-source CBA ready. Caleb’s job then was to study the system as a QA and figure out how it worked. Sulaiman’s job was to look at the code, and how we could integrate with it. Then, they would share their ideas with Tosin, our CEO.\nThe goal was to get an in-depth knowledge of this CBA, as that was the only way they could work with it. They explored how it worked in different scenarios and use cases.\nAfter about a week of working on that, trying to figure out if it had everything they needed, they were getting closer to perfectly understanding it, and could tell what was working and what wasn't. They understood how everything flowed and were preparing to go live.\nThe screw loose in the engine.\nGoing live with this open-source core banking application would involve connecting it to Moniepoint’s agency banking app, and using it for our agents. The plan was to have a demo the next day, then progress to staging, beta testing with some merchants, and eventually, migrating everyone onto it.\nOn the day before the demo, Tosin asked a question that would change our direction with this. As they discussed what they had discovered about the CBA we were planning to use, he asked a question about the transaction references.\nEvery transaction involves debit entries and corresponding credit entries, and although each transaction had a reference, Tosin asked if there was a reference for each debit and credit entry within a transaction batch.\nThe answer was No. With this CBA, you could track a batch, but not the entries within that batch. And that was a dealbreaker. We needed to be able to track the entries within each batch.\nLater that day, they stopped working on that CBA, as Felix had a decision to make; we either modified the code of the open-source application so it would have what we wanted, or we would build our CBA from scratch.\nTurning point\nBoth of those options had their pros and cons. The positives of modifying the code of the existing open-source software were that, firstly, we wouldn’t be starting from scratch. This meant that we could save time on months of development and updates, and have far less work to do. It also meant that we could deliver the entire thing faster.\nHowever, there were possibilities of the complexity of the code. Being an open-source application meant it would also be challenging to predict the maintenance of the codebase. The team discussed the pros and cons of whatever direction they’d take, and Felix decided on the next step. \nBuilding our own CBA\nA couple of weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic, Toba, SVP of core systems, got a call from Felix, our CTO, asking him to come into the office to discuss. Felix had decided to go with the option of building our own CBA.\nToba came into the office, and they had a deep dive. Everyone shared their knowledge of a CBA  - how it should work, and a couple of initial requirements that we needed for an MVP. They talked about the table structures, endpoints, expected behaviours, and more, and that 3-4 hour meeting went a long way in the product itself.\nWith this knowledge, Toba returned home to work on building something small for starters that they could test out. Part of it was influenced by the insight that Caleb and Sulaiman had garnered from extensively studying the open-source CBA we had hoped to use. The other part was years of experience gained from building similar solutions for Nigeria’s leading traditional banks.\nThe primary goal was to be able to post transactions. This involved a double entry - debiting an account and crediting another concurrently.  Ergo, for every debit, there had to be a corresponding credit to compensate for it, and vice versa. They also needed to put other things in place, which involved identifying the common properties they might need to manage on an accounting level.\nThey put everything together and created a scheme. Even though this was an MVP, they had to ensure they weren’t rushing things. A lot of the necessary context came from the product owners connecting to the CBA, who shared their insights from their previous experiences. The requirements were very clear, and that cut down execution time.\nIn under 48 hours, working on the code alone at home, Toba had an MVP ready. \nTesting and deployment\nAs soon as he was done, Toba called Felix to inform him that he had finished working on it. The team then got to work, verifying that this new application could handle our projected load.\nOnce that was confirmed, it was about converting that viable product and making sure that all the extra things that needed to be put in place down the line, that the CBA would not provide were available on it as well. And that took place over a couple of weeks.\nThe CBA today\nSoon after, integration started. Moniepoint was still primarily an agency banking product at the time, and became the first product integrated with the CBA. Every hand was on deck as they worked on migrating accounts from the previous system to the new application that had been built. They also continuously monitored it to ensure that all the posted entries were accurate.\nOver the next few months, Toba and Felix continued to make iterations and improvements to the MVP, and Caleb came on as a QA. With the bulk of the work done, Toba focused on making necessary updates with Felix, and Caleb would come on to test as soon as they were done.\nThe first of these updates happened a month after the MVP and periodically over the next 8-9 months. Every month, they would add something new or make a significant update on something we had before, based on the requirements of the other products that were using it, too.\nWith many more requests, they pushed the CBA to its limit and optimised it to help with the load. The initial data source was just MySQL, and then they introduced Clickhouse. They had a CDC (change data capture) system in place, so the main database could handle the writes, while the reads went to clickhouse. That allowed us to adjust the system and process more transactions.\nIt grew from a simple double-entry system to a proper core banking application that could handle many more features typical of a traditional core banking app. Features like interests, account sweeping, overdrafts, and liens, were introduced as we released more products, bringing us to the CBA we have today, that powers the dreams of millions across emerging markets.
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⁠If you'd like to be part of a team that's redefining the financial experience for the next million Africans, \nclick here\n to claim your spot.

Making the dream: How we built Moniepoint’s CBA.

\nIn this article, we meet Nerudo, a product manager from South Africa who just joined the Moniepoint team. His passion for learning new things, and a love for golf, have defined much of his life, and we’ll explore how he draws from those things to bring the best to his role.\nBefore joining Moneipoint, what did you do?\nI worked within the banking environments in South Africa and worked with most banks from a consulting perspective. I was at Dimension Data, RMB and then Standard Bank. I’ve also worked with financial investment houses. Enabling digital programmes for financial services companies has been my background throughout pretty much all of my career.\nIf you were to introduce South Africa to me, how would you do that? What would be your go-to place/activity?\nI think the coolest thing is the golfing community down here. There are a lot of golfers, and also a lot of world-class golf courses. So that's very unique for South Africa, for me. \nI play inter-provincial golf, so I get to travel around all the provinces to actually experience some of the golf courses for each and every province. And I can safely say we probably have the best golf courses - quite comparable to international facilities.\nThen obviously, there's hiking and outdoor things. There is the Drakensberg, one of the most extensive mountain ranges. Around that area, there’s also one of the best golf courses called Champagne Resorts. And then you go to Eastern Cape, which is in the more coastal region, and there's a plethora of golf courses almost every other hundred kilometres or so, and some of them are even 10 km apart. Most of them are very beautiful and world-class.\nGolfing seems to be your thing. How did that happen?\n\nWhen I was a kid, my uncle and cousins used to play when I visited them on weekends. I kinda got bored when I saw them play because I couldn’t play around, as I predominantly grew up in a township. They were very well-off, but watching them play this sport made me feel like I also wanted to play so that I could do something while I was there. \nDuring that period, I got interested, but back at home, we couldn’t afford it, so I was not allowed to play. And I put it at the back of my mind that I was going to go back and play the game.\nFast forward to when I started working, we organised a social golf event, and I seemed to be one of the few people who could get to play. So I started playing it consistently from then.\nIt was just something I wanted and wished to do, and once I got the opportunity to do it, I just took it with both hands. I wanted something I could control and just do on my own without needing to have a bunch of people, or forming a team, and it just became a therapeutic thing.\nNow, I do it almost every day by sunset. I'd walk on the golf course and play the course while I'm thinking about other things. It also became about mindfulness for me. I learned a lot of things throughout that time, including meditation, visualisation, and a couple of fundamental life skills. So, golf has become quite an integral part of me.\nDo you draw parallels between that and your work or, are they two completely distinct things?\nIn golfing, there’s a principle of surrendering to the elements and understanding that you can only control the next shot. Whatever has already happened is way past.\nThat aspect is quite important. You don't want to carry out what could seem to be failures, and have them hurt you in the future. You want to try and figure out what the present moment and its opportunities provide, be analytical and adept enough to understand it, and create a strategy based on that.\nThere's also a concept of understanding that you can only measure what you are and what you can do. Everything else is outside of your control. This gives you a sense of self. It can help you bring your mind back into context when it runs away.\nWe work with things that are very critical most of the time. You're almost always under pressure, and you can quickly burn out. So controlling anxiety and being able to be self-aware, and care for yourself allows you to perform at your best.\nThere are quite a lot of life lessons in golf. You learn small bits & pieces, and work benefits when you learn some of those skills.\n\n\nI stumbled upon your portfolio and saw a few documentaries. Do you want to share a bit about that? It’s not typical for what you described as your work life.\nI'm a very creative person. Growing up, I used to make things, and I'm very handy. I have a workshop where I make robots. I grew up in an environment where everybody used to think big, and it was not scary. So, people wanted to do as many things as possible. We had people who wanted to do electronics, and we had artisanal people around us who could give us access to some of their little knowledge. With these many people, I got exposed to many different lines of thought.\nI think of myself as a polymath. And by that, I mean I consider myself a person who would be inquisitive enough about multiple things, and try and get good at them.\nOne of those is storytelling. I’ve been learning that for a long time, and one of the reasons is that I want to tell the story of my grandfather, who lived up to a hundred years. So whenever I pick up a camera, I'm trying to simulate this one great story that I'm probably going to have to tell all my life. So that's one aspect of how I look at myself. Telling stories using visuals and pictures, and also trying to tell stories using music.\nHow do you think this connects to your work?\nThere's a lot of design involved in digital products. Now, because I’m creating things, I’m also carefully trying to craft this understanding of what makes good design - What’s a good font combination? What’s colour theory? How does it affect user experience? That means whenever I'm in conversations where people are very strongly design-oriented, I can help add my understanding of what they’re trying to achieve.\nIn addition, my being a person who’s usually doing a lot of things at a time comes in handy with my team. When you’re building a team, having to watch them grow to maturity and building efficiency at what we do, is an experience I've had in the past.\nWith my current team, I’m also looking forward to creating those patterns - increasing our efficiency and creating the systems and patterns that enable all of us to be able to work perfectly. That's something I'm looking forward to.\nFinally, what's your idea of perfect happiness?\nA perfect environment is one where all aspects of my health are well. It also includes feeling like all my efforts generate a purpose, either for those around me or for the greater good of those who might have to remember me one day. So, living a life of fully exploring learning new things, finding extreme difficulty at every single step, and going through all of those hurdles, and importantly, doing it for a purpose. So, yeah. Continuous learning on a path of purpose, with wellness of mind and body.

The New Dreamers: How Nerudo straddles golf, polymathy and building digital products.

Our attention has been drawn to several erroneous and misleading reports in the media about recent policy changes in the payment services space. Moniepoint MFB is a CBN-licensed Microfinance Bank, and as such, we are a deposit-taking financial institution. 

There have been no disruptions to our services even as customers have continued to make and receive payments via our personal and business banking apps.  

Moniepoint Inc. is a global digital financial services provider that invests in Nigeria and other emerging markets. In Nigeria, it is the parent company of two subsidiaries, TeamApt Limited, a Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN) licensed Switch and Processor, and Moniepoint Microfinance Bank, a CBN-licensed Microfinance Bank. 

TeamApt Ltd doesn't hold deposits and payments as it is a switching infrastructure company that facilitates payment processing.

We remain committed to driving financial inclusion in accordance with the existing regulatory framework and we'll continue to work tirelessly to power the dreams of the millions of businesses and individuals.

Moniepoint MFB is still on the NIBSS payments transfer list

\n\nYou probably wanted to skip this as soon as you saw “financial inclusion” in the title, but hold on for a minute. While it’s easy to chuck it up to a buzzword that’s probably even beginning to lose its fervour, there’s much real work to be done about it to meet the CBN’s 95% inclusion target by next year.\nWith our products being used by over 33 million Nigerians, across Nigeria’s 774 local governments, a wide range of micro-cultural influences and nuances come into play when people interact with them. Ensuring an inclusive experience for every one of those people remains front and centre when we create products, and this translates into every line of code we write.\n\nWhat does financial inclusion mean to the excluded?\nPicture a business owner situated in any of Nigeria’s local governments that do not cut across major cities. Given the location of this business owner, Mrs Maryann, and her customers, access to banking services is constrained.\nThe closest bank to them is an uncomfortable distance, and even if they were to make it, resolving whatever challenges they might have depends on several other factors. Because of this, the relationship between people like her and the banking system is tenuous, to say the least.\n\nThe more issues she encounters, the less likely she is to feel included in the banking system, or that what exists is meant for her. Compound this over months and years, and you might get an inkling of what’s meant when the financial ecosystem is described as “low trust”.\nBut this is just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. For this business owner, whose monthly turnover is just enough to keep her business afloat, ensuring her funds are safe is a top priority. Safety of funds, in this context, goes beyond just fraud. It also means that it’s inconvenient to have her money tied up in unsuccessful transactions, with her money somewhere in financial limbo.\nFor business owners like this, financial inclusion extends beyond just getting access to financial services. A huge part of the burden involves ensuring that the services they get access to are reliable enough that they can depend on them, and this is where our engineering team swings in with code.\nRedundant, but in a good way.\n\nHypothetically, financial transactions should work simply. To the user, money moves from A directly to B with no drama. But behind the scenes, it’s far more complicated. Several components are involved in making even the most basic transactions a success.\nIn this context, inclusive engineering goes beyond mapping the direct path from A to B. It also has to include all the likely unlikely things that may occur between the person initiating a transaction, and the person receiving it.\nThis is why building redundancies forms a core part of engineering at Moniepoint.\nRedundancies, in engineering terms, refer to multiple versions of specific components and flows created to improve the reliability of a system. Think of it as plan B-Z, in case plan A doesn’t work.\nSo, a fire breaks out. Ideally, the fire wasn’t supposed to happen, but here we are. Thankfully, we already made a fire extinguisher available. But what if the fire doesn’t let you get to the extinguisher? What if the extinguisher somehow fails? What if, for some reason, the extinguisher makes the fire get bigger?\nOf course, we focus on the more probable “what ifs”, but building redundancies involves accounting for these possible problems. We create multiple fail safes to ensure that, as much as possible, our processes have the highest chance of success.\nHow we apply this to our products.\nA live example of this is our “request for refund” feature. Failed POS transactions may occur for a lot of reasons, and when they do occur, they traditionally take a long time to resolve. The customer takes a printout of their failed transaction to the bank, where they’re told it might take a couple of days for the transaction to be reversed. Sometimes, a reversal never happens.\nBeyond building a system that reduces the number of failed POS transactions, our terminals also come with a system that enables merchants to log these failed transactions and request refunds for their customers.\nFrom days, the reversal process is brought down to minutes, without the merchant or their customer needing to disrupt their day. The efficiency of this system increases the likelihood of the customer choosing to make a card payment next time. \nBuilding redundancies like this means that we end up writing more code. The code to get the thing to work could be 10 lines (wouldn’t that be great if it was actually 10). But accounting for eventualities and handling what happens if it fails could extend it to a 100.\nYou write more code to make sure what you wrote doesn’t fail. Or that if it does, it can be resolved as smoothly as possible.\nBecause, in the financial system, there are so many moving parts. Many people you talk to, systems you integrate with, and quite a number of middlemen between the user and the person they’re trying to get to. So we want to make sure, even when it’s “out of our control”, we create systems that ensure that our users don’t experience failure.\nOur mentality is that, on the off chance that there’s a problem, solving that problem involves building a system to prevent it from happening again. And that keeps our product teams busy - finding and solving new problems.\nWhat this means for our users.\nFor the business owner, in our earlier story, most of this is invisible. Our first step is ensuring she has direct access to support as soon as needed. There’s someone down her street who understands our products and likely speaks her language too, and can, thus, give her tailored solutions.\nOn the side of our engineering team, they’re working to ensure she never even needs the help in the first place. Failed transactions are next to zero, and even when they happen, she knows they’ll get reversed as soon as possible without needing to go anywhere.\nAs with the “\nrequest for refund”\n feature, financial inclusion for her means having a solution that she can rely on to never fail. And if she can depend on us, so can a million businesses more.\n

Redundant systems: how Moniepoint engineers for financial inclusion.

\n\nLeading fintech in Nigeria, Moniepoint MFB, has restated its commitment to driving financial inclusion through innovative products that address payment challenges in the country.\nThe Head of Partnerships at Moniepoint Inc., Efemena Ogie, stated this at a Fintech Forum organized by the Nigeria Information Technology Reporters Association (NITRA) in Lagos. According to Ogie, it was in line with this commitment that the company has developed innovative solutions and products in the financial services space. \nAccording to him, for example our PoS alerts for transfers is helping businesses using Moniepoint’s PoS machines to receive instant credit alerts when their customers make transfers to their accounts. He said this has also taken the customers’ burden of waiting for merchants to receive alerts before they can leave.\nExplaining the innovation, Ogie said: “We had to think outside the box to make life easy when you want to make payments. If you go to a supermarket and you forget your card and you want to make a payment, you will have to make a transfer. But at some point, you have to wait until the merchant gets an alert before you can leave. You can just get angry at that point because your account has been debited. We saw that there is a better way to do that, so what we did was that instead of waiting, when you do a transfer, the alert should just hit the PoS, and that transaction will be seen as a card transaction and the merchant is able to print your receipt right there.”\nOgie added that more innovative solutions are coming into the payment space in Nigeria, especially with the ongoing implementation of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Payment System Vision 2025. \n“In a couple of months from now, you're going to see some massive innovation in the payment space because if you look at the CBN’s Payment System Vision 2025, in the documents, you have things like big data, artificial intelligence, contactless payments, and open banking. As we are talking, the CBN has also released the guidelines for open banking, so it's not something that will happen in 10 years but it's happening right now. The CBN has also released the circular for contactless payments. At Moniepoint, we are already working for our customers, we are already thinking outside the box to see how we can deploy services around these platforms,” Ogie said. \nIn his opening remarks at the Forum themed “Harnessing Nigeria’s Fintech Potentials: Challenges and Opportunities”, the Chairman of NITRA, Mr. Chike Onwuegbuchi noted that fintech has become the most exciting sector in the ICT industry, and in Nigeria as a whole. He added that the focus on the sector which is seen as the engine of financial dealings, economic growth, and transactional unification, was to present and aid various other sectors from the grassroots to international business/trade.\n\n\nFounded in November 2013, Nigeria Information Technology Reporters Association (NITRA) is the umbrella body for media practitioners reporting information and communication technology in Nigeria with a view to guide, protect and monitor ICT activities and reportage in print, electronic and online media platforms and ensuring professional development of its members through capacity building initiatives. \nBemigho Awala, PR Manager for MoniePoint Inc, used the forum to share perspectives around how opportunities in Nigeria's fintech space can be robustly captured. He cited the need for increased talent development in the industry while signposting Moniepoint NITHub initiative as an exemplar. Awala also made the case for innovative systems, enhanced due diligence and innovative solutions that meet market demand as critical pillars that undergird the emergence of a fintech ecosystem that works for all stakeholders. \n"Know Your Customer” (KYC) has become a cornerstone in establishing trust, ensuring security, and complying with regulatory standards. KYC is not merely an acronym; it represents a crucial set of processes designed to verify and authenticate the identity of customers engaging in financial transactions. As a responsible and compliant organization, we will continue to explore innovative tools and methodologies while actively collaborating and co-operating with all stakeholders in the financial services value chain to reduce the menace of fraud-related transactions", Awala said.

Moniepoint MFB supports NITRA Forum, restates commitment to financial inclusion in Nigeria

\nThere is one undeniable truth, that even the most ardent of skeptics might actually hold to be true – Nigeria, as Africa's most populous nation, has the potential to become the greatest country on the continent. From its vast arable land to an enormous population which has a high propensity to be an asset if adequately managed and deployed, it’s really ours for the taking.\nThe role of financial inclusion as a catalyst for economic development, poverty reduction, and social inclusion has been widely recognized. Some industry analysts aver that if we are going to be able to deepen shared prosperity, accelerate poverty reduction and reduce inequality, then we have to roll up our sleeves and invest in critical physical, financial, digital, technological and innovation infrastructure that support the building of our most valuable asset – Nigeria’s human capital. Because at the end of the day, financial inclusion, financial literacy is about the transformative power that people have whether they live in bustling cities or remote villages. The question to be asked is how do we create a meaningful experience for all stakeholders.\nIdentified barriers that prevent meaningful outcomes include low income, low financial literacy, lack of trust in financial institutions, high cost of financial services, inadequate infrastructure, and restrictive regulations. Sadly, these challenges disproportionately affect women, rural dwellers, youth, and micro, small and medium enterprises.\n\n\nHowever, as both empirical and anecdotal evidences have shown in many emerging markets, the effective deployment of technology in leapfrogging over previously identified barriers holds the biggest attraction. It’s usually a game-changer. India and China, with similar heterogeneous societies and large populations, are fine examples to learn from. Imagine the immense satisfaction that will come from POS terminals being able to cater to the tactile or auditory needs of the physically challenged – this is inclusiveness in all its trappings. Can we use technology to deliver financial literacy modules or microsite where people can access and understand using pidgin and local languages? Can we have contactless payment solutions become the default mode of payment in a way that means that the bus conductor isn’t asking a passenger for cash, all that needs to happen will be done via a mobile phone from Damaturu in Yobe to Agenebode, Edo state. Surely, an aggressive adoption of innovative technologies will make a huge difference in our lives irrespective of gender, creed, station in life and other societal markets.\nAnother tool for unlocking prosperity will be how we leverage digital financial services (DFS), which are enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile phones, internet platforms, and electronic payment systems. DFS have demonstrated that costs can be lowered while increasing the convenience, and expanding the reach of financial services to the underserved segments of the population. As we have seen with players like Moniepoint, they are fostering innovation and competition in the financial sector, creating new opportunities for value creation and economic diversification. Imagine a scenario where we can reverse engineer our financial landscape such that DFS become the dominant go-to service provider for accessing credit, savings, insurance, pensions, and other financial products and services that could improve their livelihoods and resilience.\nLastly, the role of transformational leadership at all levels of government of and the private sector should be of the highest national significance in curating a meaningful experience for all stakeholders across our financial services system. As we all know, creating a supportive regulatory and policy environment is necessary to foster financial inclusion. Clear and inclusive regulations that promote competition, innovation, consumer protection, and data privacy will be instrumental. Collaboration and partnerships among various stakeholders is closely aligned to the point. This is because even by our communal Ubuntu ethos as Africans, we recognize that no single tree can beautify a forest, it will take the coming together of many trees to provide shade and succor for many people.\nCreating a meaningful experience for all stakeholders in financial inclusion in Nigeria is not just about increasing the number of bank accounts. It's about empowering the unbanked, supporting financial institutions, and fostering a collaborative effort among government agencies and fintech companies. Only through a holistic approach that takes into account the unique challenges and aspirations of each stakeholder can Nigeria truly achieve the goal of financial inclusion, ensuring a brighter and more financially secure future for all its citizens.\nIn unlocking prosperity for all Nigerians, it is imperative to harness the power of technology and digital financial services. This would require concerted efforts from various stakeholders, including the government, regulators, financial institutions, fintech firms, civil society organizations, and consumers. By creating a conducive environment for innovation and inclusion in the digital financial space, Nigeria can realize its vision of becoming a leading African economy in the 21st century.\n\n*First published in the 2023 Q3 SANEF TALKS Quarterly Financial Inclusion Newsletter

Unlocking Prosperity: Creating Meaningful Financial Inclusion in Nigeria

\n\nWith financial services driving 27 percent of GDP growth in Nigeria's Q2 numbers, small and medium enterprises have been urged to leverage digital financial services in deepening value for improved productivity and business performance even as the nation's economy continues to confront several head winds.\nThis counsel was shared on the sidelines of the recently held Lagos International Trade Fair with the theme, Navigating Economic Challenges, Forging a Path to Prosperity, where leading digital financial services provider, Moniepoint Inc served as the official fintech partner at the 37th edition which was organized by the Lagos State Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI).\n\n\nSpeaking with journalists at the 10-day event which ended on Sunday, Vice President, Sales and Partnerships, Moniepoint Inc, Ifeanyi Duru noted that the Fair’s theme was apt and relevant to all businesses operating in Nigeria at this critical juncture of the nation’s socio-economic development.  \n“This year’s fair is significant because it coincides with the LCCI’s 135th anniversary and we are proud to be associated with such an illustrious brand. We recognize the importance of fostering connections and forging paths to prosperity, especially in the face of economic challenges that confront businesses and consumers. We remain resolute and committed to powering the dreams of millions of individuals and businesses. This event aligns with our mission to drive financial inclusion and economic empowerment, and we are delighted to be contributing to its overall success," Duru said. \nHe furthermore stressed that digital financial services can have a tangible impact on financial inclusion and the economy at large. DFS enhances the financial capabilities of consumers, catering to underserved segments of the population, and leveraging high mobile phone availability in Nigeria to foster economic growth by enabling new business models. \n\nAsiwaju Dr Michael Olawale-Cole, LCCI President/Chairman of Council, who noted that this year's trade fair, which is the last he'd be conducting as chair is the largest exhibition for businesses across Africa, has held for an unbroken chain of 37 years and remained pivotal for networking businesses for wealth creation in the diverse eco-system. \n“Over the years, the trade fair has grown to be another significant milestone in the economic life of Nigeria and the broader African continent. There is need to acknowledge the challenging economic environment that Nigeria has been facing in recent times, saying that “though some are necessary, these challenges have tested our resilience and have called for innovative solutions to foster economic growth and prosperity for our nation and for our people,” he said.\n\nHe thanked Moniepoint Inc and other organizations who supported the fair for coming through for the Chambers and lauded members of the LCCI Trade Promotion Board under the Chairmanship of Engr. Leye Kupoluyi for an outstanding performance. He noted that the organizers have taken note of the feedback vis-a-vis areas that require improvement, assuring that this will reflect in the 2024 LITF edition.\nLagos State Commissioner for Commerce, Cooperatives, Trade and Investment, Folashade Ambrose-Medebem, who spoke virtually at the closing ceremony said that "To navigate the economic challenges and forge a path to prosperity, the Lagos State Government, particularly through the Ministry of Commerce, Cooperatives, Trade and Investment is willing and ready to interface with you all, as we push the agenda of the present administration to support businesses by fostering a conducive environment and enhancing the ease of doing business in Lagos State.”

Small and Medium Businesses can catalyse Nigeria’s growth via digital financial services

\n\nAn exceptional affirmation to Moniepoint's unparalleled contributions to Nigeria’s financial services sector came in the form of two distinguished accolades, at the prestigious 2023 Brandcom Awards. Moniepoint Inc. received critical acclaim as it earned the "Award for the Most Outstanding Fintech Company in Financial Inclusion," while Moniepoint Microfinance Bank secured the "Award for the Most Outstanding Microfinance Bank in Consumer Engagement." These accolades signpost the company's remarkable commitment to enhancing financial inclusion and delivering outstanding services to its customers.\nNow in its fifth year, the 2023 Brandcom Awards ceremony, held in a glitzy event at the Civic Centre, Lagos, brought together the crème de la crème of the marketing and communications industry. Brands, agencies, and notable players that have pushed the boundaries of creativity and innovation were recognized for their remarkable achievements with Moniepoint's double win, a firm and unvarnished testament to the brand's unwavering dedication to powering dreams for businesses and individuals while creating a society where everyone experiences financial happiness.\nAs the "Most Outstanding Fintech Company in Financial Inclusion," Moniepoint Inc. continues to lead the way in making financial services accessible to all, particularly those in underserved and remote areas of Nigeria. It operates the largest distribution network for financial services in Nigeria through its subsidiaries, and has been awarded by the CBN in 2022 as the most inclusive payment platform in the country even as over 33 million people use their cards on Moniepoint’s POS terminals monthly across every local government in Nigeria.\nMoniepoint Microfinance Bank's recognition as the "Most Outstanding Microfinance Bank in Consumer Engagement" underscores the bank's commitment to delivering exceptional services and ensuring that its customer obsessive culture remains at the core of its operations. By prioritizing consumer engagement and satisfaction, Moniepoint Microfinance Bank has been able to build trust and long-lasting relationships with customers while driving enhanced due diligence and innovative security solutions to engender compliance in the financial services value chain.\nCommenting on the awards, Didi Uwemakpan, Vice President, Brands and Communications, Moniepoint Inc., expressed her gratitude and shared her vision for the future. "We are honored to receive these awards, which provide validation for the work that we do every day in providing innovative financial services, fostering inclusion and powering the dreams of millions. This is only the beginning as we will double down on delivering exceptional value to our customers via innovative products and services, leverage technology in more exciting ways to create engaging touchpoints in ways that redefine the banking experience and generally continue making a significant impact in the global financial services landscape.”\n\n\nAccording to the convener of Brandcom Awards and publisher of Brand Communicator, Joshua Ajayi, "This recognition encompasses various aspects of consumer interaction, such as financial education, customer service, digital banking offerings, accessibility, responsiveness to customer needs, and community involvement, among others. Amongst all other nominated Fintech brands, our distinguished panel of assessors made up of experts and seasoned marketing and communications professionals came to the conclusion that Moniepoint stood head above shoulders among others in this category to emerge winner, considering that it has played a pivotal role in advancing financial inclusion by providing innovation and accessible financial solutions to underserved or unbanked individuals and communities in Nigeria. This award reflects Moniepoint’s commitment to addressing the financial needs of marginalized populations, reducing financial inequalities, and fostering economic empowerment. It has been our culture to celebrate and showcase excellence at our awards night each year based on our mantra of Prestige, Integrity, and Credibility".\nMoniepoint MFB, recently received the prestigious Rising Star Family Business Award Pwc/Businessday 2023 Family Business Summit while Moniepoint Inc was listed for the second year running amongst the 100 most promising private fintech companies by CB Insights and the reputable Financial Times named it Africa’s second fastest-growing company.

Moniepoint scoops outstanding MFB and Fintech awards at 2023 Brandcom Awards

\nNigeria’s financial system has come under renewed scrutiny against the backdrop of the increase in the value of electronic payment transactions in Q1 2023 and the challenges posed by bad faith actors who exploit gaps in the payment systems even as Nigerian financial institutions have reported ₦159 billion ($201.5 million) lost to fraud since 2020. There is a need for all players in the financial services sector to come together in tackling these challenges.\nGroup CEO, Moniepoint Inc., Tosin Eniolorunda during a courtesy visit to the Chief Executive Officer, Fidelity Bank, Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe in Lagos. Onyeali-Ikpe, who welcomed the Moniepoint boss, used the opportunity to reaffirm her bank's appreciation for the patience and understanding demonstrated during its banking channel integration optimization which resulted in service disruptions and the inability of Moniepoint customers to receive financial inflow.\nIt will be recalled that Fidelity Bank had recently announced to its customers and the general public, the resumption of interbank transfers to all licensed financial institutions in the country. This was following speculative reports from various media publications that the bank had imposed transaction restrictions on some neo banks operating in the country.  \nDuring conversations around the growth of the digital payments segment and contributions of the financial services to Nigeria’s socio-economic development, Eniolorunda used the occasion to stress the point that Moniepoint as a responsible and compliant organization takes customer KYC very seriously. “KYC is not merely an acronym but indeed a cornerstone in establishing trust, ensuring security, and complying with regulatory standards. All accounts created on our platform have BVN verification and in addition to this we perform a liveliness check at the point of onboarding. This is a comparison of the account holder’s life picture and the BVN image as a way to reduce impersonation,” Eniolorunda maintained.\nHe continued, “we have zero tolerance for fraud and typically go all out to ensure that we track fraudsters and fraudulent transactions on our platforms. We have deployed and utilize robust fraud detection systems and technologies that can analyze patterns, identify anomalies, and detect suspicious activities in the system. As such we are better empowered to identify potential fraud incidents and trigger alerts for further investigations and remedial actions.”\n\n\nAs partners in deepening the CBN’s mandate of ensuring provision of adequate and convenient financial services to consumers and guaranteeing their protection as well as the various undercurrents in the financial services industry, Moniepoint and Fidelity agreed to work closely together to develop a tightly knit mechanism to stem the menace of fraudulent transactions and collaboratively push through in addressing payment challenges in the country.

Fighting fraud related issues in the financial ecosystem requires collaboration – Moniepoint CEO

Same Joe, minor –... If you’re from Nigeria and you don’t know the rest of that sentence, you probably have been living off the grid, up in the mountains. But for the initiated, this line from Moniepoint’s recent ads has become a piece of pop culture.\n\nLike everything else we put out at Moniepoint, there’s careful attention to every detail, every step of the way, to ensure we’re doing the best work. Here’s what that looks like for the Moniepoint Nigeria marketing team.\nPOV: your fintech product is kinda like sachet water.\nEvery society, like Nigeria, is filled with many products and services. Some, more esoteric than others. But most are so ingrained into everyday lives that they are not really viewed as products anymore.\nThink about things like sachet water, with millions of sachets sold daily. Or food items. “Groceries”, like Garri and sugar, are a staple in every home. There’s also everyday entertainment, like the hundreds of movies churned out by the Nollywood industry yearly.\nThese products and services are a part of the community, solving vital problems. And marketing them factors that in. There are no complicated campaigns, just the basics.\nTechnology solutions are often not thought of in the same light. Necessary as they might be, there’s a tendency to treat marketing them with the same level of complexity as the product itself has. A lot of jargon, really fancy videos, and little that makes an everyday user care.\nThe journey to determining a unique brand path for Moniepoint began with Didi, our VP, Comms, in 2021. She laid the foundation for the product and creative teams - led by Chinedu and Yemi, respectively - to land the brand promise that eventually metamorphosed into what has now become Moniepoint's brand ethos.\n\nWe were the solution people could use if they wanted to buy sachet water, garri, sugar, or even their movies. Every time they stepped out, they would encounter our products in one way or another. If we were that ingrained into their everyday lives, we had to use everyday language.\nIt wasn’t about us, but about them. Whatever fancy work had gone into creating our product didn’t really matter to them. They just needed to know how we solved their problems, and that’s what we focused on. \n\nMoniepoint’s fundamental truth.\nWhen I got on a call with Yemi, our creative director, to ask about how exactly we defined this “everyday language”, I expected to be breathed upon with some pixie dust that would open my eyes to some magical, alternate universe. And if you’re searching for that too, I apologise.\nWhat I got instead, was a redirection to some of the basics, that you might vaguely remember from that one marketing video you watched years ago - People, Product, Promotion & Price. This is not a refresher on the 4 P’s of marketing. What it is, however, is a first hard look at the science behind what you could interpret as our “creative”.\nThe focus was people. At Moniepoint, when we looked at our products, we considered what aspects this product fit into the lifestyle of these people. What problem was it solving? What purpose did it have in their lives? How did it impact them?\nAnswering these questions defined how we spoke to them, and ensured that we were communicating in a language that they could understand.\nIn order to do this, we needed to focus on insight so fundamental, that it was impossible to deny. As long as we could land on that human truth, then anything that we said, or derived from that truth would work. The whole point of selling is to sell so convincingly that there is no point arguing. We wanted people to align with a message because our message aligned with them.\nFor Moniepoint, our fundamental truth is reliability.\nAd-ing this all together\n\nAs Chinedu, Moniepoint Nigeria’s Director of Marketing, set out with his team to create its ads, this fundamental truth led the charge. It was so deeply set that it had many facets to it.\nFor one, we wanted to be identified as reliable. We were creating a service/experience that people could always rely on. Whenever they needed to collect payments for their business, they could come to us and receive reliable service.\nWe also wanted this reliability to extend to these businesses. Our offering, like a business account, helped them achieve this. This reliability also extended to how we communicated with them - in a manner that showed that we understood them, and were always there for them.\nIn summary, Moniepoint was that brand that people could depend on, no matter their scale - whether they were a large business spanning across the country, or just a mom-and-pop shop down the street. We needed to help them see this. Irrespective of where they were, or their cultural background, they had to know they could rely on us.\nSo, we had 3 objectives;\nThe first was to take our reliability and extend it to relatability. Such that if people were able to relate to us, they were able to trust us enough that they could rely on us.\nThe second was also aligning the product and the brand itself. So that whenever people saw our products, they could say,  “Oh yeah, that’s Moniepoint. I know them. They always speak to me, and I understand what they do. Also, their products are very seamless and easy to use”.\nOf course, we wanted things that could give us the best value for money. We wanted to strike that balance between creating a really good-looking ad, and creating content that people would enjoy. That way, it was memorable because they were genuinely entertained.\nSame Joe, Minor Differences.\n\nMemorable as this ad was, it was a regular day in the office for the team. Their own peculiar brand of regular, anyway. The ad, part of our “Get a bank account in your business name” series,  started with some research on Chinedu’s end.\nWhy should people open a bank account? Why should it be in their business name? What are the major issues? Why should they care about these issues? The answers he got tied into our truth of reliability.\nIn a society as entrepreneurial as ours, finding businesses via social media is very common. However, closing the sale is often difficult for these businesses when they present a personal account at the point of payment. Not necessarily because they want to, but because of how complicated the process of getting a bank account traditionally tends to be. This was where we could come in. With our business banking solution, we could help these businesses become more reliable.\nWith this problem defined, the creative team crafted stories around this. Yemi describes this as the “idea space”. This meant looking for the common denominator between the identified problem, and our unique selling proposition. With this defined, in his words, “that actually is 50% of the work done”.\nAlongside Yemi, Funmi, our copywriter, explored the story. She first considered the lead actor who would be starring in the ad and what scenario would look most natural to him. Then, tied this into the relatability of romantic relationships. They explored the trappings and heartbreak associated with catfishing, and connected that to our messaging for the businesses.\nWith this perspective, what seemed just like a fun skit, becomes the consequence of a series of well-thought-out ideas.\nBringing the idea to life\nWith the general idea of the story,  the next step was to convert that story into a script. Funmi recalls this process as being collaborative, with everyone on the team contributing their perspectives to create a holistic story.\nSomewhere along this path, “same Joe, minor differences” was birthed as a joke, which immediately rang out to them as something that fit the story they were trying to tell.\nThe phrase carried the weight of what was intended. Joe might not have intended to be unreliable, but he ultimately seemed so. Every detail he presented to his date differed from who he was in person. And this perfectly embodied the feeling customers could get when a business looked really promising, but ended up providing a personal account at the point of payment.\nIt was technically the “same business”, but there were now “minor differences” between their idea of the business and what they now saw. Minor differences that could jeopardise a sale.\nEvery script the team wrote, including this one, was assessed with a framework. This internal framework ensured that what they had wasn’t just a fancy ad, but that it truly spoke to our audience, and could achieve the goal for which it was intended.\nWith the story set and the script in place, the next bit was to translate the script into the ad we now have. The team searched for a production house that had the better strength in telling Nigerian stories and could authentically represent the narrative we were going for.\nWith a production team selected, they fine-tuned the production plan and analysed treatments. At these pre-production meetings, the team searched for a location that would best interpret the story and what kind of actors would be the best fit. Everything from the setting, to the costumes and scenery was defined in order to tell a cohesive story, that our audience in Nigeria could feel connected to.\nProduction, Post-production\n\nOn shoot day, everything comes alive. The team is on the ground to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Yemi, Funmi, and the rest of the creative team ensure that the creative direction is being followed. Obinna, Moniepoint’s Director of Content, is present to guide with his production knowledge. And Chinedu ensures that the brand elements are in place, and we’re communicating exactly what we intend to.\nTogether, they see it through to post-production, working and reviewing different cuts till a final one that perfectly tells the intended story.\nAfter the ads are shot, they still have to go through  ARCON - Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, ensuring that what we’re communicating complies with regulatory guidelines and advertising laws. This leads to getting a deployment certificate, after which the ads are ready to go live.\n\nGoing live\n\nWith all the work that had gone into the ads, the team expected the reaction to be generally positive. They had done their homework and, with the insights they got, put together a quality ad. Still, the reactions took them by surprise.\nPeople tend not to like ads. For example, if you’re not subscribed to YouTube Premium, then you know those 5 unskippable seconds can feel like a year.\nBut this resonated with our audience.\nEven though the team had put in the work to create quality ads, it was still validating to see how much it was taken up. In drips and trickles, phrases from the ad were used, even in unrelated conversations.\nThe people we wanted to speak to heard every word loud and clear, and it stuck with them.

Making the dream: how Moniepoint "markets" to the mass market.

\nSpecial Adviser to the President on Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) and Investment, Dr Jumoke Oduwole has revealed that there are approximately 23.8 million family businesses, responsible for millions of jobs, dispersed throughout the country and collectively they contribute around $200 billion annually into the nation’s economy. \nShe made this revelation at the 2023 Family Business Summit, a collaborative event organized by Businessday, My Family My Business, and PwC Nigeria. Oduwole noted that the figures reflect the glaring significance and the impact that family businesses have on Nigeria’s economy and the need for us all to ensure the sustainability of our multigenerational businesses. She furthermore stated the government's resolve using the instrumentality of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council to make Nigeria a progressively easier place for businesses to be established and to grow, with a focus on the micro, small and medium enterprises sector.\n“We must ensure the sustainability of these multi-generational enterprises collectively. With this sustainability, we aspire for more Nikes and BMWs to emerge from our shores, scaling across Africa and on a global stage. That is the vision and a collective effort we must all pursue”, Oduwole said while speaking to the event’s theme, Built to Last: Building A Multigenerational Business in the Age of Volatility.\nLeading technology-driven business bank in Nigeria, Moniepoint MFB, was honored with the prestigious Rising Star Family Business Award in recognition of the giant strides made by the firm over the years and their contribution to the Nigerian economy as part of activities at the Family Business Summit.  \nReceiving the award at the Summit, General Counsel at Moniepoint MFB, Okechukwu Eke emphasized the huge significance of ensuring that family businesses thrive while stating Moniepoint MFB’s renewed commitment to driving long-term success and the survival of these economic enablers via innovative solutions.\n“Moniepoint MFB remains committed to its strong ethos of powering the dreams of family businesses even as it continues on its journey of innovating to create more opportunities, financial happiness and deepening financial inclusion. We are delighted to be recognized for our positive contributions to the economy and we look forward to partnering with all stakeholders especially government at all levels to bring renewed hope to all Nigerians,” said Eke. \nOther stakeholders at the event include keynote speaker Martin Roll, a global family business and family office expert, Sam Abu, country senior partner at PwC Nigeria, Oyeyemi Oke, managing director 1st Fiduciary Limited, Toyin Sanni, CEO of Emerging Africa, Cosmas Maduka Junior (Coscharis Group), Ope Agbato, Executive Director, Technical and Animal Husbandry Operations, Animal Care, and Oludayo Obasanjo, Executive Director of marketing and development at Obasanjo Farms Nigeria Limited.\n

Moniepoint MFB receives Rising Star Family Business Award even as Family Businesses contribute $200bn to Nigeria’s economy yearly

\n\nMoniepoint Microfinance Bank conducts its business in strict compliance and observance of extant laws and regulatory circulars issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria on matters relating to the principles and procedures of Know Your Customer” (KYC).\nFor us, “Know Your Customer” (KYC) has become a cornerstone in establishing trust, ensuring security, and complying with regulatory standards. KYC is not merely an acronym; it represents a crucial set of processes designed to verify and authenticate the identity of customers engaging in financial transactions. \nThe primary objective of KYC is to prevent financial institutions from being unwittingly involved in illicit activities such as money laundering, terrorist financing, and fraud. By thoroughly understanding who our customers are, Moniepoint MFB can mitigate risks, safeguard our reputation, and maintain the integrity of our financial system.\nFor our business and personal banking operations, we are guided by CBN’s regulation on account opening and have maintained robust internal mechanisms to bolster our customer identification procedures. In accordance with every other regulatory protocol, we conduct BVN verification on all account openings with enhanced due diligence.\nFurthermore, to demonstrate the primacy we place on KYC, we have developed an online course that we take our stakeholders through to help deepen their understanding and drive strict compliance. \nAs a responsible and compliant organisation, we will continue to explore innovative tools and methodologies while actively collaborating and co-operating with all stakeholders in the financial services value chain to reduce the menace of fraud-related transactions.

Moniepoint MFB restates commitment to KYC principles and procedures

\n\nMembers of the public are urged to disregard false, malicious and misleading publications on social media that Moniepoint MFB has relocated to the UK. This is a fully Nigerian business, domiciled in Nigeria and committed to ensuring financial happiness for all our stakeholders. \n
\nMoniepoint MFB is a fully licensed Microfinance Bank by the CBN and it is a subsidiary of “Moniepoint Inc”. Moniepoint Inc. is a US-registered, global, all-in-one digital financial services provider with operations in Nigeria, Kenya, and an ongoing expansion into other emerging markets and offices in the US, and UK. \n
\nMoniepoint MFB is based in Nigeria and has its headquarters in Oyo state. Moniepoint MFB is led by Mr Babatunde Olofin, who's the \nManaging Director\n. Moniepoint remains in Nigeria alongside its leaders who are working assiduously towards powering the dreams of millions of Nigeria that trust our fast and reliable services.\n
\nMoniepoint MFB currently serves over 1.8 million businesses, enabling them to carry out financial transactions that power their dreams. \n

MONIEPOINT MICROFINANCE BANK REMAINS IN NIGERIA

Housemates in the just concluded eighth season of Big Brother Naija reality TV show, tagged as the All-Stars edition have expressed gratitude to Africa's leading digital financial services provider, Moniepoint Inc., over its lead sponsorship and the curation of exciting touchpoints to engage and experience the brand during the show.

\n\nAt a meet and greet session for the All-Stars which held in Lagos, they stated their admiration for Moniepoint’s fast, easy, and reliable services that they had experienced on the personal and business banking platforms since leaving the show, adding that this was a true reflection of consistency and a brand that works to ensure that everything is on point.

\nReceiving the BBN All Stars contingent at its office, Tobi Amira, Senior Vice President, Business Loans and Salary Advance, took the housemates on a brief session about Moniepoint.\n
“We are a digital financial services provider for businesses and most recently individuals. We have built a very reliable system and provide our services at very affordable rates leveraging technology to ensure that we can continue to push the government's financial inclusion agenda. As one of Africa’s largest fintechs, we saw mutual synergies which spurred us to sponsor this season of Big Brother Nigeria which is without doubt, one of the biggest reality and entertainment intellectual property in Africa. We are excited at what the future holds as we double down on powering dreams for businesses and individuals.”

\n\nThe All Stars Housemates who made the trip include: Gen Z baddie and winner of the All Stars show, Ilebaye Odiniya, Pere Egbi, Adekunle Olopade, Cynthia "Cee-C" Nwadiora, Ikechukwu "Cross" Okonkwo, Chukwuemeka "Frodd" Okoye, Season Six winner Hazel "Whitemoney" Oyeze, Seyi Awolowo, Doyinsola David, Ike Onyema, Somadina Anyama and Prince Nelson

\nGroup Chief Executive Officer, Moniepoint Inc. Tosin Eniolorunda, who briefly joined the event virtually, noted that the Housemates were all worthy ambassadors and should be proud of their time on the show.
“Well done to BBN All Stars for all the excitement and entertainment they gave to Nigerians and Africans over the course of 90 days. Thank you for doing the work that you do and we are happy that you enjoyed every encounter with the Moniepoint brand throughout your stay on the show. BBN has helped to birth the dreams of a lot of young Nigerians over the past 8 seasons, Moniepoint is doing the same across the financial services landscape. We are passionate about including many people in the financial net – empowering them to live better lives and we hope that you'll partner with us to do fantastic work in this regard.”
\nThe BBN All Stars edition brought back fan favourites from the last six seasons which saw Ilebaye win the coveted N120 million prize money with 30.08 percent of the votes cast, over Mercy Eke with 23.48 percent and Cee-C with 23.41 percent. According to Multichoice, the All-Stars edition recorded 1.53 billion votes cast throughout the season which is the largest ever in the show's history.\n\n\n
During a diary session styled side event hosted by Director, Content Marketing, Moniepoint, Obinna Okerekeocha, the housemates revealed some interesting facts about their time on the show. Here are a few excerpts:\n
\nIlebaye\n
I had so much fun during the Moniepoint Thursday games. Even though I would have loved any of the contestants to win, if I had to make a pick, I'd choose Doyin if I didn't win.  Life as a winner and celebrity coming out of the house hasn’t been easy being the youngest multimillionaire. It's been stressful on social media and everywhere especially the media rounds. But it’s been all love and light from my fans. I haven't seen hate. If you drag me, my fans will drag you back. I am trying to get adjusted to this new me and I am working on creating a better version of myself.\n
\nPrince Nelson\n
One part of me that many people didn't get to see on the screen is that fact that I am a nerd. I studied Pure Physics in school and when I am not doing entertainment, you'd find me digging into Science, Astronomy and Astrology as I'd always wanted to be an astronaut while growing up. So, in my spare time, I am studying the stars, ancient African religions and history.\n
\nCee-C\n
When I heard that I had been selected for this edition, I had mixed feelings. Obviously, I was worried and scared.  Because it’s one thing to go and be yourself and the misunderstanding that could arise but then I was excited because it was going to afford me the opportunity to meet new people which is something that I love to do.\n
\nFrodd\n
Being an All-Stars season, having to see a lot of people whom I call my friends outside the house coming into the game was kind of a motivation for me. Besides the fact that we were all close, I saw them play the game with a bit of maturity, I saw us all go out trying to be calm even if the chaos tried to overtake us but I had a very great feeling coming back to the House.\n
Ike\n
My favourite housemate, first it's got to be Cee-C. How can I forget her. But I also liked the action that Pere was giving me.
⁠\n
Doyin\n
My mom has been the most influential person in my life. She's imparted everything that I am today. I am quite a quality person and it takes someone who's got quality to raise someone like me and that's my mom for you.  
⁠\n
Adekunle\n
My favourite TV series is Game of Thrones. If you have seen it, then you'd understand my choice. My character of choice in the series is Tyrion Lannister and that's because he's the most intelligent person in the GoTverse. There are parallels that can be drawn, Tyrion survived to the very end as one character people didn’t think will make it through, I have been on BBNaija twice and on both counts I made it till the very end.

\nThe Housemates also used the engagement session to express their willingness to partner with Moniepoint to power more dreams across the nation. Adding that they’d be looking forward to more innovative and value-added services from the organization.

BBN All Stars Housemates laud Moniepoint, as they reveal interesting facts about their time on the show

\nFor the second year in a row, Africa's leading digital financial services provider, \nMoniepoint Inc\n, has announced its listing in the sixth annual \nCB Insights’ Fintech 100\n ranking (previously the \nFintech 250\n), showcasing the 100 most promising private fintech companies of 2023. CB Insights is regarded by top industry analysts as the most trusted source for technology market insights. The \nFintech 100\n includes a mix of companies at different stages of maturity, product development, and funding. The cohort has raised nearly $22B in equity funding across 381 deals since 2019.\nUtilizing the CB Insights platform which fuses machine learning, algorithms, data and visualizations, the research team selected these \nFintech 100\n winners from a pool of more than 19,000 private companies, including applicants and nominees. These companies were chosen based on factors, including equity funding, investor profiles, business relationships, R&D activity, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, and proprietary Mosaic scores, as well as criteria such as tech novelty and market potential. \n“We are honored to be recognized by CB Insights as one of the top 100 fintech companies of 2023. This listing validates our unwavering commitment towards powering dreams and driving financial happiness for everyone. It is also a strong reflection on our momentum in terms of growth, innovation and making a real difference in the marketplace,” said Tosin Eniolorunda, Group CEO of Moniepoint Inc.\nHe continues, “our team has worked tirelessly to deliver innovative solutions that empower individuals and businesses across Africa with accessible, efficient, and secure digital financial services. This recognition is testament to our efforts in enhancing financial inclusion and transforming the lives of millions across the continent.”\nIt will be recalled that Moniepoint Inc which has been named as Africa’s second fastest-growing company by the reputable Financial Times servicing over 1.7 million businesses, and helping them process over $100 billion in 2022.\nRepresenting 24 different countries across the globe, this year’s \nFintech 100\n is shaping the future of real-time payments, spend management automation, embedded finance, and more,” said Chris Bendtsen, Lead Fintech Analyst, CB Insights. “Together, they are not only increasing the pace of innovation, but launching new products and features to revolutionize the industry as a whole. I cannot wait to see what this cohort accomplishes next.” 

Moniepoint makes the CB Insights’ Fintech 100 List 

\nCustomer Service Week has been about celebrating the people behind the scenes, who resolve issues and ensure a remarkable experience for customers worldwide. But celebrating them is kind of hard if you don’t exactly understand what it entails, wouldn’t you agree?\nFor a better picture, I asked 7 customer service team members about their experience at Moniepoint. Beyond how truly tasking it can be dealing with tons of people (we know how people are), I learnt that there’s a deep satisfaction and sense of fulfilment that comes from being able to solve problems every day. But that’s just the tip. Learn more from their responses;\nWhat are the expectations vs reality working in customer success?\nBisola \n- I expected that working in customer success would be about building strong relationships and achieving high customer satisfaction.\nThe reality is that, while building relationships and customer satisfaction are important, challenges include handling difficult situations and managing customer expectations. It requires a balance of empathy, problem-solving, and effective communication skills.

\nKingsley \n- I expected the job to be exceptionally challenging, emotionally taxing, and demanding. I also feared that the work hours in customer service might lack flexibility, potentially disrupting my regular schedule.\nIn reality, assisting customers in resolving their issues has been a source of deep personal satisfaction for me. I find it incredibly rewarding and fulfilling to be able to make a difference in their lives and provide solutions to their problems.\nI also greatly appreciate the commitment my company demonstrates towards employee development. They consistently provide thorough and comprehensive training programs and a wealth of valuable resources, all of which have enhanced my skills and knowledge within my role. I'm fortunate to work alongside a team of managers and colleagues who are both knowledgeable, incredibly supportive and cooperative.\n
\nVictor \n- I expected to be able to provide exceptional customer service, resolve issues efficiently, and build strong customer relationships. However, the reality is that customer support can be demanding and requires a high level of patience and problem-solving skills. \nIn this role, you may encounter difficult customers, complex technical issues, tight deadlines and daily goals you have to meet. It is crucial and important to remain calm and professional, even in challenging situations. \nAdditionally, customer support professionals often have to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as responding to emails, WhatsApp chats and managing live chats. Prioritisation and time management skills are essential to address all customer inquiries promptly and effectively. While this differs from the expectation, I actually find contributing to their overall satisfaction of customers quite fulfilling.\n
\nJane \n- I expected that I’d resolve customer issues quickly, and keep interactions brief. \nThe reality is that customers sometimes do not know how to communicate their challenges, and to resolve whatever challenge, you have to understand it first. So, each customer comes with its own reality.\n
\nAnjolaoluwa - \nEveryone thinks our job is easy; just open a chat and respond, how can that be hard? But in reality, it goes way beyond that.\nYou basically have to put yourself in the customer's shoes, empathise with the customer, manage their anger, escalate their issues, follow up with the escalation and in a case where resolution is taking time, you have to call the customer and feel the anger firsthand.\nWhat is the easiest thing you’ve had to do?\nBisola\n - Troubleshooting and resolving customer complaints at the first point of contact. To provide helpful and friendly assistance to customers.\n
\nVictor \n - The easiest thing I have had to do as a customer support officer is to provide customers with basic information about Moniepoint’s products and services. This task is straightforward and requires minimal effort on my part. It involves listening to the customer's query, understanding their needs, and providing accurate information that satisfies their query.\nWhile this may seem like a small task, it is crucial to building a good relationship with the customer and promoting our company's brand. As a professional, I strive to handle all customer requests with the utmost care and attention, regardless of their complexity.\n
\nJoy - \nI would say attending to customer’s complaints and inquiries. Over the past few years of working in the customer success department, it has become a norm for me to interact with customers and help answer their inquiries while resolving their issues/complaints. This comes to me naturally, because it’s what I do for a living daily.\nAny tough experience you’ve had?\nVictor - \nThe toughest was when a customer was extremely irate and frustrated due to a technical issue we had with the app that we could not resolve immediately. Despite my attempts to empathise with the customer and offer alternative solutions, the customer remained hostile and demanded an immediate resolution. It was difficult to handle as I had to maintain my composure and professionalism while dealing with the customer's anger.\nI had to remind myself that the customer's frustration was not directed towards me personally, but rather towards the situation. Eventually, after several attempts and escalation to the team in charge, we resolved the issue, and the customer's frustration subsided. This experience taught me the importance of active listening, empathy, and maintaining a calm demeanour even in the face of difficult situations.\n
\nAnjolaoluwa \n- During the cash scarcity period, we had to deal with a surge in complaints as our customer base grew rapidly, but we pulled through.\nWhat’s the best part about your team?\n\nBisola -\n Collaboration. We work hand in hand amongst ourselves to ensure timely responses to Business owners. Another interesting thing is the excellent problem-solving abilities we all possess. We consistently go over and beyond to find creative solutions to customer issues.\n
\nJoy - \nMy team comprises the most wonderful people this world can offer. They are very approachable and always willing to lend a helping hand whenever you need help. It is surprising how I have yet to meet everyone on my team, but we all interact like we have known each other for ages. This makes the whole working experience easy for me.\n
\nAnjolaoluwa - \nWhen everyone is stressed or tense about work, we send funny emojis and stickers on the group chat, which really reduces the pressure.\n
\nWhat’s a challenge you’ve had to solve?\nKingsley \n- A business owner sent in a Social Media complaint that he could not access his personal account and transfer his funds to his business account. I could tell he was very frustrated as he had already tried to resolve the issue himself without success.\nI apologised for the experience and escalated the issue to second-level support for resolution, as I could not provide a first-time resolution. I followed up with my Team Lead to fast-track the process, as the resolution took a long time. \nI ensured that I provided the business owner with regular feedback via calls and messages until the issue was finally resolved, and he was very appreciative and happy. I learnt that patience and empathy are key when dealing with customers.\n
\nJoy - \nThere was this time I came across a very difficult merchant on one of our work platforms, he had lots of transaction issues and was really irate. It felt like every effort to calm him down was futile. I took it upon myself to escalate and followed up with the escalation to ensure it was resolved within the shortest possible time, as I promised the merchant. The excitement in his messages after the resolution gave me so much joy.\n
\nPrecious - \nA customer initiated a transaction that got rejected due to an underpayment. She was advised to provide a valid account so we could process a refund, which she did. The refund was processed, and she complained of not being credited. I provided her with refund details, including the refund session ID, which she took to the bank, and the bank confirmed that they had a downtime when the refund was processed, hence the reason she was not credited. She informed me that she had gotten her refund and was happy. I was glad to be of assistance.\n
\nWhat is your least favourite thing about your job?\nKingsley - \nHandling challenging customers, specifically engaging with individuals who display rudeness, anger, or unreasonable behaviour, can prove emotionally draining and create significant stress.\n
\nVictor \n- Personally, my least favourite thing about the job is dealing with angry or upset customers. It can be difficult to remain calm and professional in these situations, but it is essential to do so to resolve the issue and maintain the customer's satisfaction. Additionally, sometimes there are technical issues or system errors that can be frustrating, especially when it takes too long for the team in charge to resolve. However, these challenges are all part of the job, and it is important to approach them with a positive attitude.\n
\nJoy - \nIt will be the downtimes we face sometimes. It can be a bit draining during those periods, but the good thing is that it always gets resolved on time.\n
\n\nWhen you’re not working, what works for you?\nBisola -\n When I'm not working as a customer success, I enjoy taking time for self-care, connecting with friends and family, and pursuing hobbies that bring me joy and relaxation. It's important to find a healthy work-life balance to recharge and be at my best to provide excellent customer support.\n
\nKingsley \n- I enjoy spending time with my family and friends. I also spend my time designing websites and applications as a form of upskilling in UI/UX. I find it important to have a good work-life balance, and I am sure to make time for the things I enjoy outside of work.\n
\nJane - \nWhen I’m not working, reading books(all kinds) and sleeping works for me.\n
\nPrecious \n - Spending time with my family, watching movies and cooking. \n


Behind the Tickets: A Chat with Moniepoint’s Customer Success Team

A Warm Call On A Rainy Day\nIt was a rainy Wednesday, and I got ready for standup as usual, but little did I know that this standup was coming with very different news.  I was 2 minutes into the call before I took in what had just been said - I was going on a work to Kenya. Kenya?! I took a glass of water and replayed the call in my head. With the company working on expanding to Kenya, Our team had been selected to travel to Kenya, spend months there, studying the market and their needs and working to integrate our solutions into their system before we officially launched. I had barely spent 6 months, and it was still a few weeks to the end of my internship, so you can imagine how surreal it felt. Here’s how I got here.\n\n\nHow I joined Moniepoint\nThe story of how I started my internship as a product manager is funny because I wasn’t always a ‘techie’, and I had an actual dream. Yes, a dream, but it is a story for an article. I first started out in marketing, and I think I owe you a story. \nI studied Public Administration and hoped my placement would align with that. I put out the word to family and friends. Then, a family friend who sold computer software and hardware offered me a Customer Support role. I gladly accepted it, as I just needed to work somewhere. One day, the business owner approached me and said, ‘Why don't you create a social media page for us?’ So I created it, created a Google My Business page, and started getting higher traffic to our store, that’s when it first occurred to me that I could go into marketing through social media as far back as 2013.\n\n\nwhen I graduated Uni\n
\nSo, I continued in that field, and I went on to work for a fashion brand. From there, I worked at the London Fashion Festival as the Public Relations Manager. I did a couple of other jobs and started considering going into other areas of marketing. But the last place I worked before Moniepoint was Code 4TEEN - a platform for kids to learn to code from as early as primary three.\nAt Code 4TEEN, I wore multiple hats. I started as a Learner Success and Relations Manager. I was asked to lead the Product Success team a few months in, and as I took on the role, I noticed that it was similar to product management. I was learning about product management on the job, and it dawned on me that I loved this job more than marketing. I got so addicted to learning that I started consuming almost everything I had access to. Then, I enrolled at Product Dive to learn Product Management; Gamechanger! \nAfter my training, I knew it was time to do more. I needed to work in a company with clear goals, focus and distinction of roles. So, I started researching, applying, getting rejection letters, etc. When I saw the opening for Moniepoint, I was excited. Although my friends and family didn’t understand why I wanted to move from a lead position to an internship role, I had read so many things about Moniepoint on GlassDoor and Twitter that I knew it was worth the shot. \nMaking the dream, before Kenya\nMy first challenge as a newbie was understanding the terms being used. I wasn’t familiar with most of them, but luckily, I asked questions. I’d ask for the full meaning of abbreviations, the meaning of some words, the terms, software, the working method, and everything we used here. Although I came in as an intern, I wasn’t ready to just sit when I could be learning and growing. I started applying myself to tasks and asking to take on as many possible tasks.\nAt some point, when I felt like I was asking too many questions, I’d jot my questions and take them to my line manager. My mom used to say, ‘Someone who asks questions never misses her way’. It sounds basic, but that has kept me this long at Moniepoint - I ask questions. I am one person who would never feel embarrassed to ask the ‘stupid’ question that most of the team wanted to ask. \nI casually remember a conversation with the CEO, when I was a few months in and chuckle. It was the cash crunch period, and I had great ideas on what we could do to penetrate more petty businesses and help traders without BVN receive cashless payments.  So I wrote a proposal, with reasons to buttress my point and marketing ideas. For a minute, I paused before sending it because it’s a general group chat for everyone in Moniepoint. But I eventually did, and Tosin was the one who responded. It was such an insightful conversation. I learnt more about banking policies, and I am still very glad I asked that question.\nBy the second month, I had learnt a lot and was put on a task - LRMS (Loans Recovery Management System). I absolutely enjoyed my time working on LRMS. LRMS covers the entire flow of the repayment process; It is used from when an incident is logged to when it closes. I would document every time we added new features to the product and brief the Recovery Officers on the feature and how to use it.\nI also had to receive feedback from them on how the product was helping them handle the Business Owners (BO) who needed or had taken loans. My favourite task on this was the documentation part. If we added a new feature or made a new update, it was my role to document. I just loved doing it. I was also in charge of ensuring the ROs were aligned with the updates, so I’d create FAQs each time a feature was to be uploaded. I also did surveys bi-monthly to get feedback on their experience with the platform/ new features and ask for their suggestion on the new functions they’d like to see. \nI consider this my first love at Moniepoint, even though I love what we’re doing in Kenya.\n\nwith a colleague, at Moniepoint\n
\nGone East, wouldn’t be back for a few months. \nIt was a few weeks to the end of my internship when I followed the team to Kenya, and that’s crazy because I hadn’t been confirmed - I was still an intern. And here are some of the reasons I think contributed to being on the team that went to Kenya.\nFirstly, anyone who has worked with me can attest that I always get the job done. I, too like work, lol. There’s hardly a task I’m given that I won't go to the ends of the world to find the answer or how to handle it. I start by googling it to confirm how it has been handled in the past. Then, I get on calls with everyone I know who can explain more to me. As long as the job is put on my table, trust me to get it done.\n Sometimes, this means trying new things entirely, like working on the QA team, so that we can work faster and more efficiently. \nSecondly, I learned that my life depended on it (well, technically). I am a Technical Product Manager, and if we cannot understand the terms or process of work from design to engineering, I’m bound to manage a shabby project. So, I keep learning. I am on YouTube almost every time, and it has helped me a lot. I consider myself a ‘do all it takes to get the job’ kind of person. \nThirdly, I give and receive feedback. I think you can never really grow or do better if others aren’t giving you feedback. For me, it’s a vital aspect of communication and teamwork. Sometimes, a colleague sees something you don’t. Or their experience with a method makes them know it won’t work. I am usually very interested in asking for feedback. Because at the end of the day, we want to finish the job on time and well. Referencing the conversation with Tosin, before then, I was sure we were not taking opportunities and could create accounts without BVN. But when Tosin explained the policies, they made more sense to me. Now, I factor in that conversation when thinking up innovative ideas. \nYou’re probably wondering why I think these were part of why I was chosen to join the team in Kenya. I picked these off feedback from my line manager during my confirmation appraisal. And it’s not like I didn’t know some of these about myself, it just felt really good to hear someone else say it, especially your line manager. \n\nMe, in Kenya\n
\nIt’s an exciting career phase, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. There’s so much more to learn and explore, and I’m excited to see how our work will impact millions of Kenyans' lives.\n

Taking Flight: From Internship to Kenya

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a technique that is used to track and capture changes made in a data source, typically a database, and utilize those changes in various downstream systems or processes. With CDC you’re capturing inserts, updates, and deletes – the classic CRUD operations – and using this information to perform certain tasks, which could be as simple as updating another database or as complex as triggering entire workflows in an event-driven architecture.\nThe concept of CDC isn't particularly new. It has been around since the dawn of databases. In the early days, it was mainly used in data warehousing environments. The goal was to transfer only the changed data instead of reloading the entire dataset from operational databases to data warehouses. \nFast forward to today, in our modern world of real-time analytics, microservices, and distributed systems, the concept of CDC has increased in popularity.\nNow, one might ask, "Why should we care about CDC? What makes it so important?" To answer that, let's imagine this: You're running a global e-commerce platform. A customer just placed an order. Now you need to update the inventory, trigger a payment process, inform a logistics partner, and maybe even update recommendation engines for other users – all in real-time. How do you do this efficiently without impacting the performance of your transactional systems? CDC can help.\nAt the heart of most software systems is users manipulating your application state by invoking actions. Some actions are read-only, while some actions involve write operations that result in changes in the application state. These changes could be in the form of a database insert, update or delete.\nMore often than not, if you're running a distributed systems architecture, you might want to propagate these changes from one part of the system to another. CDC has this concept of source and target. The source, where the change events originate, is typically a transactional database. The target is where we want these change events to be mirrored or used – could be a data warehouse, another database, or any system that's hungry for this fresh data.\n\nForms of Change Data Capture\nSo how do we capture these changes? There are three primary techniques:\nTimestamp-based\n: This is a pull-based approach where systems query the source based on the last updated timestamp. Source items with the last updated timestamp above the threshold can be read for change updates.\nTrigger-based\n: This is a push-based approach that can rely on using database events and triggers to propagate change events from a data source.\nLog-based\n: This is a pull-based approach that involves tailing the changelog file for a data source and looking for specific entries in the logs. The log entries are propagated to downstream systems in real-time.\n\nTimestamp-based CDC relies on querying the source at intervals with a timestamp threshold. Changes after the timestamp are loaded into the target. 
\nThis approach is my least favorite because the target becomes a burden on the source. Imagine the source is receiving heavy traffic. If the target starts querying the source at intervals, that could add load to the source system. \n\n\nTrigger-based CDC relies on triggers at the source db to push changes to the target. I prefer this to the timestamp-based approach. However, since each change update at the source will require a trigger to be invoked, triggers can add some overhead at the db level. The trigger is a piece of code that could quickly add up in times of high traffic. \n\n
The log-based approach happens to be my favorite of all 3 because it’s the least intrusive. The source database logs changes in the transaction log. Changes are read by a connector and logged to a target. Databases today already have the idea of transaction logging. So adding a connector to the transaction logs is not going to impact the source system in any way. \nReal-Life Applications of CDC\nReal-Time Analytics\nData Replication\nAudit Trails\nEvent-Driven Architecture
\nLet's look at some real-life examples or applications of CDC.\nWe have \nReal-Time Analytics\n. Say you're running an e-commerce business, and you want to provide personalized recommendations to your customers based on their browsing and purchasing history. In such a scenario, you can't wait for end-of-day batch processing to update your recommendation engine. You're dealing with real-time data needs. Here's where CDC can come into play. With CDC, changes to user data can be captured and sent to the recommendation engine in real-time, providing up-to-date personalized experiences to your users.\nAnother example use case of CDC is \nData Replication\n. In a distributed systems setup, It's not uncommon to have the same data stored in different places for various purposes. CDC allows you to capture changes from a source database and apply them to a target database, keeping your data fresh and consistent across systems.
\nOur third application of CDC is \nAudit Trails\n. In many industries, knowing who changed what and when is not just good practice; it's sometimes a legal requirement. I work in financial technology, and many times, we want to know who made certain changes in the system. CDC can capture changes along with the metadata like when the change was made and by whom, allowing you to keep a complete audit trail.
\nFinally, CDC can be applied to \nEvent-Driven Architectures\n. This is where CDC truly shines! In an event-driven system, actions or 'events' in one part of the system trigger actions in another part of the system. CDC can capture data changes as events, triggering downstream processes like workflows or notifications. \n


\nDeep dive into a log-based CDC tool (Debezium)\nMuch of my experience with Change Data Capture has been with the popular tool called Debezium. From the official website, Debezium is described as an open-source distributed platform for change data capture. When pointed at your data source, it can help you respond to inserts, updates and deletes in a fast and durable manner. Let’s look a bit closer at how Debezium works: \n\n\nBy pointing Debezium at your data source, it is able to stream change updates (inserts, updates, and deletes) into a messaging queue like Kafka. Thus facilitating real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Consumers can then plug into Kafka and utilize the streamed updates however they please. \nAside from streaming change updates, Debezium also accounts for schema evolution. The database schema changes are also included in the updates to Kafka, allowing downstream clients to keep track of the shape of the data as they process it. \nAfter Debezium streams data source changes to Kafka, different kinds of services can connect to Kafka and process the change updates. In the diagram above, we have a data source, cache, search-indexer, and data lake all connected to kafka to process the streamed change updates from debezium. \nSetup\nTo run a basic setup for debezium with MySQL, one can follow the official documentation here: \n\nhttps://debezium.io/documentation/reference/2.3/tutorial.html\n\nThe documentation shows how you can plug a connector to a MySQL instance and start reading change events from the MySQL database. Instructions are straightforward and easy to follow. One should be able to complete the setup and testing in under an hour or two. \nCDC connector lib\nOver the past few months, I built a library that allows one to easily set up connectors to a data source and read change events. The library allows for two primary CDC use cases: \nChange Replication\n and \nChange Processing\n. Here’s the source code for the library: \n\nhttps://github.com/durutheguru/cdc-connector-lib\n\nFor the rest of this write-up, I’ll work with the library to demonstrate some things that can be accomplished with Change Data Capture. \nLet’s run a setup on our local env to have a fair picture of how this works and how we can utilize it. We’ll make use of the docker-compose file in the project resources folder: \n```

version: '3.1'


services:


  zookeeper:
    image: wurstmeister/zookeeper
    ports:
      - "2181:2181"
    networks:
      - docker-net


  kafka:
    image: wurstmeister/kafka:latest
    depends_on:
      - zookeeper
    ports:
      - "9092:9092"
      - "9093:9093"
    environment:
      KAFKA_ADVERTISED_HOST_NAME: kafka
      KAFKA_LISTENER_SECURITY_PROTOCOL_MAP: PLAINTEXT:PLAINTEXT,PLAINTEXT_HOST:PLAINTEXT
      KAFKA_LISTENERS: PLAINTEXT://:9092,PLAINTEXT_HOST://:9093
      KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS: PLAINTEXT://kafka:9092,PLAINTEXT_HOST://localhost:9093
      KAFKA_ZOOKEEPER_CONNECT: zookeeper:2181
    networks:
      - docker-net


  akhq:
    image: tchiotludo/akhq
    environment:
      AKHQ_CONFIGURATION: |
        akhq:
          connections:
            docker-kafka-server:
              properties:
                bootstrap.servers: "kafka:9092"
              connect:
                - name: "connect"
                  url: "http://connect:8083"
    ports:
      - "8181:8080"
    networks:
      - docker-net


  mysqldb:
    image: mysql:8.0
    restart: always
    healthcheck:
      test: "mysql $$MYSQL_DATABASE -uroot -p$$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD -e 'SELECT 1;'"
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 300s
      retries: 20
    environment:
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=employee
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=1234567890
    ports:
      - "33080:3306"
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    networks:
      - docker-net


  postgres:
    image: postgres:latest
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_DB=employee_database_sink
    networks:
      - docker-net


  connect:
    image: quay.io/debezium/connect:2.2
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - kafka
    ports:
      - "8083:8083"
      - "5005:5005"
    links:
      - kafka
      - mysqldb
    environment:
      - BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS=kafka:9092
      - GROUP_ID=1
      - CONFIG_STORAGE_TOPIC=connect_configs
      - OFFSET_STORAGE_TOPIC=connect_offsets
      - STATUS_STORAGE_TOPIC=source_connect_statuses
    networks:
      - docker-net


volumes:
  db:


networks:
  docker-net:



```\nThe file consists of the following services: 
\nZookeeper\n: For distributed consensus, orchestration, and cluster management of our Kafka broker(s). \nKafka\n: Our messaging queue, where change updates will be streamed. \nAKHQ\n: A viewer for our Kafka instance. Akhq allows us to view topics, connectors, and messages in Kafka\nMysql\n: The database from where we intend to stream our change updates. Debezium will connect to this MySQL instance and stream change updates to Kafka. \nPostgres\n: The destination database for our replication events. Data that is read from MySQL will be replicated to Postgres in our setup. \nDebezium\n: The debezium connector will do the heavy lifting of connecting to the Mysql log and updating kafka based on changes in MySQL db. \nLook for DatabaseSyncTest in the package com.julianduru.cdc.examples. Because we want to look at the changes happening in our CDC pipeline, we will enable inspection on the test. Modify the environment variables on the test configuration and set INSPECTION_ENABLED=true. \nNext, inspect the application.yml file in the test resources folder. The part showing the configuration we’re primarily interested in: 
\n```
code.config.connector:
  url: http://localhost:8083
  source-connectors:
    - name: cdc_connector
      connectorType: MYSQL_SOURCE
      databaseHost: mysqldb
      databasePort: 3306
      databaseUsername: root
      databasePassword: 1234567890
      databaseIncludeList:
        - employee
      tableIncludeList:
        - employee.user
      kafkaBootstrapServers:
        - kafka:9092
  sink-connectors:
    - name: sink_connector
      connectorType: JDBC_SINK
      topics: cdc_connector.employee.user
      url: "jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/employee_database_sink"
      username: postgres
      password: password

```\nThe configuration above has source and sink connectors. The source connector points to MySQL DB, and the sink connector points to the Postgres DB. \nWhen the test is run, it will hang because inspection has been enabled. This will allow us to look at our Kafka cluster and slowly inspect what is going on when we CDC. \nIn the test resources, you’ll notice the schema.sql and data.sql files which provide some data to be loaded into our MySQL instance. \nUSE `employee`;

CREATE TABLE user (
	id BIGINT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    address VARCHAR(100),
    gender ENUM('M', 'F')
);\nschema.sql\n```

USE `employee`;

INSERT INTO `user`(`name`, address, gender) VALUES('Julian Duru', '7th House, Main Street',  'M');

```\ndata.sql\nConnect to the database instances using a client like DBeaver. MySQL should be available on \nlocalhost:33080\n. Postgres should be available on \nlocalhost:5432\n. Exploring the user table in the employee database in MySQL, you should have a single entry in the table. The same entry should exist in the Postgres table called cdc_connector_employee_user.\nChanges made to the MySQL table are replicated on the Postgres table instantly. Let’s take a closer look at the magic going on here. For that, we’ll look at AKHQ. \nAKHQ serves as a viewer into our Kafka cluster; allowing us to inspect topics and messages. If you inspect the source connector configuration in application.yml, for each source table, the connector lib will create a topic with the format: {{connector_name}}.{{database_name}}.{{table_name}}. Hence, we should have a topic called \ncdc_connector.employee.user\n. Inspecting the topic, you should see all the messages containing change logs on the MySQL database table called user.\nThe messages contain a schema part and a payload part. The schema contains the data about the payload that will assist in replication to the sink. The payload contains the data of the change that happened in the table. The payload consists of the following parts: \nbefore\n: What the data looked like before the change happened. In the case of a create event, \nbefore\n will have a null value. \nafter\n: What the data looked like after the change happened. In the case of a delete event, the \nafter\n will have a null value. \nsource\n: The source of the change update. This typically includes the database name, table name, binlog offset, and other relevant information.\nop\n: The operation that was carried out. Will usually contain a single character. ‘c’ for create, ‘d’ for delete, ‘u’ for update, ‘r’ for read. \ntimestamp\n: The timestamp when the change happened. This value will be in milliseconds. \nAs you make changes to the MySQL database, the changes will be written to the Kafka topic: \ncdc_connector.employee.user. \nFrom there, the changes are replicated in the Postgres sink. \nSo far, we have covered change replication with the cdc-connector-lib; now let’s look at change processing. \nFor that, we can look at 2 classes: CreateUserChangeProcessor, and UpdateUserChangeProcessor. Both in package com.julianduru.cdc.changeconsumer. The CreateUserChangeProcessor has the following structure: 
\n```
@Slf4j
@RequiredArgsConstructor
@ChangeConsumer(sourceId = "employee.user", changeType = ChangeType.CREATE)
public class CreateUserChangeProcessor {


    private final DataCaptureMap dataCaptureMap;


    public OperationStatus process(String reference, Payload payload) {
        log.info("Payload: {}", JSONUtil.asJsonString(payload, ""));
        dataCaptureMap.put(reference, payload);
        return OperationStatus.success();
    }


}
```\nIf you notice the @ChangeConsumer annotation, you’ll see that the processor is meant to handle change updates when a user is CREATED on the employee db. Hence, when a new user is CREATED, the processor’s process method will be invoked with the Payload. The reference will usually be a hash of the Payload. \nThe processor is now free to process the change update however they wish and then return an OperationStatus at the end. If the processor returns a final state, then it won’t be called again. However, if the processor returns a non-final state, it will be invoked until it returns a final state.\nThe payload object mirrors the payload we see in our Kafka topics, hence our payload will have before, after, source, op and timestamp sections. \n\nWhat about the Update Processor?\n```
@Slf4j
@RequiredArgsConstructor
@ChangeConsumer(sourceId = "employee.user", changeType = ChangeType.UPDATE)
public class UpdateUserChangeProcessor {

    private final AtomicInteger failureCount = new AtomicInteger(0);


    private final DataCaptureMap dataCaptureMap;


    public OperationStatus process(String reference, Payload payload) {
        log.info("Payload: {}", JSONUtil.asJsonString(payload, ""));

        if (failureCount.getAndIncrement() < 3) {
            return OperationStatus.failure();
        }
        else {
            dataCaptureMap.put(reference, payload);
            failureCount.set(0);
            return OperationStatus.success();
        }
    }


}
```
\nThe Update Processor is invoked when a user entry in the employee database is updated. The difference in the payload now is both before and after sections contain objects that include the state of the row entry before and after the change was made. \nLooking at the logic of the update processor, it returns a failure 3 times before returning a success. Hence if you make a change to an existing row entry in the MySQL database, the update processor will be invoked 3 times before it clears processing. \nWhen not to use CDC\nCDC is a delightful technique to use when attempting to capture change events at a source and utilize those events in downstream systems. However, there are some instances when it’s not appropriate to use CDC:\nIf tracking every data change is overkill. Sometimes you don’t need the overhead of tracking each change to your data. There are other simpler techniques that would suffice. \nLimited Budget: be mindful of the Kafka bill. Each database change results in a write to Kafka; if you’re using a cloud-managed Kafka instance, your Kafka bill can blow up very quickly. So be mindful. \nRisk of exposing sensitive information: In some cases, you don’t want to expose sensitive information from your database to other clients. You want to keep data changes isolated within your respective sub-domains. \nWorkload is more Read-Heavy than Write-Heavy: If your application does a lot more reading than writing, it might not be appropriate to use change data capture. \nIn Conclusion,\nWe have gained a gentle introduction to Change Data Capture as a concept. Even looked at how we can do a setup using Debezium. I also introduced a library I built which includes an engine for integrating debezium connectors with different data sources. We also looked at how this library can be applied to Change replication and Change processing. Finally, we looked at when it’s not appropriate to use Change Data Capture. 
\nAll in all, CDC is a wonderful technique that can solve technical challenges when used appropriately. We should apply this technique with the drawbacks in mind, knowing that architecture is about choosing the best solution among competing alternatives, and each solution has its pros and cons. 

Applying Change Data Capture at Scale 

Our goal at Moniepoint is to power the dreams of businesses. But anyone with dreams can tell you that the best ones are often much larger than your current capacity. It’s no fun to imagine things you already have - we all want bigger. This is how credit ever became a thing.\nWith loans, businesses can extend their runway beyond their current financial capacity. They can restock more goods to meet increased customer demands, open new locations, and expand their businesses. A whole new world of possibilities is open to them.\nBut even though we understand all its advantages, providing businesses with loans isn’t as easy as just giving out the money. \nThe data problem\nWith all the advantages and potential economic growth possible with loans, giving out loans isn’t exactly the simplest of processes. And the major reason for this? Data.\nAs banking in Nigeria grew and evolved, much of it was focused on providing direct services to people. Enabling them to make deposits, and move their money seamlessly was the focus, leading to great innovation and collaboration like we see with NIBSS.\nSadly, the credit side of things hasn’t seen this same level of attention or evolution. Even with a central credit bureau, quality data data on credit history and lending behaviours are either absent or hard to get a hold of.\nThis makes it difficult to see what previous credit behaviours and history are like for businesses, and make decisions. As a result, giving loans to anyone, especially SMEs, requires a lot of caution.\nWhat are we doing about this?\nAt Moniepoint, these small and medium-sized businesses, are exactly the kind we’re looking for. They play a crucial role in not just supporting the economy, but also impacting everyday lives. They’re the stores you might typically run to when catching breakfast on your way to work, when shopping for groceries and other items later in the day, and so on.\nTo power these businesses, we started by providing a way for them to get the same services their more formal counterparts had enjoyed for a while. This is why Moniepoint’s core offering is banking solutions. We also provide them with POS terminals to process payments smoothly.\nBut that’s just the first step.\nBanking them in this manner causes them to become recognisable financial entities. They have a sales history, business insights and a pretty clear growth trajectory. This moves them from being risky, inaccessible businesses, to tangible entities with a lot of data to boot. And that’s where the fun starts.\nCredit where credit is due - Overdrafts\nBefore transitioning to serving businesses, our first credit product was designed to cater to cash-in cash-out merchants, or agents, as they’re often called. This product was called Overdrafts. Serving as a first step in extending banking services to where they were typically unavailable, these agents handled deposits and withdrawals for those around them.\nThis meant they needed to have physical cash and money in their digital wallets. But sometimes, at the end of the day, they might’ve had more deposits than withdrawals. Ergo, more money at hand than in their wallets.\nIn places where banks were already unavailable, finding a way to deposit cash wasn’t exactly an option. To remain in business and process more transactions, they needed to be able to borrow money, to increase the amount they had in their wallets and process more transactions. This need was what birthed the Overdrafts product.\nWith this function in mind, it was designed to be a 24-hour loan. They could take it out and return it in the next 24 hours. And the loans weren’t very large, because their needs weren't, either.\nWith our focus on financial inclusion, cash in cash out merchants had a need where they would run out of money in their accounts, or in their wallets. And then they essentially now looked to us for additional float so that they didn't have to pause their business or go to the bank to deposit cash. The overdraft product solved this.\nWe disbursed over $1.4 billion with this product, with a default rate of less than 1%. This further underscored how impactful an effective loan product could be, and set the stage for evolving it.\nWorking capital loans\nBy 2022, we realised we could more directly serve the businesses these agents served as middlemen for. So, we pivoted to providing banking services to businesses. You can check out the process \nhere\n. \nWith this change, our previous loan product wasn’t exactly a fit anymore. It had been built specifically for cash merchants, but now we needed one serve any kind of business.\nMuch of the ideation happened at our Lagos office, over the course of a week. Tosin, Chidum and I, with a couple of others, sat through the entire process, deciding what we needed.\nWe had low-fidelity prototypes of what the whole thing would look like. And then, took that, fleshed it out into the detailed requirements, broke the work down into various teams and started building different product components.\nThe product we built went live in May 2023, providing a way to cater to any business that needed loans.\n\n\n\n\nMore than the money…\nSupporting a business with loans isn't just about giving them any money they ask for. As great as that sounds, it often leads to more problems than it solves.\nIf you give a business just any amount, they might get over-leveraged, which means they get more money than they can manage or pay back effectively. This, in turn, often leads to the business becoming a defaulter, and it damages their credit profile. So, no more loans for them.\nDoesn’t sound so great, does it?\nThis is why getting insights into these businesses is an important precondition for giving them loans. With the right insights, we can estimate whether a business is ready for a loan, and just how much would make sense for the scale of their business.\nPutting data in context - Pre-qualification.\nTo give a business access to loans, we first sort through the data we have on them to make sense of their business. We call this the pre-qualification process, which helps us determine whether a business is qualified for a loan.\nThe objective? To identify a business’s real transactions, and separate them from one-off or personal transactions that don’t relate to business activities. This helps us understand the business's health and how well it’s growing.\nWe have many internal rules for filtering through transactions, many developed over months, but here’s a quick example of how it works.\nImagine a petrol station gets a N5 million credit on its account, tagged as a sale transaction. It’s very unlikely that anybody buys petrol worth 5 million naira, and even if they did, we know it's an outlier. With that context, our system will exclude it from the analysis of that business’s insights and focus on the more regular transactions it gets.\nOr, say, a supermarket gets a N10,000 transaction from the same person every 30 minutes or hour of the business day. The odds of the same person visiting the business so regularly, and performing the exact transaction are extremely low to impossible. This is also going to be flagged, and excluded.\nThis and many other checks help us precisely determine what credit limit a business can support at its current stage. \nUp close and personal - KYC & Eligibility.\nThe next stage of the process involves verifying the business’s  KYC details, after which they can check their eligibility. We confirm that the details they’ve provided are accurate and that they’re eligible to get a loan.\nWe do this by analysing data available from credit bureaus in tandem with what we have from their transaction history. With this,  we’re able to determine the business’s credit profile.\nIf they’re eligible based on this process, they can then let us know how much they want, and we will give them an offer. The offer contains all the details - How much their interest rates are, the tenure of the loan, and everything else. They can then accept the offer, and the loan goes through approval.\nGetting the show on the road - Field verification.\nIn our approval process, we leverage a human-automation hybrid to give customers the best experience possible as well as ensure we can gather the data critical to making our credit decision. We developed tools that leverage geotagging, facial recognition etc., to digitise the process and ensure it is as seamless as possible. \nOnce the loan goes through the various stages of approval, the customer can access the approved credit limit and repayments are made from the customer’s account at the agreed intervals.\nOur loan product today\nLooking at how much the financial ecosystem has changed in the last few years, we realise that products like this are an important stepping stone to the next level. Many businesses that previously operated entirely in the informal market, offline and disconnected from the ecosystem, now have access to terminals and other means to accept payments digitally.\nWith this, these businesses can step into the light, and be seen. There’s insight into how much they process, where they are, and how they’ve grown over time. All of this makes it possible for us to find more ways to support them, as we now do with loans.\nSo far, we’ve disbursed over $20 million in loans, to businesses of all sizes. Each of them can explore new options for growth, all stemming from that first step we took to bank these risky businesses. They can grow beyond their current capacity, and we’re making that happen through working capital loans.\nIf you’d like to be part of a team helping businesses in emerging markets grow, visit our \ncareers page.\n

Making the dream; powering businesses through working capital loans

In line with the resolve of the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to build a robust framework for the training of one million technical talents over the next three years and the Presidency's goal of creating two million digital jobs. \nNithub University of Lagos \nin partnership with \nMoniepoint Inc\n, Africa's leading digital financial services provider, has announced the graduation of the pioneer cohort from its HatchDev programme.  This nine-month specialized training, generously sponsored by Moniepoint, is designed to produce hundreds of market-ready software engineers every year.\n\n
In Nigeria, where the digital economy is rapidly expanding, there is a pressing need for skilled tech talent. According to estimates, \nthere are only around 115,000 developers in Nigeria\n, highlighting a significant talent shortage that hampers the growth of the tech sector. Recognizing this challenge, Moniepoint in partnership with Nithub is taking proactive steps to bridge the gap and empower the youth with valuable skills for a brighter future.\nThe highly competitive programme with a strict recruitment policy, which began in October 2022, aspires to yearly shape 300 junior software engineers, 100 intelligent systems developers, and 100 IoT/embedded systems engineers. These professionals, upon completion of the course, will be readily absorbed into a market eager for their expertise. The programme's structure is such that it starts with nine months of classroom-based training, culminating in a three-month industry-specific internship.\n\n
\nNItHub envisions a transformative approach to the use and creation of digital technology in Nigeria. This vision encompasses upskilling, startup incubation, product development, all aimed at setting new benchmarks for digital proficiency and innovation in Nigeria. Also,  \nMoniepoint\n, with its extensive reach and influence, plays a pivotal role in this digital revolution and financial inclusion. Currently, 1.6 million businesses across Nigeria rely on Moniepoint's suite of payment, credit, and business management tools to achieve socioeconomic growth and stability. The platform facilitates an average monthly transaction value of $12 billion, demonstrating its profound impact on businesses and the economy at large.
\n\nSpeaking on the success of the initiative, Chukwudum Ekwueme, VP Engineering, Moniepoint, expressed their enthusiasm, saying, "Nigeria is a booming economy and with the innovative contributions of tech businesses, like Moniepoint, that are solving some of society’s critical issues, it is very gratifying to be a significant part of those giving local talent the training and tools they need to compete on a global stage. Also, this initiative aligns perfectly with our vision of empowering the next generation of tech leaders. We believe that by investing in talent development, we can accelerate Nigeria's growth in the digital economy and contribute to the overall prosperity of our great nation."\nAfrica's Internet economy is revolutionizing development on the continent by creating job opportunities, stimulating economic growth, and offering innovative solutions to complex challenges, including access to healthcare, education, and finance. This transformation is driven by factors such as increased access to high-quality Internet connectivity, a burgeoning urban population, a growing pool of tech talent, and a vibrant startup ecosystem.\n\n\nDr. Victor Odumuyiwa, NitHub Director and HatchDev project lead, said: “Nigeria is at a critical inflection point at the moment as we continue to grow and develop our economy. As a new wave of technology companies emerge, and with increased digitalisation in every aspect of life, it’s vital that we have the local talent available here to ensure homegrown businesses can reach their full potential. That’s why courses like HatchDev are so valuable - we’re training Nigeria’s top future talent. We’re delighted to be working with Moniepoint to help bring this vision to life.`\nSome industry analysts have averred that the initiative between Moniepoint and NitHub, University of Lagos, is poised to be a game-changer in the tech industry. By equipping young Nigerians with cutting-edge skills through the HatchDev programme, they are opening doors to limitless possibilities and helping Nigeria tap into its full potential in the digital era.\n

Tech Talent Development gets a big boost as Moniepoint and Nithub UNILAG team up

For a team that’s as dedicated to solving problems as Moniepoint is, product development is part of the day-to-day. But every now and then, there’s that period when things get a lot more intense than usual. All hands on deck, pushing around the clock, and unsure if it’s going to come out like you expect. The \nMoniepoint Personal Banking\n product was just like that, and here’s a peek behind the madness that brought it to life. \nA short history lesson.\n\nSpeaking with the engineering and design teams to get a full picture of the product we built, revealed a larger image than I expected. The first thing I learnt was that the idea of a personal banking product wasn’t exactly new to the team.\nBetween 2018 and 2019, Moniepoint (then TeamApt) tried many new things. Instead of the large company we are today, think of a SWAT team. A small elite group of engineers, kicking down doors and taking no hostages - fast and adept. They had the expertise, and had gained experience building products for banks.\nMore than 26 banks in Nigeria, and their customers, used products that they had built. They explored both B2B (building backend operations) and B2B2C (building mobile banking apps). Now, the team was pivoting into building directly for the market and experimenting with a few things.\nThe more common ones you’re familiar with are Moniepoint and Monnify, but one product that was explored is a personal banking solution called Kuwego. Not the flashiest of names, and even a bit cornier when you realise it’s made from \nkudi, owo\n, and \nego\n, all of which translate to money in Nigeria’s major local languages. But the idea behind it and its infrastructure was solid.\nTrue to our mission of creating financial happiness, it was to be a personal banking product that could fully support the user. It would offer the usual transfer, airtime and bill payments, but even more, make loans and savings possible. The team grew this product, and it had over 10,000 customers at the time, but resources were limited.\nThis was 2019, and both Moniepoint and Monnify saw rapid growth, so the team decided to focus most of their efforts on these two products. Kuwego, with all its promise, was put on ice.\nPersonal banking today.\n\nIf building a personal banking product wasn’t entirely new to the team, then what made it such a great idea now? The short answer - customer feedback.\nFor the 1.5 million businesses that use our products, the experience is seamless. Payments are lightning-fast, and downtimes are minimal to non-existent. In whatever way their customers need to pay, they can accept them easily.\nBut this customer/business interface is where most of the challenges lie. Sometimes card payments fail due to reasons that are entirely not the fault of the businesses, or the customers, really. We created the \nrequest for refund\n feature to mediate in periods like this, but what if they didn’t have to occur at all? What if all card and transfer transactions went through?\nEven more, some of these businesses needed a way to manage their employees’ payroll efficiently. If their workers needed salary advances, it could and should be much easier to provide it automatically.\nThe team’s answer to these questions was a project phase. Let’s call it Project X 2.0\nProject X 2.0\nWhen Ope, SVP Channels, got a call from Tosin on a regular weekday in April, he had no idea it would spin out to become something this grand. On the call, he discussed some of the feedback the team had gotten from business owners, and how to implement them.\nWith the feedback they had received, there were two things the team needed to do. The first was to update the mobile app for businesses and give them a better experience. The second, and why we’re here today, was to create a personal banking application.\nAfter that call, and having initially concluded that internal resources might not be enough to carry out the project, the plan was to outsource it. But there was a problem. Unlike the usual product development life cycle, where the amount of work needed to be done determined how long it would take, this was the other way around.\nThere was a deadline. And the search was for a team that could deliver within that short (and probably a bit crazy) timeline. Two weeks of calls and meetings passed, discussing with local and international software vendors (kinda like TeamApt used to be). The two weeks only brought bad news - the people available either couldn’t do it at all, or would take at least 8 months to get it done.\nIf you want to get it done, do it yourself.\nAt this moment, when outsourcing had become unsuccessful, the team decided that we would just do it ourselves, and in 3 months.\nOn 10th May, 2023, Tosin announced that the team would embark on another project sprint. If you’re wondering what the first sprint was about, you should visit our \ncareers page\n to join us and find out. For this new sprint, there was something different that hadn’t been done for a while. Not since the SWAT team days.\nAs Ope had tried to figure out how exactly the team would pull off this insane project in the time available, he realised something. The only way to make this possible was to have everyone working in the same place in real-time. He brought this realisation to Tosin, who agreed.\nThe team working together from across the world was usually just fine. Everyone collaborated seamlessly from different time zones, putting in their best work. But to meet the demand of what we were trying to do, everyone had to be together at the same location. \nAnd that’s exactly what they did.\nFrom the UAE to the UK, US, Canada and even Pakistan, every engineer who would be a vital part of this project was brought down to Lagos. Everyone stayed in the same hotel with everything they needed, and all they had to do was focus on the work.\n\nThe first step is planning.\nBefore anyone’s flight was booked, it was important to consider how exactly we would do this. Firstly, meeting the timeline meant it would be impossible to build from scratch. And it wouldn’t make sense to, anyway.\nThe entire reason we were doing this was because our business owners trusted our services. We had an infrastructure that already banked over 1.5 million businesses. Hence, we decided to just build based on that.\nEven more, Chidum, SVP of Engineering, knew that everyone working on the same source code would bring on more problems. There was a possibility of merge issues, which would only compound as they were fixed. Testing, depending on which components were built out first, would also be impossible. For example, if transfers are built first, it would be impossible to test it without the login process.\nWith all these potential challenges, they decided to use a concept called microservices app. If you’re familiar with our infrastructure, you’ve probably heard of the term “\nmicroservices\n” a few times. This worked with the same concept, but instead of communicating with the different parts via APIs, there was a “super app” component interfacing with the different smaller apps.\nThey broke down the app into smaller functions so each person could build it independently of the other, and the main app would be made up of these parts.\n\nImagine you wanted to build a car and had limited time and people available to do it (yes, the process is automated. Just imagine). You could have everyone working on the car, and building it at the same time. Maybe you begin with the frame, then move to the engines, adding in the doors, one thing at a time.\nWhat they did, instead, was to break it into smaller parts. So different team members worked on different parts, and someone brought everything together seamlessly.  There was onboarding, transactions, dashboard, and many other parts we treated as smaller apps, with a super app that referenced all the apps.\nIt’s a lot more complex, but that’s the simple way to put it.\nSame bank, minor differences.\n\nMost of these functions already existed for the business app but functioned differently. For example, a business owner could have multiple accounts within the same app, while a personal user needed just one. So, while using the same base, the engineering team built a different flavour of the business app that functioned as a personal experience.\nA flavour of an application is, essentially, a variant of a particular application that allows you to modify the existing application. So, you have a new application that behaves in a different way, but works based on the fundamentals that have been implemented on the existing application.\nThis was the same concept across the board. Each microservice app was built to match the custom experience of the personal user based on what previously existed for businesses. This was great for two reasons;\nFirstly, it meant we could build the personal app easier, faster, and more efficiently, meeting the deadline.\nSecondly, it meant that subsequent updates would be less complicated. We could scale easily, and add in new functionality more seamlessly. If we wanted to develop a new feature going forward, we only had to build it in one place.\nBeginning the build.\n\nWith a general idea of the approach to build this, it was time to get to it. Even though the entire project was meant to last 3 months, the bulk of the work would happen in 6 weeks, while the entire team was in one place.\nWhen we first started, we stuck with the traditional team structure, but soon realised that this would not work. We had to break them down into smaller bits. In payments, for example, you had transfers, airtime, bill payments, etc. So we started looking at what complete flows we needed to build.\nSo while there were major teams, these were broken down into smaller groups to focus on specific flows.\nFor this to work, everybody had to be in sync. So the next thing was syncing the dev team with our design system, \nKamona\n. A button is a button wherever you go. The spaces are the same as well. If you were to do an animation of a dropdown or pop-up, it had to be the same. The work here, was agreeing on a design pattern we would use everywhere.\n\nThen these components were assigned to be created, and were in a shared library accessible to everyone. We also built all the widgets separately in a smaller application that everybody depended on. With this, the experience would be uniform across the app.\nBuilding out these components and widgets gave the team time to work on the logic of it, which was the main thing. With the components in place, it became as easy as putting in a line of code, and we had the view we wanted on the application. Then we could concentrate on the View-Model.\nAs this was being implemented, there was still more planning that Chidum, Adrian, and a couple of other team leads had to do. It was like creating our own domain-specific language that we would use elsewhere. As some worked on the components, others worked on the flow.\nThere were questions the team asked to define this. If a person was going to do a transaction, how would they start? What goes where? The flow helped tell a story of the user’s journey using the components that were being created, before going into development. \nAll or nothing.\nSo the first week was spent working on the components, while the leads worked on different flow iterations. From the second week, the PMs broke the flow down into smaller steps each team would work on. There was also a back-end component and an analysis of how the flow would interact with our existing APIs.\nA lot of trust was involved, expecting everyone to do what they needed. Everyone focused squarely on their contributions for the next 4 weeks. The disadvantage of this was that everything didn’t seem like it would work until almost the end.\n\nInstead of thinking of it as the team building a personal banking app for six weeks, think of it as one person building an onboarding app for 6 weeks, and another on transfers for 6 weeks. None of it made sense until we all put it together. The whole app was in a very incomplete state throughout the process.\nIt was an all-or-nothing approach.\nBy the 5th week, it was finally time to put everything together. Given that the teams had all focused on their parts, this first integration understandably didn’t go so smoothly. To find the issue, we had to test everything one after the other. The Enterprise Architect in charge of this process, Paul, ensured that all the hitches were worked through and fixed. After this first integration, however, and identifying the challenge, it was smoother.\nBy the end of 6 weeks, the team had successfully pulled through. All the different moving parts had come together and at last, there was a single product - the Moniepoint personal banking app.\nAnd there you have it.\nAnyone who’s familiar with product development knows that, of course, the end is hardly ever really the end. But the team had done the bulk of it. In Chidum’s words, \n“this was only possible because everyone gave 120%”.\nGrit and technical depth are part of our core values, and for these 6 weeks, they became a whole lot more than just words on marble. If you’d like to be part of a team that’s doing cool, and sometimes absolutely crazy things like this, visit our \ncareers page.\n\n

Making the Dream; Behind the Scenes of Building Moniepoint Personal Banking

TL;DR: Moniepoint’s personal banking solution offers reliable debit cards to over 33 million Nigerians using its terminals monthly, with an easy dispute resolution system that ensures funds reversal for failed card transactions.\n\nMoniepoint was founded with the mission of providing financial happiness to people. With this mission, we’ve powered the dreams of over 1.5 million businesses, providing them with payment tools and banking solutions to help them grow.\nAt these businesses, over 30 million people use our POS terminals monthly. For us, this highlights another way to take our mission further. Supporting the customers of these businesses, as well as their employees, provides a means through which we can power these businesses even more, and impact Africa’s economy.\nThis is why we’ve launched a new product - \nMoniepoint personal banking.\n\nThrough this personal banking app, users can make transfers, pay bills and buy airtime. We’re also launching a debit card which can be used at ATMs, POS terminals, and online. This solution is powered by our reliable payment infrastructure, which our businesses are already familiar with, and ensures we can connect businesses and their customers more effectively.\nOur experience in building banking solutions that cater to our users’ needs has also led to the addition of a new feature for personal users – card dispute resolution. With this, every user will be able to log disputes for failed card transactions and track them till they get a full reversal, giving them control over dispute resolution for the first time.\nRather than a foray into new grounds, we view this as an extension of our current path, providing even better support for the businesses using our products. With the personal banking app and card, customers can now make seamless payments to these businesses. This support will extend to employees as well, with the release of a Salary Advance feature in the coming months.\nAligning this with our sponsorship of this year’s season of Big Brother Naija, this app will also feature various games. These games will see users earn points with each transaction and compete for grand prizes of millions of naira each week.\nWe believe that financial happiness is key to unlocking a better life, and with our personal banking product, we look forward to powering the dreams of millions of people.

Introducing Moniepoint Personal: everything you need to know about our new product.

\n\nWhen I joined Moniepoint 7 years ago, I was just embarking on the journey of carving a career niche. I had studied Mathematics at the University and just assumed that I would do something so directly related to it, that you could draw a straight line on a graph with it. However, life had other more interesting curves and adventures for me, and it’s quite the story.\nIt all started at 1004\nI didn’t join the team as an HR professional right from the jump. Back then, the team was small and was made of a lot of moving parts. I joined Moniepoint through Adrian, who is now VP of User Experience. He was already in the company then, and they were having a get-together of some sort at 1004, and he invited me. At that time, Moniepoint was only about a year old. \nI went for it, met with a couple of people and two weeks after that, Dumebi and Adrian reached out that the project manager for their Access bank project was leaving, and it would be a good opportunity for me to explore. \nI was supposed to go for my Master’s program, but it hadn't clicked yet, so I asked myself, “What do I have to lose?” \nI went for the interview with Tosin. He asked about what I was doing at that time - working with a small IT company as a business development person. He asked me a couple of questions, and at the end of the session, he just said, “Okay, you can resume on Monday.”\nThat was how I started working at Moniepoint.\n\n\nEarly days with the team\nI was very intrigued by Tosin’s dreams. It was very daring, and he was clear on what he wanted to achieve - financial happiness. At the time, there were just about 10 of us; Bunmi, Emeka, Felix, Solomon, Dumebi, Adrian and a couple of others.\nJoining the team was challenging because I had zero knowledge of Assets and Liability Management. I had to understudy the PM, who was relocating in two weeks from the time I joined.\nIt was challenging,  but one thing that has been consistent through the years is growth. As time went by, I picked up a couple of other roles as the company grew. Being a fast-paced but relatively small team, there was always something that needed to be done, and I was ready to take it on.\nThere were different phases, and through all those periods, one thing that kept me grounded was that Tosin was very clear on his direction. He gave different growth opportunities. A lot of “figuring things out by doing” happened as we grew. We were just a couple of young professionals trying to find our way, and many opportunities came. \nAs the team grew, it became necessary to have some structure, and that’s when Tosin suggested that I take on the role of an HRBP. I was unsure at first, considering how different it was from what I was used to, but 7 years down the line, I’m glad I took that step. \nHow People Operations has evolved over the years\nSince I first took on the role, People Operations has evolved beyond just getting the right people into the company. It now also extends to ensuring that people in the company are engaged, and everyone is happy. \nIn some sense, that has always been there since the beginning, but the scale has changed, and the approach has definitely gotten better.\nThe perception of HR is changing as well. People are also beginning to understand that we're not just there for fancy. Before interacting with the larger startup world, I never knew that people thought HR was a non-technical function, they thought it was a place from which people could dispense wickedness.\nBut it's quite technical. For example, a lot of data analysis goes into what we do to make decisions. There's a lot of emotional intelligence required. We need to be able to balance the organisation's needs with the employees' needs. This is evident because, so far, there's been no employee-related lawsuits or situations in which a super disgruntled employee has had to leave the company. \nAnother instance was with benchmarking, i.e. arriving at the new salary structure. We needed to do some type of analysis of what the market is paying in our industry and other industries. The structure is not the same across the board, so we were calibrating to ensure that we were paying market value, and that people feel properly compensated for their work.\nWith additional administrative things like our Women's Day campaign when we sent out packages. We had to curate data on things like staff locations, and how we were going to plan the logistics before those things went out. \nIf we did it manually, we'd probably have had burnout.\nAll of these considerations are important so that no team member feels left out, and everyone at the company gets a good experience working here. With a team of over 1000 people working remotely across different continents, it’s not as clear-cut as it might be if we were all in one building.\nIn this sense, People Operations is as technical as any other role that you can think of,  if you're doing it in the way that you should. What has changed is that people are getting to understand more that it is a lot beyond just hiring and firing people.\n7 Years Later\n\nWe’ve grown over 1000% since I first joined. And as we’ve scaled and added more structure, I’m proud that we've not become one of those super traditional stiff companies. We foster an environment that allows for expression and easy collaboration. The implication is that anybody can reach out to and talk to anyone. In real terms, an intern or new employee can chat with any of the execs on Workplace.\nIt is a fantastic arrangement, as it fosters transparency. You don't feel like anyone is squeezing your neck because you're at work. That's something that I'm very happy that we've been able to maintain over the years.\nI'm also really proud of the calibre of people we bring in. In our \n4Ms framework\n, we refer to this as Mastery. We’re very insistent on the very best people joining the company, and helping them to do their best work. With this, everyone feels like they fit in, and at the same time, no one feels like they’re doing all the heavy lifting alone.\nAnother major milestone is the Women in Tech internship program that we've run for the past three years. At first, when I had the thought, I was a bit uncertain how exactly it would pan out. But it has blossomed with time, and through collaboration with other teams like Marketing. \nAs a result of the program, we’ve had stellar women come on to join the team and do brilliant work. We started it to get women to join the company directly, and every year we’ve done just that. Everyone deserves an opportunity to shine in whatever space they are interested in, and women cannot just write off Tech. There’s a place for them here too.\nWhy Moniepoint?\nI believe that Moniepoint is a very rewarding place to work. Not just because I’m head of People Operations, but as someone who’s been part of the team for years. We’re serious about the work we do and don’t take anyone on the team for granted.\nWe are very high-performance oriented and impact-driven. We’ve recently updated our perks to additionally reflect this, creating a way for employees to earn up to 50% of their salary as a bonus for the work they put in.\nTo put it simply, we care about people. And I know every company says this, but for us, it drives even the products we put out there. Both our products and internal culture are empathy-driven, and it’s evident in everything we do.\nIf you’d like to join a team where you matter, and can do work that matters, visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n\n


7 years Leading People Operations at Africa’s second-fastest-growing company

\n\nThis article was first published in \nThe Paypers.\n\nA walk across a street in Lagos, Nigeria, would give you a pretty interesting picture. You would likely come across more than two mom-and-pop shops with “POS here” written out in front. The busier the street, the more likely that interspersed between them are a few other kinds of businesses - a fruit seller, a cybercafe, or a suya stand, all accepting digital payments in one form or another.\nAs early as 3 years ago, it was rather different.\nTo understand how much transformation the financial experience for people and businesses has undergone in the last few years, it’s important to get a sense of the payments landscape in Nigeria.\nPayment in Nigeria, like much of Africa, was previously primarily cash first. Even with the introduction of ATMs and more banking services, it was typical to find taking their cash out of the banks and spending it at the places they needed to.\nThe biggest change to this happened with the introduction of transfers and Nigeria’s cashless policy drive, enabled by the previous establishment of the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS). All of Nigeria’s commercial banks coown NIBSS, and it began operations in June 1994. \nNIBSS was set up to enable easy settlement of funds between banks. With the cashless policy drive, transfers were introduced, done primarily via bank applications. To drive inclusion, these transfers were extended to USSD, which meant that people using feature phones could make transfers too, and the smartphone-technology barrier was less of a problem.\nEmpowering financial inclusion in Nigeria through transfers and agency banking\nWith time, transfers became the most common means of digital payments, and still largely are till today. Apart from sheer familiarity with the method, there’s also a higher sense of security. When making transfers, customers have a sense of control and, with that, higher confidence in the security of their payments. \nSubsequent efforts by the Central Bank of Nigeria to further drive inclusion caused agency banking to become a core part of the financial experience in Nigeria. This enabled banking in areas where it wasn’t fiscally feasible or likely that traditional banks would set up branches or ATMs.\nWith agency banking, people become the banks. They receive cash and credit from customers' bank accounts, or disburse cash in exchange for digital payment. In this way, these cash-in-cash-out merchants performed primary banking functions like deposit and withdrawals, for people in areas that didn’t have banking services available to them.\nThese cash merchants, or agents, represent another significant leap in financial inclusion in Nigeria. For people and businesses who initially did not have bank accounts, they also made it possible for them to make payments digitally. This opened these areas and businesses to more intranational transactions that were not limited by location.\nWhen people had to move across distances to sell or purchase products, having these agents to turn in their cash to, made it safer for them. They no longer had to carry large amounts of cash across unsafe places or at unsafe times.\nIn Nigeria, this business safety brought on by access to digital financial services forms one of the cornerstones of the importance of financial inclusion. With access to digital payment and collection services, business is safer, and there is better interconnection between merchants and customers from different places across the country.\nAgency banking has come a long way\nThe earliest version of agency banking depended on terminals that could only accept card payments, and settlement was T-1. This meant that the agents received the money from their transactions the next day.\nApart from affecting the system's efficiency, it also was problematic as tracking transactions was difficult. Agents had to go to the bank in order to track the transactions, armed with only the receipts of the day. There was no digital record accessible to them. \nThe consequence was that the agency banking sphere became a low-trust one. It was not uncommon to hear stories of agents being arrested or harassed in cases of suspected fraud, and tracking these transactions was hard. Getting refunds for failed transactions was also a complicated process, leading to losses for both the agents and customers.\nIn 2019, the service evolved with the introduction of better technology for point-of-sale terminals. Moniepoint, for example, introduced terminals that were reliable and allowed agents to receive their money instantly. Agents could track transactions, get settled instantly and request refunds on behalf of their customers. The service became smoother, setting the stage for the rapid growth of agency banking.\nHow POS terminals and business adoption transformed Nigeria's financial landscape\nBy 2022, digital payments through POS terminals had seen a shift from being primarily agency banking based, to business owners adopting it as well. As businesses saw that they could rely on these terminals, they began to seek ways to accept payments themselves, as opposed to through the middlemen agents. They got their own terminals.\nBusinesses of all sizes could now directly receive payments from their customers. With the business they regularly patronised now accepting digital payments, people also became more inclined to try a digital payment method for varying kinds of transactions.\nFurther innovation helped this transition. For a pro-transfer society, introducing features like “POS transfer” unlocked new kinds of versatility for these businesses. This feature allowed customers to make transfers directly to the terminals instead of using their cards. Where transfers to businesses were out of their control, they could now accept or reject them from their terminals.\nIn March 2023, Nigeria saw a decrease in the availability of cash in circulation. With this, it became more important than ever for businesses to be able to receive payments from their customers. This pressure caused a sharp increase in businesses using terminals, and people opting to pay digitally as cash was scarce.\nWhile cash has seen a return into circulation, this policy change further helped accelerate the drive towards digital payments, especially for businesses.\nBeing part of this evolution since 2015, we’ve witnessed firsthand how much adapting technology, and innovation can change the experience for people every day. Financial technology forms the basis on which much more can be created and explored. If people can pay digitally, commerce can thrive, and the ripple effect improves the economy.\nThis shift towards digital payments is also important, and as it can open the door to a wider range of digital financial service solutions. These businesses, which are supported by access to payment - the mom-and-pop shops, the fruit seller and co - can benefit from access to credit, business management and full banking services.\nWhere traditional systems may not be primed to take on these risks, financial technology solutions are willing to do the work, and by helping these businesses grow, take the Nigerian economy to the next level.

Payments in Nigeria: The Rise of Digital Payments and its Impact on Financial Inclusion

We hope you’ve been holding on to your seats, because it’s finally here. If you weren’t, feel free to hold onto them now.\nFor the past 3 years, we’ve held the Women In Tech internship, and for this year’s edition, we decided to bring them on the team with a bit of a bang. We kicked off this 3rd edition of the Women in Tech internship with a premium event created to celebrate the new intake of emerging women in tech.\n\n\nThe interns got to meet brilliant all-women technical minds within and outside Moniepoint including Adora Nwodo and Chisom Nwokwu, Software Engineers at Microsoft, and Zulumoke Oyibo, co-founder of Inkblot Productions. \nIt’s okay to be jealous, we don’t mind.\nThis event, themed “Tech Dreams, Activated”, was focused on getting the interns acquitted with the team. We welcomed them, dreammaker-style - having fun while equipping them with all they need to know to spur them on their journey.\n\nWe hung out at The House in Victoria Island, Lagos, having insightful conversations,  interactive hands-on activities, and exciting games. It helped foster a shared sense of camaraderie, and a deep understanding of what it means to build a career in tech as a woman.\nEach year since 2021, Moniepoint has had 5 women join the team to work on products in real-time, doing impactful work in technology as we create solutions to improve the experiences for over a million businesses in emerging markets. \nEvery intern gets to become a full-time dreammaker, and in this way, we ensure that young African women have access to build a career in technology beyond the 6-month long internship.\nThis year 5 women have been accepted via the internship to join Moniepoint in 4 roles; System Administration, Quality Assurance, Frontend engineering and Product management.\n\n\nEach of them will receive direct mentorship during the internship. Other perks include; a salary, work tools, and merch. The best part; they get to work with the team on live projects that are impacting millions of businesses in emerging markets, and will get an offer of full-time employment depending on assessment after the internship.\nIf you’re a woman and are interested in transforming the financial experience for businesses in Africa, we’ve got a spot for you. Visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n

Highlights from the 2023 Women-In-Tech Internship Mixer

In Q2, we expanded our offerings to better suit the businesses we support. We launched Working Capital Loans, designed to help merchants solve capital challenges and keep their businesses running and growing.
\n\n⁠\nThe Working Capital Loans product offers businesses a line of credit relative to their capital (or stake) in the business. They are short to medium term loans ranging from 7 to 120 days which can be easily, and in some cases, automatically renewed. This way, any merchant who runs his business via their Moniepoint account may have access to a line of credit proportional to the business that passes through the Moniepoint account. The product is already widely adopted by a number of their businesses; supermarkets, fuel stations, etc. and currently has zero defaults so far. \nReport shows that access to finance remains one of the biggest hurdles faced by African small businesses, which predisposes them to an inability to invest in and grow their business. With insufficient working capital loans, these businesses are held back from restocking so they can scale as they ought to. \nThe new product allows businesses access to a revolving credit facility that they can use for purchasing additional inventory and short term working capital for smooth business operations - solving two major problems; access to affordable credit whenever they need it and convenience in accessing the credit.\nThe launch of this service was particularly crucial as we now serve over 1.3 Million businesses. \nAdditionally, in May, we got listed by the Financial Times as the second fastest-growing company in Africa. This, like everything else we accomplished in this quarter, was only possible because of the businesses who trust and depend on us, and our devotion to supporting them.\nBut we are only a reflection of our team; the people that make the product work. We call them “DreamMakers” as they help power the dreams of business owners. Get it? Well, with how much work DreamMakers put in to make financial services seamless for our business owners, it was imperative that, beyond their salaries, people got rewarded for how much work they put in, and that’s what we did.\nTo make this happen, in Q2, we introduced a performance bonus structure, which ensures that every DreamMaker can earn an additional 50% of their salary each month, with a baseline of 15%. Think “Money” in our 4Ms.\nIf you’re ready to join a team that’s impacting Africa’s economy, visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n.\n

Launching working capital loans to support businesses better; our Q2 milestones.

This is a love story. Well, something like that. And like most of the best love stories, it starts with a gift. On Valentine’s Day, February 14th 2022, Moniepoint got its business banking licence. This pivotal moment and all that came after it is sometimes viewed in isolation, but it’s hard to understand the present without a bit of a journey to the past.\nIt began with a promise.\nStarting off as a bootstrapped company wasn’t a bed of roses, but by 2018 we had seen some success. As an enterprise solutions provider for banks, TeamApt, as we were called then, created multiple solutions that were being used by most of the traditional financial institutions in Nigeria.\nBut we were looking to do more. Experience in the banking sector had provided us with unique insights, and a perspective that most others just did not have. The combination of this spurred our next challenge, setting us on the path to building what Moniepoint is today.\nGetting there required a few steps, the first of which was building an Agency banking solution.\nThe birth of the Moniepoint terminal\n\n\nTobi Amira, Loans VP at Moniepoint, often \ntells the story\n of his first month on the job. I interrupted him mid-lunch, sharing an idea I had to build an agency banking application. This wasn’t exactly our first encounter with Agency banking. As a service provider to financial institutions, we had built Point of Sale (POS) terminal applications for some of the country's biggest Payment Terminal Service Providers (PTSPs).\nThis was different. Driven by the goal of spreading financial happiness, I couldn’t ignore how much financial inclusion in Nigeria needed to improve. Most of the “big guys” supported the people with little risk, but this meant that so many others were left underserved.\nAgency banking could help bring these people on board by taking the digital financial services they needed closer to them, but there were a few problems with the existing systems that our team needed to fix.\nMost notable were the problems with reconciliation, stability, and a lack of transparency. As a result of these problems, agency banking wasn’t appealing to agents because they were often at the receiving end of customer complaints and dissatisfaction. This, in turn, meant that agency banking was generally not growing at the scale necessary to significantly improve the financial experience for the people who needed it.\nRight off the bat, we decided that we wouldn’t just build, but we would do so differently. Armed with industry experience and market research, we built a product that would solve these problems, effectively changing the trajectory of agency banking.\nAmong \nother things\n, we added another leg to the transaction process flow that allowed agents to get real-time reports of their transactions. We also built a hyperlocal distribution network, powered by a system that ensured agents could see and track how much they earned. This combination made even the earliest version of Moniepoint something that people were excitedly waiting for.\nAround this time, something else was happening too.\nInnovation on two fronts; inventing virtual accounts.\n\nIn 2018, transfers were a lot different than they are now. All payments via transfers required manual confirmation. If you paid a company, someone had to check to see if the funds had entered the company’s bank account and confirm that the sender's name matched the customer's. Manually. \nThis tediousness meant that while transfers were a preferred payment option for customers due to their instant nature and speed, the time it took to confirm these transactions worsened the experience for both the businesses and the customers.\nTo solve this, we got to work on a product that was not previously available in the market - virtual accounts.\nThese accounts could be assigned to customers, and transaction confirmation was digital. This meant that if customers did decide to \npay via transfer,\n confirming their transactions would be fast and seamless, and there was no more manual bottleneck.\nThus, \nMonnify\n was born.\nThe Monnify product quickly gained traction with early adopters like Piggyvest, Cowrywise and Fairmoney using them to drastically improve payments processes for their users. Continuing on this path, Monnify would go ahead to completely change the pay-via-transfer experiences for thousands of companies across Nigeria.\nThe journey to powering dreams for Nigeria’s businesses\nBy 2019, TeamApt had pretty much completed its transition towards creating consumer-facing products, and I had refocused most of the team’s efforts on these two products. Both Moniepoint and Monnify began to see rapid growth and adoption.\nBarely 2 years after its launch, \nMoniepoint\n became Nigeria's leading agency banking solution, processing up to $7 billion in over 120,000,000 transactions monthly. Its partner product, Monnify, hit a milestone of over $22 million daily in 500,000 transactions.\nAt this point, agency banking played the role of a middleman between businesses and their customers. People withdrew cash from agents to pay to businesses that weren’t digitally enabled. These businesses then also gave their cash to agents to credit them digitally, so they didn’t have to take the cash from the day’s business home.\nWith this level of adoption of Moniepoint by agents, it became clear that there was more that we could do, and their data told the same story. Each month, 16 million unique cards were used on the Moniepoint terminals, representing over 25% of banked Nigerians. \nAgents had always been a layer towards digitisation, and it played the role of a middleman between businesses and their customers. People withdrew cash from agents to pay businesses that weren’t digitally enabled. Also, these businesses gave their cash to agents to credit them digitally, so they didn’t have to take the cash from the day’s business home.\nIt was clear that cash wouldn’t be the prevalent means forever, so we decided to also bank these businesses and enable them to receive payments directly. \nBut while designing this solution, we soon realised that the agents they currently served technically qualified as businesses, except, they sold cash for a commission.\nWe already gave these agents a wallet, insurance for their terminals, and a debit card to spend directly from their wallet. Furthermore, an experience with the agents opened the doors to exploring a credit solution.\nAs Moniepoint was being adopted, we had been approached by some of their agents who kept getting loan requests. Based on this, we decided to give out a few loans, and it went great. The loans were repaid, and the team began exploring credit solutions too.\nWith that last offering, Moniepoint was already providing a suite of tools for their agents.\nAll of this was covered under the payment and switching license we had, as well as partnerships with other organisations. But to extend these services to businesses, we had to get a banking license, so we applied for one.\nWhile waiting for it to come through, We all got busy building out the first iteration of the Moniepoint platform for businesses - offering bank accounts, loans, and of course, payment tools like the POS terminals we had become so known for.\nWhen the news came, on February 14th, 2022, that Moniepoint had received its banking license, we were excited but, most of all, prepared. In about two months, on Apr 13, 2022, Moniepoint MFB was live.\n\n\nPOS Transfer\nTeamApt had always built products that met customers' specific needs, and we maintained this customer-centric approach with our business bank. We listened to the problems businesses had, and created solutions for them.\nOne of the key outcomes of this was the creation of the \nPOS transfer feature\n.\nAccepting transfers is a pretty common mode of payment acceptance for most businesses. People found them safe and easy, and would often opt for transfers as a means of payment. The downside for businesses, however, was that they couldn’t control the transfers made to their businesses, or track whether they were successful or not.\nTo improve the experience for businesses, we developed a feature on the Moniepoint terminals called “POS transfers”. It went through several iterations, and the final version was something that enabled businesses to see the transfers on their terminals, and confirm the details of the person sending it, before the money entered their accounts.\nThis was an important step, as it brought the Moneipoint terminals closer to being an all-in-one payment solution for businesses, accepting whatever means of payment their customers preferred.\nInnovation like this, coupled with a transition of the same distribution network that had worked so efficiently for onboarding businesses, saw us hit a milestone of  $10 billion in monthly successful transactions, just seven months after officially launching as a business bank.\nGoodbye TeamApt, Hello Moniepoint.\n\nDespite these milestones, we had a bit of a problem. We had struggled with our brand for a bit. Having built a name while creating solutions for banks, and then gone ahead to build successful products like Moniepoint and Monnify, which served businesses, people often couldn’t reconcile us with these products. The name “TeamApt” was disconnected from these products, and describing ourselves was a big challenge. \nWhen she first joined the company, TeamApt’s Global Marketing Lead presented her ideas to the executive team and advised that we take on the name of our flagship product, Moniepoint. At the time, Moniepoint was just gaining traction, and the idea seemed rather brazy.\nBut with all the growth the team had seen since its transition to creating consumer-facing products, it was finally the perfect time.\nUntil this point, Moniepoint was still just considered a product of TeamApt. And because of how ubiquitous Moniepoint was,  TeamApt was almost invisible. Moniepoint was the product that people knew and loved, and it made sense for the company to become known by the name of this product we were heavily associated with.\nSo, by January 2023, TeamApt Inc. changed its name and officially became Moniepoint Inc.\nHowever, this was only one way the team had changed. We had gone a long way from being a guerrilla team of ex-Interswitch engineers. We had now become a global entity with over a thousand team members spanning more than 7 countries. From being completely bootstrapped, to being powered by some of the world’s leading VC firms, including QED, for whom Moniepoint was a pilot investment in Africa.\nMoniepoint set its foot forward boldly, and we were here to stay.\n\n\nThe cash crunch\nOn the cusp of this phase of immense growth for the team, external policy changes were being made in Nigeria that would change the experience for everyday users and test the decisions that we, now called Moniepoint, had made.\nIn March 2023, as part of its effort to aid in adopting cashless means of payments, combat inflation and prevent fraud, the central bank of Nigeria started a Naira redesign. The consequence was a reduced availability of cash and, by extension, increased reliance on digital payments.\nWith this policy change, we saw an increase in the adoption of Moniepoint by businesses. Our positioning as a business bank helped make it easier for these businesses to see the Moniepoint terminals as the solution that they could depend on, making it easier for them to make the switch.\nHaving a solution like this was important, especially for SMBs. Being able to begin accepting payments digitally with ease, helped most of these small businesses thrive during the cash crunch. Without cash, the role of the agency banking cash-in/cash-out service was a lot less impactful, and businesses that could accept payments directly led the charge.\nIn this period, our team saw record transaction volumes daily, and we increased our focus on site reliability in order to handle the surge. We had to ensure that the reliability we had become so known for didn’t change.\nThis experience further validated our decision to focus on serving businesses, and the devotion we’ve had to helping them grow since.\nAfrica’s second-fastest-growing company\nToday, on the streets of many states in Nigeria, Moniepoint has become a synonym for “POS terminal”. It currently serves over 1.3 million businesses, with a monthly TPV of roughly $ 12 billion in 400 million transactions. It is present in every local government in the country, rightly earning it the financial inclusion award from the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2022. \n\nBy May 2023, Moniepoint also got listed by the Financial Times as the second-fastest-growing company in Africa. A peek behind the curtains would show that our “magic” comprised of a ruthless devotion to innovation, and the grit to solve the unfancy problems that were often ignored.\nDriven by the mission to create financial happiness, we created a solution to meet the needs of everyday businesses that were historically overlooked and, using these businesses as touchpoints, changed the trajectory of finance in Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria.\nBut all the best stories are the ones that are still being written. There’s much that’s still to come for us as a team, and many more people beyond Nigeria’s borders, who need the kind of products we’ve spent years building and refining. If our journey so far is anything to go by, then I’m confident that we’ll accomplish so much more.\n

Redefining Payments and Banking in Nigeria; the Moniepoint story.

What happens when a QA Engineer and an Internal comms manager meet in a surprise interview? Well, you’re about to find out. It's not every time someone leaves a company and returns after a year, so when I saw Paschal being introduced as a new hire, I knew I had to get the tea. So, I got him on a call to spill without telling him why. Let’s see how much of his story we’ll get.\n\n
\nCelz\n: Hi, Paschal. Thanks for your time. How’s the weather today?\nPaschal\n: The weather in Glasgow has been brilliant. We've been getting alot of sunshine. The temperature has been between 15 and 27 degrees Celsius. How’s it over there?\nCelz\n: The weather is quite fair. I usually only take note of the weather when I wash because I have nowhere to go, lol. \nPaschal\n: I know, right? So, to what do I owe this conversation? Is this an episode of RIPPLES? \nCelz\n: Lol, I know RIPPLES is like my badge now, but that’s not why we’re here. I just thought of having a conversation with you. So let’s start with what you do. \nPaschal: \nOkay, what I do here - I am a QA engineer with Monnify (our payment gateway). My role entails ensuring the quality of the products we’re shipping out before they reach the end user. Sometimes, I do QA for Monnify business loans, but I mostly work with the Monnify core team. \nPaschal\n: My work involves ensuring the products are bug-free before releasing them to the customers. I also have to check that it meets the customer’s needs. For example, if the product were a toothbrush, I'll be checking to ensure the toothbrush is not faulty, but beyond that, I have to make sure the toothbrush serves the customer's functional needs. If it’s for a kid, it should be smaller and fancier. An adult doesn’t need fancy, they need a tongue cleaner to be added to the back of the toothbrush. The bristles also have to be good enough. I know this analogy is slightly different because we are selling digital products, but I hope that analogy clarifies it. \nCelz\n: Yes, it’s clearer. Now I’ll want you to explain how a quality check as a QA engineer differs from what a Product Manager does, but I can no longer hide why I thought to have a conversation with you. You were previously listed on our alumni list, but your profile on Workplace says you joined us recently. Why’s that? \nPaschal\n: The information you have are correct. I was with the team before, but I left in 2021.\nCelz\n: I see. Were you trying to test other software, or why did you leave?\nPaschal\n: Wow, nice one. I relocated to Scotland for my Master’s in Big Data Technologies, and I did not want to mix school with work, so I left. \n\n\nCelz\n: Wow, congratulations. That’s a big one. I’m guessing you’re back because you’re done, so safe to ask how the experience was, yeah?\nPaschal\n: It was good but gruelling. It wasn’t as easy as expected, there were many difficult times, but I’ll say the experience was worth it. \nCelz\n: Interesting. I like to believe that nothing good comes so easily. But in those trying times, what would you say kept you going?\nPaschal\n:  I don’t want to sound patronising, but I’d say that my experience at Moniepoint equipped me to a large extent. If I had an assignment and it wasn’t looking like I could work on the task, I’d just remember times we had daunting tasks at Moniepoint and how we always approached things from a ‘Can do’ perspective, so I’d keep trying and pushing. GRIT is the word. I know it sounds simple, but it is the reality. No matter how hard it gets, just get the job done. If you work with Moniepoint, that’s your subconscious. It isn’t dependent on how hard the task is, you just have to do the work. I also think that working at Moniepoint improved my analytical mind, which I have applied in many areas of my life, and my studies aren’t left out. \nCelz\n: Talking about your work gives you an analytic mind. Earlier, you mentioned that you are a Quality Assurance Engineer. If you were talking to someone who knows nothing about your work. How would you explain it?\nPaschal\n: My work involves ensuring the products are bug-free before releasing them to the customers. I also have to check that it meets the customer’s needs. For example, if the product were a toothbrush, I'll be checking to ensure the toothbrush is not faulty, but beyond that, I have to make sure the toothbrush serves the customer's functional needs. If it’s for a kid, it should be smaller and fancier. An adult doesn’t need fancy, they need a tongue cleaner to be added to the back of the toothbrush. The bristles also have to be good enough. I know this analogy is slightly different because we are selling digital products, but I hope that analogy clarifies it. \nCelz\n: Definitely. I’m curious, though. How is this different from what a product manager does?  \nPaschal\n:  I see why you have that question. When it comes to assuring quality, the Product Manager assesses the product on a higher level, while a QA engineer does a deeper assessment. The Product Manager relies on input from the Quality assurance engineer in assessing the product. It is also the work of the quality assurance engineer to take full charge of quality across the software development lifecycle. So it is not just about testing what has been built but also ensuring the processes followed are such that other things that were working before won’t break. \nCelz\n: That’s quite explanatory. So what does your day-to-day task look like? \nPaschal\n: First, I work with the Technical Product Manager to define the requirement. Then I work with the Enterprise Architect to get insights on the implementation details. I rely on input from the software developer to navigate through sanity tests on whatever features they built. Using these inputs, I identify test scenarios to discover bugs that may affect users on production. While testing, if I find a bug, I log the bug on our bug management software - xxx. From there, I manage the bug life cycle until it is fixed. \nCelz\n:  That’s great. Sounds like you love your job. But you studied Big Data Technologies for your master's. You’ve not mentioned your first degree, but why Quality Assurance? \nPaschal\n: Okay... My first degree was in computer science. During my internship, I started to learn programming. I did Java with Parox. When school resumed, I did some projects in Java language. But at some point, I realised that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I thought I would. That’s when I started exploring roles in engineering. In 2014, I started testing. I noticed that the more I tested, the more interested I was in testing. I found it an interesting niche and decided to grow in that area. So yeah, I've been doing this since 2014. Sometimes, it’s boring, but when I get to work on different products, it makes me come alive, and I just want to keep going.  \nCelz\n: Interesting. You started testing in 2014 and joined us in 2017. So Moniepoint isn’t the only place you’ve worked. So why Moniepoint again? After your second degree?\nPaschal\n: Thank you for asking. This is a question I asked myself over and again. Because Moniepoint is the sixth place I had worked throughout my 9 years career, it looked like that was the only place I was willing to return to. Working here is different - is it autonomy? Or the people I work with. Mehn, I work with the most highly motivated people that want the job done. There’s an obvious high drive and commitment in the right direction. So when I was leaving, it wasn’t part of my plans to return. But I just completed my Master’s, and Moniepoint is the only place I could think of returning to. \nCelz\n: I see. A lot has changed in one year. Are you still confident in the decision to return here?\nPaschal\n: If I didn’t return now, maybe later I would have because the growth is massive. Everything and everyone is growing. The staff strength compared to when I left is almost 1000 more. And that’s even better for me because it means we have more hands, and I can give more time to the product. That’s my key responsibility. The workload is a lot more balanced, and roles are clearer.  And the culture? I thought it was good before, but it’s better now. It is also more defined, and the teams in charge of driving culture and ensuring staff welfare seem to be more intentional. \nCelz\n: While I’m blushing on behalf of the People’s Operations and Employee Experience team, mind shedding more light?\nPaschal\n:  Hmm. So, I like to use our core values to describe the culture in order of how I have seen it play out here -TECHNICAL DEPTH,  GRIT, CANDOUR, and EMPATHY. Now the aforementioned is about the kind of colleagues I have. But beyond departments, the attention to the employee experience is outstanding. The effort to get feedback on our general and departmental experience, the recent monthly performance bonus structure. So many things I can’t start listing. But I know there’s been a huge improvement. I wake up every day wanting to work, not just because I love QA engineering but also because I know the management here sees and appreciates me.\n\nCelz\n:  I could turn on my video now. I’m probably red from blushing. I’ll share this feedback with the affected team. That's good feedback. So what would you say is the main thing you love about working here?\nPaschal\n: First, it’s the impact we have on lives. I have friends in Nigeria who share their Moniepoint (using the POS and our payment gateway) experiences with me, and I am so proud to be in this team. Then, of course, the people. I probably mentioned this earlier - I love the people I work with. The synergy here is seamless. If I were describing these with our 4Ms, that’s be Meaning and membership. \nCelz\n: That’s interesting. We’ve come to the end of the conversation. Thanks a lot, Paschal, for your time. \nPaschal\n: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to being on an episode of Ripples. \nCelz\n: Lol. Sure. Have a great day. 

Back to the Monie: Paschal’s growth story

We are aware of the false reports about recent events in Anambra State, where businesses continue to use our services without any issues.

We have always remitted all funds to the Anambra State government and have been crucial in helping the state government improve its revenue collection operations.

We are working closely with the Anambra State Board of Internal Revenue to ensure a smooth transition in collection points for tax payments under their new leadership.

Statement re: Anambra State

\n\nLet’s imagine, for a second, that you woke up this morning as a systems admin. You get out of bed, have breakfast and sit at your work desk. You turn on your computer, and you have a few requests pending;\n“Hi, thanks for your help so far. Please, can you help with the password reset again. I didn't make use of it the last time”.\n“Good morning sir, I have completed the setup, is there a need to allow the vpn connect?”\n“Hi Gabriel, thanks for the guide. Please, my VPN doesn't work without connecting to the internet”\n“Hello, my computer logged me out. It was requesting that I update my password but I wanted to do it later”\nWait.\nBefore you lose your wits and slam your fists on your desk, that’s just the start of the day. There’s a lot more where that came from. Being a system administrator is typically stereotyped as having to deal with a lot of “silly” requests. And it can sound like that. But at the heart of it is solving problems, and that’s why I started in this field in the first place.\nTo successfully take you through a day in the life of a systems administrator, you need a bit of context. My name is Gabriel, and I’m the lead systems administrator at Moniepoint. Depending on where you might have first heard the term, you might have varying ideas of what a system admin does. But I like to think of what I do as solving problem, or making sure they never happen in the first place. With that in mind, here’s what a typical day for me is like;\n\n\n8:30 am\nMy day rarely starts typically, but one thing it always starts with is problems. We call them requests. By the time I log on, there’s likely a thing or two pending that I need to attend to. Someone who needs a password reset, or another person curious about a problem they’re having with their VPN. And it probably sounds a bit dreary, starting with problems, but that’s the exciting thing about being a system admin - the opportunity to help people on your team by solving their problems.\n9:00 am\nBy 9:00 am, I have meetings with my team to discuss pending projects and things we need to do. During this meeting, we might highlight necessary updates that we need to make to our systems or new solutions that we can explore. \nAs a team lead, meeting like this is important to stay in sync with my team and collaborate to solve pending issues.\nBefore Moniepoint, I worked as an IT support staff and found it limiting. I couldn’t solve problems myself and often had to escalate them. Often, I had ideas for how things could be improved or done differently, but these were outside the scope of my role, so they weren’t considered.\nBut things are different here. I joined Moniepoint in July 2021 after receiving an offer from the HR recruiter. It was exciting until I was told it would be an internship. That gave me mixed feelings - I was excited to try something more in line with what I wanted to do, but also a bit sceptical about taking an internship. After the internship, what next?\nThroughout the interview process, I kept asking what would happen after the internship was over, and everyone told me the same thing - “it will depend on your performance”. Determined to give it my best, I decided to go for it.\n10:30 am\nAfter our morning meetings, I’m usually back to addressing more requests. I get requests from level one and two support teams, as well as HR, Operations and anyone else who might need my help. Think of my number as “911” for system emergencies.\nI get a “Hi Gabriel, I need access to the core banking database on xxx server.”, and an, “How far Gabriel? We need to review everyone's permission on xxx”.\nWhen I started as an intern, it took a minute for me to get used to it as I still had relatively limited access and had to collaborate to get things done. But soon, I noticed a difference here that made me decide that I wanted to be a part of this team - I was seen and heard.\nMy contributions counted.\nWhen I brought up ideas and said, “Oh, why do we do it this way? Why not something else?” I often got the go-ahead to do a test run and compare my new solution with existing ones. Once I did it and got feedback, there was no judgement. If it worked, cool, we’d switch to the new solution. If it didn’t, it was also fine. I had validated what we were doing, and I could move on to the next thing. There was room for growth and for my ideas, and that made me want to stay.\nOne time, when I’d just joined as an intern, I had to set up about 300 laptops over a weekend. My first reaction? “It’s impossible”.\n\nBut I took a moment to look at it differently. The reason why it would be impossible was because we were using a manual method at that time. David wrote a script to handle this task, but it was still taking time to run. Then I had an idea to simplify it, and I tried it out. It worked, and in under 24 hours, I had finished what seemed like an impossible task.\nMy role began to evolve quickly. I started working with David five months after my internship started, and by the next month, he confirmed my employment.\nWe worked together for two more months, and then he introduced me to Devops. At this time, I was also handling our data centre and a few other things. With the transition to DevOps, I could perform my role as a system administrator on a whole new level.\n11:00 am\nRemember how I mentioned that some days go atypically? Well, this is usually around the time that it gets like that. If nothing happens, great. But on April 14th, 2023, something definitely happened.\nI got a call from someone saying they couldn’t access the internet. At first, I assumed that it was a one-off and try to solve it as such, but I began getting more messages with the same complaint. When I checked Workplace, our internal communication platform, I realised everyone had the same problem.\nCode red.\nThe interesting (and scary) thing about being a system administrator is that you often work in a live environment. My line manager, David, often says, \n“Don’t press spoil”,\n i.e. don’t break things. In a live environment, one thing going off could affect everyone.\nIf no one could access the internet, then nobody could work, and this could affect the company. I had to do something. To check what the problem was, I get on a call with my team. I checked my computer and the system logs, but neither was particularly helpful. I decided to get someone else’s laptop, and then I was finally able to identify the issue - the computer wass reporting back to its local host, so it could not access the internet.\nWe identified the issue, but there was no way to apply a solution to everyone because of the same problem - the laptops are offline.\n11:30 am\nWith a bit of time past since this began, it became even more crucial that we fix it for everyone. Creating a fix for this meant accounting for most laptops being offline, and we needed to find a unique way to apply this solution. Wrote a few lines of code, modified, and modified it, and then sent it to David to crosscheck before we ran it. We finally found a way to run the command for everyone, and soon, we were all back online.\nYou know that scene after a hero saves the city, and everyone around them claps? That’s how I feel. It’s a great part of the experience for me at Moniepoint. I get to do things that move the needle. I can create solutions to problems and see those solutions deployed in real-time.\n\n\n2:00 pm\nStill on April 14th, as an analogy for an atypical day, everything was a bit settled by this time, but I still had a few people for whom the general solution didn’t work and I had to address them personally.\nThere are a lot of highlights in my career as a systems admin, but there are three key moments for me;\nWinning the MVP award at the Moniepoint end-of-year event last year\nGetting informed that I would be promoted to lead System Administrator (in under two years since I joined the company).\nEvery moment when I get a “Thank you, Gabriel” after helping someone with a problem.\nIt’s one thing to get the opportunity to make key contributions to the company where you work, and it’s another to also  get recognised for these contributions. It’s truly exciting that I’ve been able to find both.\n4:00 pm\nBy 4 pm, things have often gotten a lot more quiet. Most of the major issues are out of the way, and we’ve done our part to keep things up and active. Throughout the day, I collaborate across teams to ensure that everyone else can have a smooth working experience, tackling challenges as they come and working to ensure that everything goes smoothly.\nNo matter how chaotic it gets, I’m excited for the opportunity to solve problems. Each problem is an opportunity to try things differently and explore new creative solutions. I get to test out every idea I have and think of the best way to make contributions that count.\nIf you’re looking to join a team where your contributions count and you can solve problems, visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n\n

A Day in the Life of a Lead System Administrator

Our team at Moniepoint has seen much growth in recent times. We’re now over a thousand across over six countries, all working to power business dreams across emerging markets. With this drive, it’s important for us to connect globally, and that’s why we’re excited to welcome Ross Strike to the team.\nRoss Strike is joining Moniepoint as Head of M&A and Investor Relations. He is a finance professional with over a decade of investment banking and venture capital experience. Ross will be responsible for developing and executing our M&A and fundraising strategy, as we expand into new markets.\nMoniepoint is currently the second-fastest growing company in Africa, per FT’s latest ranking, and we’ve recently shared some milestones we hit in the first quarter of 2023. We’ve seen much growth in this period, and with Ross joining the team, we’re looking to reach newer heights.\nHe is joining Moniepoint from British International Investment, where he led their investment in Moniepoint. Ross was one of the founding members of BII’s venture capital investment team, helping to scale the firm’s early-stage activities, which has deployed over $350m across over 40+ investments. He started his career in Citibank’s investment banking team and is a Kauffman Fellow. \n\n\n\nHe has spent most of his career pursuing a passion for financial inclusion and supporting businesses, both of which we’re also excited about at Moniepoint.\nAmong other things, Ross likes to travel and meet new people and cultures. He has spent a bit of time exploring Kano, Nigeria, and as he joins us, we hope he finds more adventures across the African continent.\n

Welcome Ross Strike, our new Head of M&A and Investor Relations

\nWhen you ask an employee their favourite thing about working at your company, there are quite a few responses they can give. At Moniepoint, the most common one we get is “the people”. Today, we’re sharing a reason why this is a big part of why employees love working here - our open door policy.\nWhat’s an open door policy?\nAn open door policy is a way of shaping the culture of an organisation to be embracing approachability. This means regardless of role, position, or level, every member of the company can interact, engage with one another and can raise issues without fear of retaliation.\nThis workplace rule fosters an open line of communication, builds trust, and encourages employees to discuss job-related ideas or issues with their immediate supervisors or any senior-level managers.\nWhy do we use the open door policy?\n#ForTheCulture!\nDiversity and equity are very crucial to us as a company and the products we build. It is therefore very important that we cultivate this in our day-to-day, which means all doors are wide open for the flow of diverse ideas, people, and enabling equality of opportunity through fairness and transparency. Using the open door policy has created an environment where people know that their work matter and always plugs into the big picture of powering dreams. \nTo build trust!\nWhether it's a community, a group of friends, a cooperative or, in this case, a company, trust is a major part of its social contract - it's why people can function optimally, show up every day at their best, and grow the company into what it is today.\nThe open door policy intuitively engrafts trust into the processes we have within the company, as it naturally creates an atmosphere of employees who have one another's back.\nMaking ideation and collaboration seamless!\nA beautiful feature of having an open door policy is that it makes it easy for teams to collaborate. As we have grown and expanded over the years, and especially in the last couple of months, our open-doorness has helped us function as a well-oiled machine. As everyone knows, they can literally knock on the other person's door, and it'll be opened to them to share, collaborate, brainstorm and find solutions to any problem.\nHow do we keep the door open?\nBy consistent communication\nIt may sound super simplistic, but it works! Constantly communicating the fact that you can reach out to anyone on the team company-wide has given everyone a constant awareness of it. \nBy example\nThere's a lot to be said for leading by example, and this falls under it. From the communications tool we use, to the way senior executives respond to requests, the policy is fostered by the living example of every team lead who encourages their direct reports to feel comfortable coming to them with ideas, feedback and concerns.\nBy applying some ground rules\nDiscussing an open door policy can feel like a lot of pressure, especially for already mega-busy executives, but that's where some ground rules apply. For us, it's about setting expectations. For example, we have a general rule about how long it should typically take you to reply to a colleague and how to respond when you are incredibly busy and need to come back to address what they've contacted you about.\nHow our core values also help bring it to life\nThe core values of Moniepoint inherently makes room for an open door policy.\nFor example candour is one of our core values, and in itself, it connotes being open and honest with feedback, so people don't fall into a pattern of holding back good feedback that's essential for growth.\nEmpathy, another core value that we possess as a company, does this in a two-pronged way. Firstly is in dealing with users, and then in communicating with colleagues. This helps leverage the policy in a well-rounded way.\nAnother core value of ours, which is technical depth, is a wonderful push factor that spurs our employees on to making good use of this policy. It drives them to ask for help, and learn from one another, thereby making great use of the policy.\nGrit, which translates to courage and determination in DreamMakers (this is what we call ourselves), is another example of a push factor that helps bring the policy to life for us at Moniepoint.\nWould you like to experience what it's like to work in an environment where growth is inherently enabled through policies like this? Head over to \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n.\n

Getting a handle on Moniepoint’s open door policy

On February 2nd, 2023, Tosin made a post on his internal work timeline; \nHey guys. I just took this quiz, and it says my personality would be a goalkeeper if I were on a football team. Want to know what your personality says about you? Take the quiz here.\n\nIn under 3 hours, we had over 100 responses, the internal comms equivalent of a viral post. So how did this happen?\nFirst off, who am I? My name is Celestina Dike (everyone calls me Celz, and you can too). I’m the Internal Communications manager at Moniepoint Inc., and if this is the first time you’ve heard about me, you’ve not been reading our blog, and I’m hurt.\nAt Moniepoint, we think of ourselves as a high-performance sports team, but it wasn’t always like this. We made a collective decision to create this narrative, and this is the story of how it happened.\nIt started with an idea.\n\nIn August 2022, Didi reached out to me. She’d had a conversation with our Head of People Operations, Naz, and they decided we needed to define our internal culture. “Culture” is thrown around everywhere in the corporate world, and we wanted to be different. We wanted a way to define exactly what we meant when we talked about the kind of culture we have at Moniepoint.\nSo, I had to work on a culture campaign.\nBut when this went live, how exactly would we get people to \nlive\n the culture? It was one thing to say \nxxx\n was our culture, but what would make it memorable to every team member? How could this be engaging to them? I had my work cut out for me.\n \nAs we defined this culture, one of the earliest conclusions was that we’re not a family. I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about this often. Instead, as we’ve described \nhere\n, we think of ourselves as a sports team. This became the overarching metaphor for the process.\nAnd we took it a step further. We weren’t going to be defined as just any sports team. Teams across different sports had different structures and dynamics.So, we picked the most popular sports in the world, one that our multicultural team across continents could relate with - football.\nOn a football team (soccer, if you’re American), everyone had defined roles, but this didn’t get in the way of accomplishing goals. Everyone on a football team knows what they’re there to do, and they do it. However, a striker would defend if that’s what the situation required. That’s the kind of synergy we were going for.\nThe Eureka Moment (or something like that).\nI don’t really think of the point where I thought of the personality test as a Eureka moment, but I suppose it counts as one.\nI had been brainstorming about the campaign, and the best way to get people to engage with it when I remembered the personality tests I loved to take online. I’ll be honest, no matter how busy I am, I’d always take the test whenever I come across them. “Take this test to find out what currency you are”? Sign me up!\nAnother important detail that made the personality test idea stand out from the rest of what I explored, was how immersive it would be. Beyond just communicating the culture, it could form a useful base for improving both inter and intra-team interactions.\nSo as we tried to figure out a way to kickstart the culture campaign, I suggested a personality test, and the team was on board with it.\nThe next thing Yemi (our creative director) and I had to do, was define the different personalities using a typical football team. We wanted to focus on just four so it wasn’t too complicated. In this way, it was also easier to connect it to existing personality models like the Hartman Personality Profile that’s based on 4 colours, and the four temperaments.\nTo connect these team roles to personality types, I reached out to one of our partners with experience in psychology and personality tests. With their help, we were able to create a model that helped identify each personality type.\nWe finally settled on a personality typing that connected the football roles to personality types on the colour wheel. Here’s how we categorised them;\nGoalkeeper\nWhat stands out when you think about a goalkeeper? For me, it’s making sure the ball doesn’t go into the net, and that means paying attention to details. On the colourwheel, the Goalkeeper’s personality is Blue. Like a goalkeeper, people with this personality are very detailed and have their eyes on the ball always. They ensure that nothing slips past them. In the work place, they are typically ​​structured, organised, functional, and formal.\n\nDefender\nThe defender is a silent advocate for the team. They tend to be relaxed, friendly, and informal but pay close attention to and detail to tasks they’re assigned. Their personality colour is green, and when they’re on a team, they give their all to whatever tasks they’re assigned.\n\nMidfielder\nThe midfielder is a collaborator. They have a vibrant personality coloured yellow, and they connect the team. They love project management and are amazing with bringing resources together to get a project done. They’re fast and spontaneous and help a team move forward.\n\nStriker\nFor a quick picture, think Messi or Ronaldo. The striker is someone who is a goal-getter. They identify opportunities and take advantage of them in order to get the maximum results possible. Their personality colour is red. They are efficient and structured, and will typically be the first person to offer to take on tasks.\n\n
\nDesign, Engineering, and tests\nWith the basic framework of the test in place, the next thing was creating the actual test. I had to meet with Adrian, our VP,  User Experience and Chidum, VP of Engineering,  to explain what we were trying to achieve. We then agreed on a process and flow for the project.\nThe test had three parts;\nThe opening page with a basic explanation of the test and a place to fill in your name (or nickname).\nThe test proper where you had to pick an option from a couple of questions\nThe results page where you saw your personality type\nAdrian’s team got to work with the designs, and while they were on it, I worked on the results page with Yemi and Olympio (brand designer).\nAt this point, even though we had everything we needed, the culture campaign couldn’t exactly go live yet. We were still called TeamApt, but not for long. I knew that we were going to \nchange our name\n soon, and so I had to work with that as I crafted the campaign. The “culture book” we put together had Moniepoint branding, and so did the personality test we were putting together. This meant they could both only go out after the name change was official to avoid spilling the tea.\nThe process was on, and for now, I mostly had to wait.\nIterations\nPersonality test v1\n\nI got the first version of the personality test from Chidum on the 28th of November. By then, they had not done the results page to share or download. This was the first iteration. You could only click the link, and go through the questions.\nOn review, the comms team settled on the fact that the pictures attached to the questions on the test didn’t work. I reselected the images and got back to have them changed. Luckily Chidum and I are best friends (or that’s what I like to believe). He created a group with the engineering team that made it easy for them and me to collaborate.\nPersonality test v2\nBy the 5th of December, they had redone it, and we realised that there was another problem - we couldn’t share the test via Workplace chat (our internal communication platform). We didn’t know if it was a feature or a bug. We had to fix that too.\nPersonality test v3\nBy the 8th of December, we decided that we had to personalise it further. The tests started with you putting in your nickname, and we wanted that nickname to feature at the end. So, we fixed the ending page to make the test come across as more personal. At this point, Chidum was making most of the changes himself, which I thought was really cool.\nPersonality test v- no longer counting\n\nWe also had text corrections to improve the clarity of the questions on the test. I reached out to the partner we had worked with earlier for clarification, and we adjusted it. But this created yet another problem.\nWith these adjustments, the algorithm got a little out of whack. The questions weren’t quite matching the results. On the first attempt of the quiz, everyone got a result they agreed with. But by the time we had made a couple of changes to improve the experience of the quiz, the results changed. As the code was being worked on, there was a mixup, and we had to correct that too.\n3.. 2.. 1.. Liftoff 🚀\n\nWe made tweaks and adjustments right until the final day. On the night before, we added a copy at the beginning. There was also an issue with the quiz not working on some devices.\nOn the morning of “D-Day”, I met with Chidum and his team to explain the issue with the algorithm. We had tiny fixes with the grammar and many other tiny changes. We had a standard that we wanted this test to meet, and all hands were on deck to make it happen.\nSoon, it had all come together, and we were ready to launch.\nTosin took the test and shared his result, and soon, the timeline was full. Everyone shared the results they got, and, interestingly, agreed that it reflected their personalities. By our next townhall, people were using the terms “striker, “defender”, and co, to describe themselves.\nLessons and takeaways\nAt the time that I started with this, I was just transitioning into my role as internal communications manager. This was somewhat unfamiliar territory, and the scale of the project also meant that it was more tasking than was typical. But with smooth cross-team collaboration, we were able to pull off something that got our multicultural team of almost a thousand (at the time) engaged. I was so excited that I tweeted about it.\n\nGoing through this process also made it easier to relate with my team, and this is something we’re extending to everyone else as well. With an idea of each other’s personalities and how it fits into our culture, collaboration is easier, and team members can work together more effectively. Culture becomes less of an undefinable thing floating in the ether, and becomes real to every one of us.\nIf you’d like to be part of a company where culture isn’t just a buzzword, click \nhere\n to claim your spot.\n

Making culture go viral - the story behind Moniepoint’s internal culture-based personality test.

Law and legal constraints aren’t the first thing anyone thinks about when they talk about the tech industry. When you hear “tech”, your mind immediately goes to a lot of code and design. And, fair enough, that’s an important part of it, just not quite the full picture.\nThere are laws and regulations all around us. Everything that works in our cultured society works because there are laws in place guiding it. The technology ecosystem is no different. For every technology solution created, every bit of innovation that escapes into our world, laws exist to guide and advise its creation and use. This area is where technology law resides.\n\nOkechukwu Eke - Moniepoint's Head of Legal\nTo understand how this works at Moniepoint, I had a chat with Okey, Our Head of Legal. The first thing I learnt, was that the scope of the legal team covers five broad areas;\nLitigation management\nDocumentation - contract reviews and drafting\nIntellectual property management\nManagement of the secretariat\nProvision of legal advice\nLet’s take a peek into each of them;\nLitigation & dispute management\nThe primary task of our legal team is to avoid litigation. That sounds ironic (why have a legal team if you want to avoid court cases?) but stay with me. Having a product that is used by millions of businesses means that it’s inevitable that we’ll get some complaints. When these complaints arise, the first thing we do is to understand those complaints and respond to them appropriately after relevant investigations have been conducted.\nLitigation takes time and resources on both our side, and that of our businesses, and we’d rather ensure they have an experience as smooth as possible while using our products. This is why we often try to resolve whatever challenges they might have, without it leading to a court case.\nBut real-world scenarios don’t often play out as we’d intend. Ultimately, some of these situations lead to litigation, but that only happens in a small percentage of cases. A very small percentage.\nFor the most part, our legal team works hard to ensure that these situations are resolved without ever leading to a court case, and that every side stays happy.\nDocumentation - contract reviews and drafting\nWhen Okey joined early on, he realised that we had a bit of a problem. Our documentation system wasn’t optimised, and this meant that, it wasn’t very easy to track and review documents and agreements. We needed better documentation management.\nDocumentation management basically involves drafting and reviewing contracts. On a day-to-day basis, the legal team receives requests from different business lines and functional teams to draft or review contracts.\nWhen they receive those requests, they provide the required legal support. Sometimes that whole contract review process might involve negotiations with counterparties. Counterparties could involve our customers, and it could also involve our suppliers, depending on who we’re entering a contract with.\nTo solve our documentation problem, we started using a contract management platform called Juro. With this tool, we now have a centralised contract management platform. It allows members of the sales team to generate contracts by themselves - they can go on the platform, and input details by themselves, and contracts are automatically generated. This aids efficiency and reduces the time that would have been spent on drafting contracts. The legal team also put up standard contract templates on that platform to enable other teams to create contracts as needed.\nJuro \ndid a case study\n on how this changed our legal documentation system\n.\n Through that same platform, we get our contracts signed by relevant signatories, and then, of course, we have all of those contracts in a shared folder that any member of the legal team can access.\nIntellectual property management\nIntellectual property management (or IP management if you’re cool), involves registration of relevant trademarks for our products and services, or trademarks with regards to our brand or company names.\n“Moniepoint” is our unique identity, and as we create products for emerging markets, it’s important that we protect both our identity and our intellectual property, by having them registered.\nI know it doesn’t sound as dramatic as your favourite suits episode where Harvey is battling it out in court, brandishing sarcasm while being suave, but this is important too. As we expand as a global company, we aim to ensure we have this trademark registered to avoid possible infringement, i.e. someone else going ahead to register these trademarks and then claim ownership of the mark.\nManagement of the company secretariat\nWe (and I say “we” because I’m unofficially part of the legal team now), manage the company secretariats of various entities. After these entities have been set up, there’s sometimes a need to make certain filings when there are changes - such as changes in shareholdings or composition of directors, for example.\nWe make those filings at the corporate affairs commission to ensure that our records are up to date. It also involves the filing of our annual returns when due.\nProvision of legal advice\nThe legal team is also part of the product development cycle. Occasionally, we receive requests from business lines and functional teams to provide legal advice on certain issues. So we carefully consider the issue on the ground, look at what existing laws state on the issue, and then also consider the commercial side of things in providing legal advice. We consider both the legal side and the commercial side in order to arrive at a solution for the business. \nWe ensure that our responses are timely to internal stakeholders so that they can provide value to the various businesses out there. For instance, if we delay in providing feedback when requests are made, that will, in turn, delay the feedback provided to businesses.\n
\nThese 5 areas blend to create a unified approach that keeps the company out of legal risks, and ensures that our products and services remain accessible to business owners.\nTaking the law into your hands\nOf course, I don’t mean that illegally, but being a legal team in the tech industry feels a little like that. They’re always “hands-on” with the law, guiding the company to avoid legal risks. That’s why having a legal team in your tech company is important.\nIt can be tricky, but according to Okey, if you’re setting up a team for your company, or start-up, then you want to get people who;\nUnderstand your business\nUnderstand the risk appetite of your business\nUnderstand the challenges your company could face from a legal perspective\nOnce all of these things are understood, it guides your head of legal, or the person managing your legal team, to be able to source for legal counsels that will be able to solve problems. \nOf course, in choosing legal counsels, it’s also important to choose legal counsels that are smart and commercially savvy. Not just people who know the law, but people who are also aware of the commercial implications of actions. It’s necessary to strike that balance between the legal and commercial aspects of a business, and that’s what the best legal teams do.\nAd Astra Per Aspera\nForgive my Latin, but if you’re unfamiliar with the term, it means “through hardships to the stars”. The philosophy of Moniepoint’s legal team is to manage legal risks through sound legal and commercial analysis. This philosophy ensures that the legal team is at the heart of the business. So, the legal team will always provide quick and innovative solutions to the problems that the functional team has from time to time, to ensure that the entire team makes it... to the stars. As Moniepoint grows and evolves, we’re out there to provide value and enable opportunities for the business. That's our philosophy.\n
\nIf you think our legal team is awesome, and you’d like to be a part of a team doing awesome things in awesome ways (is that too many “awesomes”?), visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n to claim your spot.\n

Going on the stands with Moniepoint’s legal team.

\n\nIn Q1, the team hit some pretty big milestones, but the milestones by themselves don’t often tell the full story. With just the numbers, it’s easy to forget that we’re made up of people, doing the work to make things work. For every milestone we hit, there was a lesson. A way in which we had to adapt to meet challenges as they came, evolving to keep ourselves on track.\n\nIt started with a change in the demands of our users. Regulatory changes in Nigeria saw a shift in the dependence of businesses from cash, to almost strictly digital transactions. Our focus since inception has been on enabling businesses to make a shift like this, but what’s that saying about being careful what you wish for?\nThis cashless policy caused a surge in growth that our support infrastructure wasn’t ready for at the time, but that didn’t last for too long. To meet the increased demand and ensure that we were serving our business owners effectively, we scaled our resources. Currently, we have a 92% CSAT score, even with 10,000 daily interactions.\nIn Q1, we processed a total of 1 billion transactions for our businesses. On its own, this might already sound like a lot, but the scale is even more profound when you put it into context. First, hitting the 1 billion transactions took us 3 times as long in 2022 (9 months). Even more, our transfer feature got hit by industry infrastructure failures, but we didn’t let this get in the way. As we solved this, we launched an additional feature, recurring transfers, to help businesses schedule payments.\nOur \nsite reliability team\n also swung into action, making sure that merchants could (as their name implies), rely on us. We reduced disputes due to processor failures to about 10% daily and reduced downtime by 60%.\nWith the demand surge from businesses and, the reliability of our platform, POS requests went up by 1000%. \nEvery 30 seconds, we activated a terminal for one of our merchants\n. This increased demand was so high, that our manufacturers had to create a new factory line for us. A win, not just for us, but for the businesses we’ll power to accept digital payments with ease.\nWith this growth, we were able to onboard more businesses, surpassing the 1 million mark of merchants who trust our products. We also hit a milestone of over 500k apps in the hands of business owners. But the heart of this was onboarding some of Nigeria’s largest hospitals;\nObafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital\nFederal Medical Centre, Asaba\nNational Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi\nIrrua Specialist Teaching Hospital\nFederal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital\nNnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, and others.\nAll of this contributed to our total processing value of $43 billion for Q1 alone.\nPlacing a premium on membership, we had a leadership retreat in the Seychelles. It was a great time for everyone to get in sync, bracing for the other milestones we intend to hit in the rest of 2023. Furthermore, to enhance our synergy as a team, we designed and developed our very own personality test based on our culture. \nWith all of this in perspective, it’s less about the numbers in isolation, but also about every member of the team. Every milestone we hit, helped us connect with each component of \nour 4Ms framework\n, building a sense of membership and meaning as we make money through our mastery. \nIf you’d like to be a part of a team that’s focused on being better every day, visit moniepoint.com/careers to claim your spot.

Showing grit in the face of challenges; our Q1 2023 milestones.

\n\nTL;DR: Moniepoint has been listed as the second fastest-growing company in Nigeria by the Financial Times in its latest ranking.\nWe’ve recently been listed by the Financial Times, the world’s leading financial publication, as second on its annual list of  Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies. This list was compiled by \nStatista\n, a leading research company renowned for its insight into African companies’ performance, in a rigorous screening process.\nSince our pivot towards creating solutions for businesses in 2019,  we’ve had one goal - to power the dreams of businesses in emerging markets. Every growth on every metric we’ve seen since then, speaks primarily to the progress we’ve made with creating solutions that over a million businesses can depend on.\nIn this survey, companies were ranked by their revenue’s absolute growth rate and compound annual growth rate (CAGR), between 2018 and 2021. Our growth rates of 321%  (absolute) and 7,373%  (CAGR) in this period, led to us claiming the number 2 spot, ahead of hundreds of leading companies from diverse industries like technology, telecoms, financial services and healthcare.\nOur team has also grown massively in this period, and there are now over a thousand of us, all of whose collective efforts are validated by this recognition. Our focus on demographics that are typically excluded from formal systems remains unchanged as we remain devoted to powering the dreams of businesses across emerging markets.

Moniepoint Ranks 2nd on the Financial Times’ List of Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies.

\n\nRisk and compliance management involves dealing with a company’s reputation with regulatory bodies. It’s important for us to stay within the boundaries of stipulated regulations by the designated regulatory body like the Central Bank of Nigeria and attend to law enforcement requests. My job is to ensure that we do.\nI also work with the different product teams as they develop products. I’m there to guide them on the risks to consider and remind them of regulations that guide their design. \nBecause this is a field that not many are familiar with, I often get asked what I do. Here are some peculiar things I have to do daily or weekly as a risk and compliance manager in the tech industry;\nBonding with internal stakeholders\nOne of the foremost things I must do is to bond with my colleagues. When my name is mentioned, I don’t want people to become defensive, as this puts a strain on my ability to successfully perform my role. It’s much easier to work with people when they’re relaxed around me, as it makes it easier to know the processes they’re undertaking and give advice. \nI always work hard to buy that confidence and trust across internal stakeholders. It helps to ensure they don’t feel compelled to contact me. Instead, I want them to naturally feel like they can carry me along when they have an ongoing project or challenge and not that they have to do it out of compulsion.\nNo matter how good you feel as a risk and compliance executive, you will have hitches if you don’t understand the company's products.  So, I work hard to ensure that I have a good rapport with my colleagues across the company to be efficient. With this rapport, whenever I give recommendations, they realise I’m on their side and are willing to listen and consider them.\nPropose solutions when there are no existing regulations for the business\nThe tech industry is pretty face paced. This means that sometimes, regulations are unable to keep up. Every day, we see new ideas within the tech ecosystem—for instance, crowdfunding platforms and companies. But then, we didn't have a regulatory body for crowding until it was signed last year. \nThis is why a part of what I do involves acting proactively and proposing solutions to the regulators. Certain things never change regarding regulations, and I want to make the regulators see that. So, I write to the regulators to get our processes reviewed and checked for compliance. \nThrough this, I’m inviting them and not waiting on them. They’ll check if we have processes in place, and once they are, there wouldn't be issues with the regulatory bodies.\nYou can also find me checking the regulations governing similar businesses in other countries. It’s often said that “there is nothing new under the sun”. Someone somewhere must have started something similar. So, it is my job to check, and armed with that knowledge, I can use the regulations in that country as a guide, pending when my country has a local law to address the business.\nGain the trust of external stakeholders \nAnother part of my routine is building relationships with stakeholders outside of my organisation. Collaboration is key, especially in risk and compliance. Without collaboration, covering all the necessary grounds to ensure we abide by regulations becomes impossible.\nBy gaining their trust through regular interactions, I also make it easier for them to give me access to the necessary information I need to carry out my role seamlessly. It's like buying a house. You need the keys to all the rooms if you’re going to inspect them fully, and that access is what building trust provides.\nSo, it’s important for me to keep working and delivering to show these stakeholders that I can be trusted and that working with me is collectively beneficial.\nCommunicating with the team\nI’d say that one of the superpowers of any risk and compliance officer is having effective communication skills. It is a needed skill as you would always have to communicate with members of your immediate team or even other interrelated teams. \nI always have to communicate every day, especially when there are overlapping functions. With an auditor, for example, I must employ the use of awareness and tact to identify that as a risk and compliance person, my role ends at point Z, and I can allow the auditor to come and continue from there. \nI had to consciously build my communication skills in my early career years, especially in the office. I’d say that communicating clearly and objectively with an open mind has proven helpful so far. \nRisk-free zone\nWhen a day of analysing risks and ensuring compliance is done, I like to kick up my feet and spend time in my risk-free zone - bonding with my husband. You know what they say about all work and no play. Despite risk and compliance in tech being face paced, I create time to make memories with my husband. We do this by exploring new places and cooking new recipes. You’d always find us spending time cooking together. \nAmongst the many peculiarities of risk compliance, one of the most frequent things I have to deal with is a lack of awareness about it. Because of this, one of my core responsibilities is helping people understand the importance of risks and compliance. That way, they’ll always turn to me when necessary because they understand how I come in.

A Day In The Life Of A Risk And Compliance Officer In The Tech Industry

Automation is a common phrase amongst software developers and test automation engineers. You must have heard people using this phrase during a software development cycle and were confused. You may know what it means, but you don't understand why and how it plays in software development. \nThis article deeply delves into test automation and its role in software development. \nWhat is test automation?\nTest automation ensures that you have manual test cases automated using specific automation tools. An example of such automation tools could be Selenium or Cypress. Not only do you use these tools, but you also use them with the knowledge of a programming language. It could be Java, JavaScript, or any other programming language that supports automation. \n\n\nWith test automation, all your manual test cases are written down in a code base. It helps you in the future when you want to run regression tests. Therefore, you don't have to start testing them manually again. Instead, you can just run your script from your system, and it automatically tests those existing test cases you had added in your script. \nThe concept of test automation is helpful across many organizations. It allows companies to have a database that assists new QA engineers. These newbies now know how things are done in the organization. \n\nThe role of test automation in software development \nFrom my experience as a QA engineer, test automation wears many hats in the software development life cycle. Some of its benefits include:\nTime-saving \nThe goal is always to optimize for time when building a software, and test automation makes it happen. For instance, you have about a thousand test cases to execute, and the business expects you to go live the next day or that weekend. It means you're running on a tight schedule, and implementing these test cases isn't feasible if you run them manually. \nYou need more time to test manually, which is where test automation comes into play. If these scripts were automated, you don't have to do anything. All you need to do is run the automated scripts, and it will test for you within five or ten minutes, depending on the largeness of your test suites. \nYou would have already gotten feedback on all these tests in a little time. But if you had decided to do it manually, you're looking at spending the whole day and some more on it. \nTest automation helps you reduce the time it takes to execute your test cases.\nFaster feedback \nYou'd also get faster feedback when your test cases are automated. The more time you save on executing your test cases, the faster the feedback you will get. \nIf you were to test manually, you would look at six to seven hours to get feedback. But with test automation, you can get feedback within 20 minutes.\nReduces business expenses \nTypically, businesses are always looking for ways to reduce their businesses, and test automation is one of the ways to go about it. You won't need more manual testers if you have an engineer that can automate. You're saving time and a lot of money with one engineer that can automate. \nEven if you need manual testers, you wouldn't need so many. This way, you're saving the money you would have used to pay these manual testers' salaries.\nIncreases test coverage \nTesting manually limits your test coverage because you are human. Many factors can hinder your progress, such as fatigue. Sometimes, it could even be a simple oversight. \nIt isn't unusual to feel that it would still be working because something was working before. Thus, you tend to ignore and not test it. However, automation doesn't think like humans. It does every instruction given to it to perform. \nSo, if you have like a thousand test cases, it would test all the test cases and give you feedback. If anyone fails, it will provide you with feedback; you can see the errors on the logs. Thus, giving you a higher test coverage. \nReusability of test suites \nLet's say you write a test script that has to do with login functionality. Then, maybe you move to another product that also has login functionality. You don't need to rewrite that login functionality because you've already written it for another product. \nAll you need to do is pick the test you wrote and use it in your current project.\nImproved accuracy \nIf you rely on manual testing, you might not check everything and ensure a hundred percent accuracy. You might skip some test cases believing it was working before and everything is working. But automation will test everything and give you accurate feedback against what a manual tester would have given you.\nWith manual testing, it's easy to assume that all your 10,000 test cases are working perfectly. But when you run the scripts, you might discover some tests failing. For example, you can see that 80% of the test passed while 20% failed. It means it is more accurate than manual testing. \n
\nTest automation and its role in the quality of the software\nWith all the roles that test automation plays in the software development life cycle, it improves the quality of the software. Therefore, test automation equates to higher and better quality in software development. After all, it gives you accurate feedback. \nSome of the metrics you can use in checking software quality are: \nIt meets the business requirement \nLess high-impact bugs complaints \nStability - almost 100% uptime. \n\nTest automation also helps to improve quality through feature coverage. For example, you're trying to simulate thousands of virtual users interacting with your web application. It is more of a performance test because you're automating the process of simulating users that will hit your application. \nLet's say you have the Moniepoint business app on production, and you're expecting a minimum of 200,000 users to be on that app. Now, you want to simulate that before you even get to production to be sure the servers will not crash. It would be best if you were sure you wouldn't have any downtime when you get 200,000 or 300,000 users. \nThen, you get to know the bandwidth at which the server can take or the servers' limits or breaking point. You'd now put it at that point that if you get to this particular number, stop other people from going into the server until someone leaves. So it doesn't go down or get downtime.\nNow, you understand how test automation helps to improve quality and makes your product outstanding. \nHow does test automation integrate with continuous integration and continuous delivery process? \nThere's what we call a pipeline in our dev ops tools, and I'll explain continuous integration with an example. Let's say you finish automating your test cases, and you need to add the test cases to the pipeline. You're doing this to ensure that if there's any deployment from the developers' end, you don't need to go and trigger it manually. So once there is any new code deployment, automatically, the CICD picks up your automated test scripts and runs them for you from the start of testing. \nOn the part of integrating, it is adding your automated script to the pipeline, and then you set up the configurations on the pipeline. How do you want your automated script to be run? Is it immediately after a code has been deployed? Or do you want it every 10 minutes? Or 20? Or every 24 hours? Once you add it to the pipeline and set those configurations, this pipeline is now the CICD tool. \nWhenever you have deployments, it checks the configuration to know how to run the code based on your settings. If it's for every 5 minutes, it runs the tests every five minutes and sends feedback. If any build fails and everything doesn't pass successfully as it should, it stops deploying the build to the next environment. \nChallenges in implementing test automation \nI'd be lying if I said implementing test automation is easy. While it is useful and has many benefits, some people or organizations ignore it because of the challenges they might have encountered. \nSome of these challenges are:\nThe technical know-how\nIt could be that the test engineers within the organization are not familiar with the chosen automation tool, or they do not know the programming language. Often, they are used to the manual system, and navigating automation processes becomes difficult for them.  \nNot knowing how to prioritize tests \nWith automation, you need to know how to rank lower priorities against test cases of higher importance. When you run the automated scripts, it should test for test cases that are relevant at that time so that it doesn't waste the time of everyone involved in the project. \nTypically, you should test those of higher priorities before lower-priority test cases. So, prioritizing tests is another challenge that many engineers face. \nCommunication and collaboration \nIt is essential to know how to pass information to every team member involved in the project. You also need to know how to reach out to teammates when there is an issue. \nFor example, I have a blocker that is blocking me from being able to write my automated tests. It could be that there is someone on the team who can help me with a more straightforward solution that could unblock me in less than five minutes. But because I do not know how to reach out or communicate, I try to research independently. \nThen, I spent about two or three hours on something I could have resolved in five minutes. Therefore, communication is another challenge. You need to learn how to communicate well or properly research when you have an issue, or else you wouldn't be able to solve it. \nTaking actual user conditions into account \nLet's use the earlier scenario of stimulating virtual users that hits a specific application. If you don't consider things like that, it might be challenging because things will still be breaking once you go to production. \nSo, take actual user conditions into account. \n
\nMeasuring the success of your test automation \nOften, it isn't about creating something new or automating a process. You need to check that it is working and successful. As a new engineer in a new organization, the best way to measure the success of your test automation is by checking if it \ncatches all those bugs it's supposed to notice. \nFor instance, you write an automated script and run it for the first time, and everything succeeds. Then, a code change springs up somewhere, and you may not be aware of the change. Then, they tell you it's time for production, and you rerun your automated script. A successful automation should catch that bug and show that something has broken.\nIt is best to remember that sometimes, some tests could fail due to network issues or a change in the UI flow. If you know the difference in the flow, you need to update your flow to match what you currently have. \nOne of the ways to test your success metrics is by checking that it captures a failure if there is a change in code or something breaks in a process that was working initially. Once it signals that something is wrong, you can check manually to know why it's failing. \nIt allows you to delay deployment until the issue is resolved. Once they fix the problem, you can rerun your script and ensure everything is a hundred percent successful before giving the go-ahead for production. \nBest practices for creating and maintaining automated test suites \n\nCreating and maintaining automated test suites is a detailed process. Some of the ways to go about it are:\nDecide which tests to automate\nEvery test automation plan must begin with narrowing down which tests will benefit from being automated. So, it's advisable to automate tests using some of these qualities: \nTests requiring repetitive action with vast amounts of data \nTests prone to human error \nTests that need to use multiple data sets \nTests that extend across numerous builds \nTests that must run on different platforms, hardware, or OS configurations \nTests focusing on frequently used functions \nTypically, you'd need to talk with your product manager and discuss ticket priority. So, once you have tickers, you need to divide them into higher and lower priorities based on the metrics I have highlighted above. \nFor example, you know that login tickets would have a higher priority because you cannot do anything inside the application if you cannot log in. The same applies to the registration, as you cannot do anything in the application without registering. \nSo, you sit with your PM and draft out those higher-priority tickets. Start with the registration flow, go ahead to the login, take the next higher-priority feature, and automate. \nDivide tasks based on skill\nWhen creating test suites and cases, assign each to individuals based on their technical expertise. For example, if the test requires a proprietary tool to be executed, it will allow team members of varying skill levels to create test scripts with reasonably minimal ease. \nCollective ownership of tests\nIt is crucial to keep in mind that everyone has a role to play when it comes to test automation. It isn't just about a single tester or engineer to carry out the entire automation testing project. Everyone involved in the process has to be active and on deck. \nIf the rest of the team does not stay up to date every step of the way, they will not be able to contribute in any meaningful way. \nRemove Uncertainty \nThe entire point of automation is to achieve consistent and accurate test results. Whenever a test fails, testers have to identify what went wrong. However, with an increase in the number of false positives and inconsistencies, a corresponding increase in the time required for analyzing errors occurs. \nTo prevent this, one has to eliminate uncertainty by removing unstable tests in regression packs. Additionally, automated tests can sometimes miss out on checking necessary verifications because they need to be updated. You can prevent this with sufficient test planning before running any tests.\nIt is also essential to be conscious of whether every test is always up to date. Also, ensure that the sanity and validity of automated tests are adequately assessed throughout test cycles. \nTest on real devices \nNo matter the website or app, there is a need for it to be tested on real devices and browsers. \nKeep records for better debugging \nWhen tests fail, it's essential to keep records of the failure and text and video logs of the failed scenario so that testers can identify the reasons for the failure. It also helps when new engineers come on board. \nChoose a testing tool with an in-built mechanism for automatically saving browser screenshots in each test step. It makes it easy to detect the stage at which the error occurs. \nUse data-driven tests\nA manual test becomes out of the question if multiple data points need to be analyzed together. The sheer volume of data and the number of variables would make it impossible for any human to conduct quick and error-free tests. \nImplementing data-driven automated tests boils it down to a single test and a single data set, which can then be used to work through an array of data parameters. Thus, it helps to simplify the process.\nEarly and frequent testing \nStart testing early in the sprint development lifecycle to get the most out of automation testing. It also helps if you run tests as often as required. By doing so, testers can start detecting bugs as they appear and resolve them immediately. \nDoing this saves much of the time and money that would have to be spent to fix bugs in a later development stage or even in production.\nPrioritize detailed and quality test reporting \nAutomation should reduce the amount of time QA teams have to spend verifying test results. So, set up adequate reporting infrastructure with the right tools which generate detailed and high-quality reports for every test. \nGroup tests according to parameters such as type, tags functionality, results, etc. A good test summary report should be created after each cycle. \nAutomation is not the same as Artificial Intelligence (AI) \nOne of the biggest misconceptions I hear about automation is that it is the same as AI/ Machine Learning! To wrap up, I want to clarify that both concepts are different. \nThe concept of machine learning implies that things automatically happen based on instructions, or it learns and understands how testing is done before it starts doing it on its own. But for automation, you need to add specific actions they need for it to work how you want it to. 

Test Automation in Software Development Life Cycle

A brief but detailed intro to Moniepoint’s 4Ms framework.\n\n\nIt’s the 21st century, and let’s face it, work isn’t anything like it used to be. Now we’re all about a healthy work culture while maximising productivity, and for a good reason. The world is evolving, and we should too.\nThe thing, though, is that striking that balance can be a little tricky. And although many companies claim they’ve done it, they’re often unwilling to talk about the how. So ultimately, it’s much like the Lochness monster. You don’t know what it is for sure, but you’ve heard rumours of its existence.\nFor anyone looking to join our team, however, we’ve decided to make this as lucid as possible. If we say we’re creating the best place to work, as well as ensuring you’re able to give your best, how exactly are we doing that?\nWell, meet the 4Ms framework.\nThe “M”, as I’m sure is obvious, is from “Moniepoint”, but each of the 4Ms stands for a distinct way we approach giving everyone who’s a part of Moniepoint a wholesome experience. Here’s a breakdown;\nM for Meaning\nNo one really likes working. I mean, think about it. No one sets out at the beginning of their life with the decision to spend hours stuck in front of a computer, click-clacking away. What we all can relate to, though, is making some difference in the world.\nWhether or not you like “working”, you want to leave some impact on the world. You, and I, want to feel like the things we do are making a difference out there. And that’s the first thing we think about too when defining the ideal workplace.\nHere’s some context. \nLast year\n, we powered \n592,677\n businesses across industries like Agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Non-Profits, and so much more. Often, we’d get messages from people whose lives have been changed by what we do, and everyone on our team gets to say, “Hey! I did that!”.\nHere’s someone on our team sharing what that feels like;\n\n\nM for Membership\nLet’s put this out there - we are not a family. I mean, it’s a cool concept, and I get why it’s common to refer to your workplace as a family, but family is different. I could decide to stop talking to my family, and they would still love me (probably. I’m not so sure). But that’s not healthy, and that’s not the kind of workplace we’re creating either. Instead, we think of ourselves as a team, in every sense of the word.\nSee, on a team, everyone has a role. And playing that role makes the team complete. When we win, we do so knowing that everyone made a contribution. We worked together to make this happen, and we celebrate as such. \nOn a team, no one is less important than the other. The goalkeeper is just as important as the striker, and the defenders have to connect with the midfielders to make it all work. I hope you get the football references.\nBut if you still don't believe me, believe Waqas.\n\n\nM for Mastery\nTo put this simply (and a little informally), everyone here knows their *bleep*. And that’s what you want. Life is a lot easier when you know you can count on the next person to put in a hundred percent, and that’s what we always do.\nMuch of what we do at Moniepoint revolves around creating solutions for emerging markets, that have either not been previously available, or were inaccessible to those who needed them. This means that we’re doing a lot of groundbreaking work, and don’t plan on ever giving up. We’re innovating cool stuff like \nPOS transfers\n and working with kick-ass \ndesign systems\n.\nIt’s a lot, and that’s what makes it worth it. It leaves everyone feeling like genuine badasses (is “badass” still cool to say?). From engineering to legal, marketing to design, everyone on the team is a master at their game. And we think like minds belong together, don’t you?\nWell, even if you don’t, Kemi thinks so;\n\n\nM for Money\nI’ll be straight with you; everything I’ve written above is just fancy English if you’re not getting paid what you’re worth. And companies tend to dance around this bit a lot. “It’s not about the money”, is something you probably might’ve heard often enough. But, we still need to pay them bills though, don’t we?\nWe understand the importance of not just getting paid what you’re worth, but also enjoying pretty awesome perks. I mean, what better completes the experience of doing meaningful work, being on a team where you fit right in, and working with people at the top of their game in the industry, than getting paid what you deserve? The only thing that sounds better is a pyramid scheme (but we don’t do that here).\nOf course, you don’t have to believe anything I’ve written. Tolu not only talks about this, but he also goes further to tie everything in.\n\nSo what’s it to you?\nWell, you tell me. I’ve laid it bare for you, and you’ve got additional evidence from members of our team. Think where you currently work has a better framework for creating an ideal workplace? Then send me a mail \nhere\n. Otherwise, visit \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n to join us. Bonus points if you talk about our 4Ms in your cover letter.\n

This is not just the usual corporate write-up about culture. I promise. 

In November 2022, we had decided to split the database which our services write into. We initially had everything one just one service, and that was a problem. If, for example, that central database went down, it would affect everything. If we had a slow query on a database, automatically, everybody was affected, and it wasn’t a good experience for our users.\n\n\nSo we took that insight and decided that we had to split our services. In the course of this splitting, we deployed at night because there was less traffic, and at that time, everything looked fine. But the next morning, by 5:30 am, there was a problem.\n\n\nThe scale of our products at Moniepoint and the delicacy of financial services means that there is little to no room for error. Keeping the trust of our users, merchants who depend on us for a complete business banking experience, requires that our products and services remain active. But the world isn’t perfect, and that’s where site reliability engineering comes in.\n\n\nWhat is Site Reliability?\n\n\nSimply put, Site reliability is the discipline or structure put in place that acts as a supporting system for software, applications or products.\n\n\nSite reliability is what happens when you ask a technical team to design an operations team. This means that, unlike traditional technical engineers, devs and other tech-related roles, site reliability engineers (SREs) apply some software principles to their day-to-day work to ensure the proper flow of our services.\n\n\nIn the incident from November, our SRE team helped identify the problem we had early on. The person on duty noticed that we started having slow queries on the database. We saw the slow query, and connected it to the deployment the night before. \n\n\nIn our language, we call it “deploying beans”. If you’ve ever had to prepare beans, then you know that cooking beans is very difficult, and it doesn’t always come out right. Apparently, what happened was that when the new splitting was done, they missed out on a vital column.\n\n\nSo we all had to get on a call - site reliability with enterprise architects and the head of infrastructure. We resolved that issue before 7:30 am that morning.\n\n\nThere are four primary responsibilities of our Site Reliability Engineering team;\n\n\nMonitoring:\n A foundational requirement for every SRE, monitoring involves collecting, processing, aggregating, and displaying real-time quantitative data about a system. This could include query counts and types, error counts and types, processing times, server lifetimes and other things that need to be monitored. We use tools to observe for any abnormalities in the system, so we can get ahead of them before they disrupt our services. Active monitoring was why we were able to detect the problem with our database, and get ahead of it before it began to affect our users.\n\n\nAvailability: \nWe are responsible for the availability of the services we support. After all, if services are unavailable, end users are disrupted, which can cause serious damage to our organisation's credibility. We ensure that every service we render remains available.\n\n\nPerformance:\n Our service needs to be not only available, but also highly performant. For example, how useful is a website that takes 20 seconds to move from one page to another or a transfer that takes 1 week to go through? Beyond just making our services available, they must also perform at a level that provides a seamless experience for our users.\n\n\nIncident management\n: SREs manage the response to unplanned disruptions that impact customers, such as outages, service degradation, or interruptions to business operations. We identify the problem, work to ensure that the services are back up and running, and coordinate with the necessary stakeholders to make this happen.\n\n\nHow do we maintain site reliability?\n\n\nThe SRE role is a diverse one, with many responsibilities. An SRE must be able to identify an issue quickly, troubleshoot, and mitigate it with minimal disruption to operations.\n\n\nA partial list of the tasks we typically undertake includes;\n\nWorking with the Devs, Enterprise Architect, Infrastructure or System Admin to solve problems using software - whether it’s code-related, a quick fix or infrastructural upgrade.\nBeing on call to detect any service abnormalities. This is not the most attractive part of being an SRE, but it is essential. We must be available to attend to errors, even outside of typical work hours.\nWe facilitate discussions of strategy and execution during incident management. We call this “leading a war room”.\nPerforming postmortems to identify processes that can be put in place to avoid further disruption in the future. For every issue we encounter, we fix them and then put in systems to ensure that they never occur again.\nAutomating: SRE can be tedious and boring, if everything is done manually. Automation not only saves time but reduces failures due to human errors. Spending some time working on automating tasks can have a strong return on investment.\nStand-ups to discuss and Implement best practices, We are in several areas of service management.\nHow we designed an effective on-call system\n\n\nAn on-call management system streamlines the process of adding members of the SRE team into after-hours or weekend call schedules, assigning them equitable responsibility for managing alerts outside of traditional work hours or on holidays.\n\n\nIn some cases, an organisation might designate on-call SREs around the clock. In our case, we have a team of application monitoring and technical engineers available before working hours, during working hours and late nights, who are the first touch when issues arise, i.e. we use on-call schedules to make sure that someone's always there to respond to major bugs, capacity issues, or product downtime.\n\n\nIf they can't fix the problem on their own, they're also responsible for escalating the issue. For SRE teams like ours, who run services for which customers expect 24/7/365, 99.999% uptime and availability, the on-call SRE has multiple duties:\nProtecting production systems: The SRE on call is a guardian to all production services they are required to support.\nResponding to emergencies within acceptable time: we have automated monitoring and alerting solutions that also empower our SREs to respond immediately to any interruptions to service availability.\nInvolving team members and escalating issues: The on-call SRE is responsible for identifying and calling in the right team members to address specific problems.\nTackling non-emergent issues: we have secondary on-call engineers scheduled to handle non-emergencies.\n\n\nHaving an on-call system ensures that you’re able to detect problems at off-hours, and this is especially important for financial services. Having a remote SRE team also increases our efficiency. We’re available round the clock to attend to issues and are able to gather on a call and fix issues, no matter where we are.\nAn SRE team you can rely on\n\n\n\nBusinesses sometimes deprioritise site reliability, leaving the load for just one person to handle. But the advantage of having a team, instead of just one person, is that there’s always someone available to detect any issues that might arise.\n\n\nWith our transactions per minute hitting new milestones every day, site reliability has become more important for us than ever. Our team grew, and our system made everyone’s jobs clear and fluid. Part of ensuring that we run effectively is a culture that ensures that our team can run efficiently. For our teams, we prioritise;\nA focus on engineering\nBalanced workload to avoid burnout\nPositive and safe environment\n\n\nBeyond this, every member of the team has a couple of characteristics that contribute to effective site reliability engineering. Some of them include;\nAttention to detail\n: Our team refers to this as \nbeing paranoid\n. It could be just a small spike and something someone else could ignore, but finding out exactly what is happening (and why) is important. If there’s a spike or reduction in the values you’re monitoring, what caused it? Is it a normal pattern, or is something wrong? That paranoia helps a lot. We’ve sometimes detected bugs just by being attentive to changes in our system that might’ve otherwise been ignored. \nWillingness to learn\n: A site reliability engineer doesn't need to know everything, but you should be close enough. This is important because you’ll need to interact with different teams, to solve different problems that might arise. So you want to be versatile enough to interact with them, and find a solution that works.\nTaking responsibility\n: As a site reliability engineer, it’s important to understand that it’s your responsibility to ensure that services stay up. This sense of responsibility keeps you attentive to processes, and with good attention to detail, keeps you ahead of downtimes.\n

Say hello to Moniepoint’s Site Reliability process

In today's rapidly evolving software development landscape, staying competitive and keeping up with user demands is more critical than ever. Microservices offer a flexible, scalable, and resilient solution to building complex applications. But before we dive into the world of Microservices, let's first take a closer look at \nMonolithic Architecture\n.\nThe Monolithic Architecture is a straightforward and efficient approach to managing application code. By consolidating all code into a single executable program, it simplifies the building, testing, and deployment processes. However, as the application grows in size and complexity, this simplicity can become a disadvantage. With a Monolithic Architecture, implementing any change or update to the system necessitates redeploying the entire application, which can result in downtime and disruption to the entire system. Although, to mitigate downtime, various approaches, such as \nCanary deployments\n, can be utilized.\nIn Microservices Architecture, which is the framework we use heavily at Moniepoint, our approach is somewhat different. The application is broken down into smaller, loosely-coupled services that communicate with each other over well-defined APIs. Each service can be developed, tested, and deployed independently, providing greater agility. With Microservices, developers can focus on building and maintaining smaller, more manageable components, reducing the complexity of the system as a whole.\nBenefits of Monolithic architecture over Microservices\nSimplicity\nEasier to maintain\nEasier to deploy\nBenefits of Microservice architecture over Monolith\nAbility to scale different parts of the system independently.\nAbility to deploy different parts of the system independently.\nHigher Resilience against failures, since issues are more isolated. \n\n\nWhile Microservices are often considered the ideal choice for developing scalable and resilient systems, the tried and tested Monolith cannot be overlooked. However, in many cases, a well-structured Monolith can offer the same level of code cleanliness and maintainability as Microservices, without the added complexity. This well-structured Monolith is often referred to as a Modular Monolith, or Modulith. With a Modular Monolith, you can enjoy the benefits of a Monolith and the flexibility of a modular architecture while maintaining code quality and maintainability. Each module is designed to be isolated from the other modules, resulting in decoupled modules that are easier to maintain.\nSo, whether you're considering using a Monolith or Microservices for your application, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. It all comes down to your specific needs, requirements, and goals.\nA Closer Look at Microservices.\nThink about Microservices as a system comprising multiple services where each service is self-contained, and services communicate with each other via APIs or some well-defined mechanism. API, short for Application Program Interface is a medium over which you can invoke functionality within a service. \nSuppose we are building a Hospital Management System (HMS) that provides an API for saving health records. Each health record contains patient information, attending physician, diagnosis, and other pertinent details. The API accepts information from a caller and stores it in a database, with the intention of leveraging it later. For instance, we may provide other APIs to enable users to view the accumulated records, extract valuable insights from the stored data, and perform analyses on the existing records.\nCentral to the Microservice paradigm is the art of \nDecomposition\n. Which is almost like deconstructing a large puzzle. But instead of trying to piece the puzzle together, you're creating a set of smaller, more manageable puzzles. This is a very crucial step while building Microservices.\nDecomposition in technical terms stems from decomposition in business terms. Decomposition of the business domain. Your business domain is the totality of all context that pertains to your business. What you want is to properly decompose your business domain into its sub-domains. This means careful organization of functionality within your architecture into individual services, with each service designed to address a specific concern within the business domain (or by extension, the technical domain).\nFor example, in our Hospital Management System scenario, if I need to send emails to my users, I could have an email service. If I need to send sms to my users, I could have an sms service. If I need to keep track of orders placed by users, I could have an order service. You get the idea.\nNote\n: A monolith will probably suffice for our Hospital Management System, but for the sake of our understanding, let’s assume we are engineering a Microservice setup.\nSo how can we decompose a system into microservices?\nWe could be working on breaking apart a monolith into individual services, or building a microservice setup from scratch. Either way, it's great to have a formal approach to decomposition. Personally, I would recommend the following steps:\nIsolate and group functionality\nFirst identify the different functionalities that will need to be supported by your system. At a high-level, you can start to see these functionalities if your business domain has been well defined. Functionalities that are related in some way should be grouped together. In grouping these functionalities, you may realize that some of these groups can be handled by 3rd party libraries or existing solutions. In which case, no need to build in-house since existing solutions can be leveraged.\nUsing the example of our HMS, some functionalities we can discover:\nAs a Patient, I should be able to sign-up on HMS\nAs a Patient, I should be able to log into HMS\nAs a Patient, I should be able to schedule an appointment with a Doctor\nAs a Patient, I should be able to view my scheduled appointments\nAs a Patient, I should be able to view my Health History\nAs a Patient, I should be able to place order for medication using a Doctor's prescription\nAs a Doctor, I should be able to log into HMS\nAs a Doctor, I should be able to schedule appointment with a Patient\nAs a Doctor, I should be able to view my scheduled appointments\nAs a Doctor, I should be able to view a Patient's Health History\nAs a Doctor, I should be able to add a new record to a Patient's Health History\nAs an Admin, I should be able to log into HMS\nAs an Admin, I should be able to onboard a new Doctor on the platform\nAs an Admin, I should be able to view all doctors and patients on the system\nAs an Admin, I should be able to view details of a doctor or patient on the system\nThis is by no means an exhaustive list, but from the items listed above, you can imagine our system will need to serve different entities: Patients, Doctors, and Admins. An entity is anything of interest in our domain which has an identity and some well known attributes. We can identify 3 functionality groups: one for each identified entity. This could mean assigning a service for each group: patient-service, doctor-service, admin-service. A somewhat simplistic approach, but it might suffice for our use-case. 
\n\nThis arrangement yields some benefit, even in terms of security. Say we want to implement some network level security for the different services, our patient-service can be public facing and available to anybody over the internet; our doctor-service can be deployed behind a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and made only available to users (doctors) within our private network, our admin service can employ even tighter restriction and be made available to IPs in a \nCIDR\n range.\nFunctionalities could also be grouped by other means, including business function. For example, in the list drawn up above, some functionalities revolve around appointments; doctors and patients should be able to schedule and view appointments. We could have an appointments-service which allows users schedule and manage their appointments.\n\nUsing this approach might imply we’ll need to create a service to address each business function within our domain. \nIdentify Subdomain Boundaries.\nA sub-domain is a logical boundary that separates the different parts of the system according to the business functions and responsibilities. The boundary comprises the classes, entities, components that will exist within each service, including the schema and data that will constitute the database for that service. Establishing boundaries also provides a footing on which to deliberate on the APIs that will be exposed by each service.\nWhat kind of Database? Shared Database or Database per Microservice?\nWill a Relational Database suffice? Are we using a SQL or NoSQL database? Is our data inherently graphical and best handled with a Graph database? Do we want a Shared Database or Database for each Microservice? We ask ourselves these questions in order to think about data persistence within our architecture. \nIn a \nShared Database pattern\n, you have multiple services connected to a single datasource. All reads and writes by the different services happen against the same database.\n\n\n
This has some benefits but also some drawbacks.\nBenefits:\nSimpler to operate.\nEasier to enforce data consistency.\nDrawbacks:\nMay open up the services to unnecessary coupling.\nGreater probability of service interference at the database level due to row-level or table-level locks.\nScaling becomes trickier. Scaling a service could impact your database and by extension other services.\nGreater security risk as all services have access to the same data.\nIn a \nDatabase per Service pattern\n, you have each service connected to its own datasource. This creates greater decoupling of services, since each service handles its own data independently without interfering in other service's data. Services only communicate via APIs. \nDatabase per Service pattern has several benefits over the Shared Database.\nBenefits:\nBetter Scalability\nFault Tolerance and Isolation\nFlexibility\nServices are more independently deployable.\nDrawbacks:\nData Consistency becomes more challenging\nMore expensive to run and maintain\n\nA hybrid approach, \nDatabase per Service Group\n can equally suffice. Where you can have a group of related services sharing the same database. This approach can allow you to reap the benefits of shared database and database per service. Particularly in cases where it makes sense for the services to share the same datasource.\n\nIdentify Cross-cutting concerns\nCross-cutting concerns affect multiple modules or layers within a system's architecture. Examples of cross-cutting concerns include: security, logging, transaction-management, caching. Security is probably the first concern we might need to address. Our users (regardless of their role) need to be able to log into the platform. \nWhen a user logs in; they should only be able to carry out those actions they are allowed to do. A patient should not be able to onboard a new Doctor; because that action is restricted to Admins. This security concern cuts across our entire system. For every action that can be invoked by a user, we want to ensure that the user is authorized to carry out such action. We can delegate \nAuthentication\n and \nAuthorisation\n to an Auth server, which will exist as a stand-alone service within our infrastructure.\nAnswer the question: library or service?\nA service implies a separate process that is independently deployable (possibly) with its own data storage and exposed API(s). A library on the other hand implies a reusable collection of code that can be imported into other services. A library is not a stand-alone service.  When you group functionality, or identify cross-cutting concerns, it is important to answer the question: should this function group be handled by a library or a service? \nLogging as a cross cutting concern can be conveniently handled by a library; Caching can be implemented by a library, or if we're using a tool like Redis as our cache, that would mean accounting for a redis instance within our infrastructure. Trade-offs will need to be thought through and discussed by the engineering team. \nIdentify medium for inter-service communication\nHow will our services communicate: Soap, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets etc? How do we plan to support Synchronous and Asynchronous IO within our infrastructure? Are we using Messaging tools like RabbitMQ, Kafka for asynchronous messaging? How do we plan to support '[Fire and forget]' or '[Guaranteed Delivery]' patterns for our operations. Are we installing an API Gateway? Are we employing [Service Discovery] or do we want services to explicitly know about each other?  Some of these questions can be answered at this point, and some of them can be deferred.\nWhen building microservices, there are many variables to consider. However, this is where software architecture shines – it involves making informed decisions while balancing different tradeoffs.\nKeep in mind that good software architecture requires us to defer important decisions until we have a better understanding of the context. In the meantime, we can reason from a higher level of abstraction and use the available information to guide our decision-making process.\nSuccessful implementation of good architecture depends on architects having a thorough understanding of the problem space and its constraints. So let's remain flexible and adaptable as we navigate this exciting journey!\nI first shared this on my LinkedIn \nhere\n. You can check it out, and, hopefully, connect with me. In the next part of this, I’ll touch on Distributed Systems concepts like Synchronous / Asynchronous IO, Messaging, Event Sourcing, SAGA, and much more. Ciao. \n

Microservice Architectures and Design Patterns

I still remember the first time I saw the news about COVID. It felt like something far away that would be over soon. Slowly, it crept into my life and almost crippled everything I was used to. I remember having mixed feelings the first time I had to work remotely. I was happy I didn’t have to wake up too early and be stuck in traffic, but at the same time, I was worried my parents wouldn’t understand the concept of working from home and bombard me with errands. \nIt’s over three years since I first worked from home; even if many companies have returned to working from the office, I know I’ll always choose remote work. But all these years, I have always wondered what difference remote work meant for working mothers. So I decided to have a chat with some mothers in Moniepoint. \n‘Based on a survey of more than 7,400 employees worldwide, Catalyst found that women with child-care responsibilities are 32% less likely to report that they intend to leave their job if they have access to remote work, compared to women with child-care responsibilities who don’t have access to remote work. Additionally, the report found that 30% of all employees say they are less likely to look for another job in the next year if they can work remotely.’\nJoin me; let’s see what remote work is like through the eyes of  Tomisin and Olivia.\n
\nRoutine / Life Before Remote Work \nIf you know Lagos, Nigeria, then it’ll not be surprising that the first thing Tomisin mentioned about having to go to the office daily is that she could feel her lifespan reducing in the daily traffic. I asked about their daily routines just to get a sense of what it was like.\nTomisin:\n “I won’t lie, I don’t really want to relive those days, but here goes - when I used to work in person, I would need to do all the food prep and deliberately dress myself up before leaving the house. I had to do all these things before 6 am because leaving my estate alone takes at least 45 minutes. So unless I wanted to be late to work, I needed to leave home early.  I would wake up at 4 am to prepare meals, get ready for work at 5:30 am, etc.; that was the only way to be in the office at 8 am.”\n“Meanwhile, I had just one kid I was taking care of them, yet we couldn’t ensure he had eaten before going to school. I would always hope that his teacher forces him to have breakfast. My boy was always asleep when I dropped him at school. Also, forget about spending time with my boy - he was always asleep.”\n\n\nOn the other hand, Olivia had a slightly similar routine but noted that she majorly felt stressed in the evenings, as she’d have to prepare dinner when she returned from work tired;\nOlivia\n: “The difference between how I used to work before remote work is that I had to leave the house very early for work. And even when I returned as late as 9pm with sleepy eyes, I still had to prepare dinner. And I’d end up eating late. I also didn’t like working from the office because I had to share toilets.”\n\nRemote work - The Knight in Shining Armour\nWhen the pandemic hit, and Tomisin started working remotely, she realised that she had no need to wake up earlier. She began to find pockets of time within which she could take back her life while giving her best at work. Her routine changed.\nTomisin: “\nSo now, on a typical day, I get up between 5 and 5:30 am to prepare breakfast, brunch and lunch for the two boys, who happen to eat different meals due to their age differences. So usually get that done within an hour maximum, and then I wake them up by 6:30 to prepare them for school. After they take a bath, I stuff them with breakfast. By 7:30, we are already in school, and I’m usually back by 7:50, tops. If I have enough time, I shower. I love preparing for work and starting skeletal work before standup at 9 am. I don’t fancy lunch breaks that much, as I can quickly get soaked in sweat. But when I feel like a lunch break, it is good to know I can put something together if I want to. In all, I try to get food in my system as much as I can. By 5 pm, I have to pick them up and prepare them for winding down. But the good part is, once I prep them for bed, I can return to work until around 7 pm before I shut my laptop down”.\nOlivia shares a similar story; \nOlivia; “I like to prepare meals the night before to make it easier for me in the morning. So basically, when I wake up, I just heat the food up and put it in the kids’ flasks. While I am doing that, their father is taking them to the bathroom to have their bath. When he’s done,  I dress them all and then make breakfast. By 7 am, they are ready, and I get to prepare for work. I have my bath, make a quick breakfast and get to work. Work starts with standup; I check on the progress of tasks assigned to my teammates and give new tasks before fully resuming my work. That’s how it goes until my kids return at around 5 pm. The first one is old enough to have her evening bath, so I bathe only the younger one.”\n\n\nOlivia working from home\nDoes working remotely blur the lines between work hours and family time?\nNow, many people have mentioned that remote work has fewer boundaries hence you end up working more hours than you usually would. In my interviews with both women, they agreed to an extent, stating that it all boils down to prioritising, time management and striking a balance. \nTomisin\n: “I’ll say that It is pretty easy to forget the lines between work hours and family time. Especially when there’s a lot of office work, you know there are days when you have so much work and other days when you have very little work. Either way, what matters is prioritising. On some days, you’ll need to spend extra time with work, and there are other days when you’ll have to communicate that you need to push the extra work to the next day. And I don’t think it should be only married people who do this, and it is just a matter of really ascertaining urgency and importance. Because generally, everyone should be disciplined enough to have a work-life balance.”\n“Moreover, my family automatically spends more time with me. My husband, for example, works hybrid, so we have more time together during the day. While working, we get to gist and enjoy each other’s company. “\nOlivia’s method is to stick to work during work hours, shutting out everything and then shutting out work before/after work hours.\nOlivia: “I agree that remote work can blur the lines between work and family time, but my easy hack is time management. Almost every day is the same in terms of timing. My husband and the kids leave at a particular time and return around the same time. Because I have this at the back of my mind, I do my best to ensure work time is strictly for work and after-work time is mostly for my family. Of course, there’ll be days or weeks when I’ll need to put in the extra time at work, and I can do that without allowing it to affect my family time. I just believe it is about communicating to them how important it is for me to prioritise work. So yeah, time management is my hack”.\n
\nDoes remote work help with living a balanced life?\nI had been curious about how well mothers who work remotely can balance their lives or if they have time for non-work related stuff, so I asked Tomisin and Olivia, and to my expectation, yes. For Tomisin, she has been able to have more family time. They recently started swimming classes with the kids, which she thinks was only possible because she and her husband feel well rested during the weekends as little or no commuting is done. \nTomisin\n: “Oh yes, that has to be one of the things I love about working remotely. First, with the extra hours I’d have spent in traffic in the morning, I can quickly do a thing or two for myself before it is work hours. Sometime last year, I took at least 30 minutes to walk daily and returned home in time to prepare for work. Also, we recently started swimming together as a family almost every weekend. In the past, I would never have been pumped about putting any activity on the weekend because that’s the only time I had to rest. My weekends were strictly for sleeping because of the stress.” \n\n\nTomisin’s walking record\n
\nAs for Olivia, who is more of an introvert, she has been able to watch more movies (at the home, of course) and sleep better.\nOlivia: “I am indoorsy, so most of my interests are indoors - I see more movies and skip every evening. Most times, I’m done with everything, including prepping for the next day at 9 pm, so I pick up my skipping rope and start. This has helped me stay rejuvenated and in shape.”\nWhen I asked both mothers if they’d like to return to work from the office, the answer was an emphatic no. In Olivia’s words, “I can’t return to working from the office after experiencing this bliss”.\n
\nReady to explore a wholesome work experience that allows you to enjoy your time while doing work that matters? Click \nhere.\n





Remote work from the eyes of mothers in Moniepoint

\nThe first time I came across DMAX shoes, we were working on our 2022 year-in-review. We had gotten testimonials throughout the year - people sharing the different ways their lives and businesses had been changed by our products, and we wanted to interview some of them to share their stories. \nOkeke Desmond Chijioke, the owner of DMAX shoes, immediately stood out for a couple of reasons. Our research showed that Desmond used a wheelchair, yet his business was shoemaking. Even more, his business was in Benin city, the same city I’d stayed in most of my life. Right there, I knew I had to meet him. There was so much I was curious about, and hoped to hear his story in person.\nOn the day of the shoot, I arrived much earlier than the video crew, and this got me some time to speak with him. I had never had a conversation like this with a person with a disability who wasn’t family before, so I wasn’t quite sure how I would start the conversation with him. But as soon as I spoke with Desmond, my fears were allayed. He was willing to share his story, and he held nothing back.\nEstablishing DMAX Shoes\nBefore we began to speak, I watched him put together the top part of a shoe (called the “upper”. Yes, I googled) together, from what initially only seemed like scrap leather to me. He had a sewing machine which had been tweaked so he could operate it with his hand, and with it, I could see the semblance of a leather loafer quickly come to life. It was fascinating.\nI asked about his business, and he shared this with me;\n\n\n“DMAX shoes officially started in 2020. I’ve been making shoes since 2011, but I officially started in 2020 after I graduated from the University of Benin. By God’s grace, I graduated from the University of Benin after studying Public Administration. I was squatting with a friend from 2011 up till 2019, but immediately after I graduated in 2019, I looked at it and realised that I couldn’t go back to my friend’s shop because he is married. Going back to his shop when I’m done in school will look somehow. I didn’t want to go back to work for someone else when I could have mine, so I had to put all my arsenal into action, and I was able to come up with something I established my own shop in 2020 at Okhoro, Benin city.”\nDesmond spoke with a determination that made every word he spoke carry weight to it. Clearly, he wasn’t one to let anyone else determine his life's path. He took control unapologetically. A sheer resolve in his voice was hard to miss as he continued to talk about how he had set up his business;\n“Things were not favourable in that area. The condition of that area was bad - no customers were coming, and I was spending a lot on transportation and other logistics. I discovered that it was really stressful for me, so I had to relocate back to New Benin, where people knew me. Because I was born and brought up here in New Benin, most people know me here. So going to Okhoro, was like I was going to a strange land, and it was hell for me. I paid for a year and 6 months there, but I only stayed 9 months, to be precise, before looking for a shop around New Benin to do the business."\n"Because I cannot go around begging people for money to feed. I also could not go around doing menial jobs to survive, so I had to look for money to get another place. It wasn't easy as a physically challenged person, but I had to do it”.\nUneasy beginnings\n\n\nSmall and medium-sized businesses like DMAX shoes in emerging markets often face many challenges. They often do not get the support they need, and even though everyday people depend on them for many things, they don’t survive for very long. But despite this, Desmond was running a thriving business and making the decisions he needed to help his business grow. How easy could it be for Desmond, who used a wheelchair, especially in Nigeria, with zero accessibility adaptations?\n“The truth is, it’s not easy. It’s not easy at all,” Desmond shared, “ I’ve been physically challenged for more than 30 years, due to different challenges and an \nattack\n. It all happened when my family and I travelled to the village. I was still very young, and that’s how the story changed. I was walking before I went to the village, but when I came back, I couldn’t walk. That’s how it all started. Since then, it has not been easy. It even affected my education. I didn’t have a wheelchair or anything for mobility to get to school. My father didn’t have support from people because things were hard for him, and he couldn’t afford a wheelchair. So I had to stay at home, watching those going to school. My mom tried her best, teaching me the little that she knew at home. I was almost 16 years before I entered primary school. I started from primary 3, and that’s how the journey began”.\nHe continued, “Before I could get into school, I received help from a stranger who’s not even a family member. I had family members on my father’s side who could’ve afforded it, but they never did. When my dad called them, they didn’t help. It was a stranger. On the 25th of December 2006, my brother and I decided to go out for a Christmas stroll, and my younger brother carried me on his back. We were moving around to greet people on Christmas as usual, and that’s when we saw someone - a good samaritan, a youth corper that had just finished service.”\nUnsure whether or not his family would be okay with her purchasing a wheelchair for him, this good samaritan first had to confirm. He continued telling his story, and I could see the joy and significance of this moment written across his face;\n“She asked, ‘\nIf I buy wheelchair for your brother, your family go vex? Them go feel say I dey mock them say the no fit buy am?\n’\nI responded, ‘\nah, them go happy o. If you buy am, my family go like am o\n’.\nTo my greatest surprise, on the 27th of December, 2006, I saw some people coming to my house with a wheelchair. They brought the wheelchair, and that’s how I began to get my life back - going to church, visiting friends, and going to school.”\nEven though this had all happened roughly 17 years ago, he retold it like it was only yesterday. There’s a lot of stigma around being a person with disability in Nigeria. People often assume that it is the end of the road for that person, and Desmond had felt the weight of their misassumptions too.\n“I was indoors for years. I lived in a house for 4 years, and I didn’t come outside to see anybody because I was ashamed of myself and didn’t want anybody to see me. Many people thought that I couldn’t become anything in life and that I shouldn’t go to school. They looked down on me and told me I didn’t need an education. They believed a physically challenged person couldn’t amount to anything, but they were wrong.”\nTurning the wheels of fortune\n\nAfter being gifted a wheelchair, Desmond was on the way to putting his life together.\n“But as I began to interact with others, I began to see a reason to live and started developing myself. Throughout primary school, I was top of my class, and my headmistress told my parents to allow me to sit for the primary 6 exams. I did and got into secondary school. It wasn’t easy, but I had assistance from my younger brother pushing me around to get to class and work too - I started this shoe-making when I was in secondary school.”\nDespite people initially telling him to “focus on shoemaking”, what they pictured was very different from the business he had built. To them, he would never do more than just petty repairs, earning too little to cater for himself.\nThey would tell his mother, “Mama Desmond, look for \npangolo\n, find needle give am make e dey sow shoe for house”. But his mother didn’t listen to them, and neither did Desmond. He decided that he would go to school, and that’s what he did.\n“Even after I wrote my WAEC and made JAMB, gaining admission into the university, I had someone tell me not to go to school.\nHe said ‘\nDesmond, don’t go to school o. What do you want to do in school? School na scam’\n.\nHe said so many things then. I started praying to know the direction of God for my life, and after everything, I started making moves for myself. I have a mentor who encouraged me greatly. He told me that he didn’t just see me as a physically challenged person but so much more, and that encouraged me.”\nDesmond got admission into the university on his first attempt. For those familiar with Nigeria’s university admission process, this was no easy feat. He recounted this period of his life with both pride and gratitude;\n“I didn’t write jamb twice. I got admission into the University of Benin to study public administration. Then, another journey began - more stress. Many people said I wouldn’t be able to cope as a physically challenged person, and that I wouldn’t get any help. They cited the fact that classes would happen in different locations and I would have to move around a lot. My mentor told me to pray that God would send helpers. Which I did. From the day I got admission to the day I left, I didn’t stress about pushing myself. I was always getting support from my coursemates and friends. The place we received classes had stairs, and I climbed them every day for about 4 years. I also had to go to other lecture centres, but I graduated successfully.”\nWhen Desmond graduated, he knew he couldn’t start going around looking for a job. He’d heard about how difficult it could be for people to get jobs, and knew that it would likely be much harder for a person using a wheelchair.\n“I decided to focus on my business, using a skill that I had developed for so many years. That’s how I began in 2020. I did my youth service in 2021 and passed out in 2022.”\nTaking business to the next level - Using Moniepoint\n"When I moved closer to New Benin, my shop was in a busier place, and I began to have people coming around to ask me if I had a POS terminal. I had never considered getting one before, but with so many people asking, I had to apply for one. The one I used previously was problematic because it had a lot of charges. Eventually, it felt like I was giving all my money over to them."\n"A friend of mine, who we graduated together, came around and saw the terminal I was using and asked me to get a Moniepoint terminal instead. He was a BRM. He made a leap of faith for me. He trusted Moniepoint so much that he gave me the terminal to use before paying him back when I could. That’s how he did it for me, and I started using Moniepoint."\n"With Moniepoint, I started generating more profit. By God’s grace, I’m a father of one now. I have a wife, and I’m taking care of my family."\n\nBusiness owners like Desmond across emerging markets are collecting payments, accessing credit and managing their businesses with ease through Moniepoint. Ready to try a simple business banking solution that works? Visit moniepoint.com/ng\n

Turning the wheels of fortune – Building a business as a person with disability in Nigeria

As a Quality Assurance Engineer at Moniepoint Inc., amongst other things, I track and report software defects. Trust me; it can be overwhelming trying to track software defects. But a rewarding feeling comes with sorting out these defects to ensure everything runs smoothly.\nSoftware defects, also known as bugs, can cause significant problems for software development teams. In a more general term, Software defects are \n"any threat to the value of the product to any of the stakeholders."\n Most defects occur because of mistakes in program design, source code, or in the operating systems on which the program is running. These defects can lead to loss, costly delays, decreased user satisfaction, and even security breaches. \nTherefore, tracking and reporting software defects effectively is crucial to ensure that they are addressed promptly and efficiently. \nThis article will discuss all-encompassing angles for tracking and reporting software defects. Let's start with the process itself.\n\n\nThe tracking and reporting of software defects process\nTo track and report software defects, you should: \n \n1. Use a defect-tracking system\nA defect-tracking system is a tool that helps software development teams manage and track defects throughout the development process. The tool you use for this process is not set-in-stone as it differs based on different factors.\nThere are many defect tracking systems available, both free and paid. The most popular ones include Jira, Bugzilla, and GitHub Issues. At Moniepoint Inc., we use \nJira\n, which is fully integrated with QMetry application (our mainstay test management tool)\n. \nSo, you can choose a tool based on its efficiency, ability to integrate seamlessly with other test management tools, subscription package, personal preference, organization choice, etc. \nA good defect tracking system should allow you to categorize, prioritize, and assign defects to specific team members. It should also provide a clear view of the defect's status and allow accessible communication between team members.\n\n\n2. Provide detailed descriptions\nAfter using the defect tracking system to pick out a bug, you need to relay the details of the issue to the teams involved. Therefore, you must provide detailed descriptions of the defect. It helps ensure stakeholders know where they need to come in to resolve the bug. \nYour description should include steps to reproduce the issue, screenshots or videos, and other relevant information, such as browser or operating system versions. The more information provided, the easier it will be for the development team to reproduce the issue and determine the root cause.\n\n\n3. Prioritize defects\nIt is essential to understand that not all defects are created equal. Some bugs may be critical, while others may be minor. It is vital to prioritize defects based on their severity and impact on the software. \nThe development team can now focus on and address the most critical defects on time. You wouldn't want to make the mistake of treating less critical bugs than the important ones. \nAs we go further, I'll talk more about defects prioritization. \n\n\n4. Assign defects to specific team members\nOnce a defect has been reported, it should be assigned to a specific team member for resolution. It helps to ensure that each bug is being actively worked on and prevents duplication of effort. It also allows for accountability and ensures that defects are not overlooked.\nBy doing this, everyone knows the role they have to play, and it can be tracked to ensure efficiency. If you leave the defects without assigning them to anyone, they may stay for weeks or months without being resolved. And you can't fault anyone for it in this case as you didn't assign the defects to any specific person.\n\n\n5. Test fixes thoroughly\nOnce the development team fixes and returns the defect, verifying it has been restored is essential. It involves testing the software application again to ensure the bug no longer exists. If the defect has not been fully fixed, it should be recorded as a new defect, and the process should begin again.\nIt includes both manual testing and automated testing. Automated testing can benefit regression testing to ensure the fix has not caused unintended side effects.\n\n\n6. Communicate the status of defects\nEffective communication is vital to ensuring that defects are tracked and resolved promptly. It includes updating the defect tracking system with the status of each defect and communicating any updates or changes to the development team and other stakeholders. It allows everyone to stay informed and ensures everyone is working towards the same goal.\nYou must have excellent written and verbal communication skills as a QA engineer. Some people tend to ignore these skills when talking about QA engineers. However, you cannot excel without them. \n\n\nPrioritizing Defects \nNow let's reanalyze prioritizing defects and how to go about it. You may wonder, how do I know what bugs to treat first? For example, when executing your test, you tend to find different kinds of bugs, unfortunately your defect tracking system cannot help to categorize defects automatically, hence the decisions on that is all yours. That said, knowing or picking the defect that should be handled first might be confusing. \nOne thing you should always consider when you want to fix a bug is its impact, the impact of the bug on the application. For example, there are bugs we call blockers or showstoppers. If you don't fix these bugs, you can't move forward with using the application. \nLet's say you want to watch a movie on your favorite streaming platform and it has a showstopper bug, which prevents you from being able to log in. You definitely won’t be able to stream without login. Login bug is your showstopper in this case. \nAnother example is when you want to call on your phone and cannot access the dialer application. Thus, limiting you from inputting numbers. Now, you may want to test for the quality of the call, sound quality, connectivity promptness, etc. All these would be impossible as there is a blocker bug, and you can't even dial a number. So, these kinds of bugs should always take priority. \n\n\nMeasuring the effectiveness of your process\nOften, people carry out processes without running checks on their effectiveness. Tracking and reporting software defects goes beyond the process alone as you need to checkmate the process to check if it should be continued or if you'd need new approaches. \nTherefore, it is essential to have a metric that checks this effectiveness. The best approach is to check the estimated turn-around time for handling the bug.\nLet's say we've agreed that the bug needs to be fixed and closed within 24 hours. Our process is effective if everything is done within that time frame. We could use 10 hours, 20 hours, 22 hours, etc. But once we go beyond the 24-hour time frame, it shows that the process could be more efficient, and we are lagging. \nThus, we would need to return to the drawing board and develop a process that suits the 24-hour time frame. \n\n\nInvolving stakeholders in the process\nThere are usually many stakeholders involved in any process. Many people track, report, and resolve a bug issue, as it doesn't concern the QA engineer alone. You'd have the project manager, product manager, testers, developers, etc. And it is vital to carry everyone along to ensure everyone is on the same page.\nCommunication is essential in this aspect, as information needs to be passed around. Ideally, all stakeholders should be carried along from the beginning of the task. So, there should be a task board from the start. \nOn this task board, we'd have the names of the product managers, enterprise architects, and all stakeholders involved. When a bug is detected, everyone is notified and carried along. The task board can be any tool you use, although Jira is the most common. \nIf you are not carried along from the beginning, you can still be added to the task along the line on Jira. The process is like tagging someone on social media. So once I tag your name, it adds you as a recipient of notifications on any kind of update made to the task. \nIn conclusion, tracking and reporting software defects is essential to software development. Using a defect tracking system, providing detailed descriptions, prioritizing defects, assigning defects to specific team members, testing fixes thoroughly, and communicating the status of defects are all critical best practices to follow. By following these best practices, software development teams can ensure that bugs are addressed promptly and efficiently, leading to higher-quality software and happier users.\n


Tracking and Reporting Software Defects 

The sales industry frightens a lot of people. Their idea of sales revolves around huge targets, a lot of pressure and other stereotypes. While a part of this is true, years of experience have helped me see sales quite differently.\nSales is about building relationships and connections to solve problems. Being able to connect with people and get them to make that decision is the side of sales that excites me. My earliest memory of being interested in sales comes from my childhood.  I still remember the excitement I got from interacting with customers at my mother's shop while in primary school and the satisfaction when an item was sold.\nA lot has changed since, leading to me becoming the enterprise sales VP of Moniepoint. I’ve had to learn and build skills, and here are some of the things I’ve found most helpful as a sales professional;\n\n1. Establish quantifiable objectives.\nSales is a goal-oriented aspect of any business. You’re trying to accomplish something, and without that in sight, it can get very difficult to get things done. I always tell my team that their targets should be measurable. It becomes unclear if you do not put a quantifier to your targets, making it even harder to meet expectations.\nWhen you wake up, you can say, “today, I want to generate and send proposals to 50 leads in X sector”. Now, you’re working with a clear goal, and you can check it to see if you met that target before you go to bed. Focus on the target and push all distractions away. \n Always remember sales is not about effort or activities but results. With a measurable target, you spend less time being busy for the sake of it, and more on accomplishing what you’ve set out to do.\n\n2. Make Grit your north star\nIn sales, there are so many situations that you can only influence but cannot determine the ultimate outcome. Sometimes, you’re actually even more likely to get a NO than a YES. This is why it’s important to factor in the reality of facing obstacles while making plans. Always have an alternative.\nHave a plan B, plan C, and even all the way up to a plan Z. I refer to this as “having a healthy pipeline”. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Pay attention to the process and know when it’s time to switch to something else. Instead of reporting the same deal for 12 months without any real progress, move to the next deal(s).\nImagine you’re chasing a deal with A telecommunications, and the deal doesn’t work for certain reasons. The next step isn’t to come back to tell your team and management that you did your best and you’re throwing in the towel.\nGrit is one of our core values at Moniepoint. This means that we always push through. Instead of just telling the team that you tried pushing a deal with G telecommunication that did not come through, you also let them know that you’ve made progress with B and C telecommunications. \nAlways position yourself to have options at all times.\n\n3. Be adaptable \nBeyond just having alternatives, it’s important to be adaptable as well. It’s often said that the only thing that’s constant in life, is change. That’s why you should be ready to adapt. This change could be internal or external. \nFor example, government/regulator policy can change your set goals/target\ns\n. Nothing stays the same, and with new regulations, you could have a new playing field that you might be unfamiliar with. The way to power through this is to adapt. Look out for the positives and opportunities amid the changes and challenges. \nIt is helpful to have that emotional and mental mindset that things can always change at the snap of a finger. Give yourself a perspective that lets you keep moving, even when the situation is different.\nAn internal example can be a company saying they want you to drop product X and start selling product Y. It could be that you’ve been selling product X for the past three years, and letting go might be hard, but being adaptable will help you switch to the new product that the company wants you to sell. \n\n4. Winning means showing yourself empathy too.\nSales can sometimes get overwhelming, even for the best. We all have those dry seasons where things don’t go quite as smoothly as you hope. However, ensure this does not become a pattern. \nAlways remember that as a sales professional, you are only as relevant as your last deal. As they say in Nigerian pidgin,\n “I get am before no be property”. \nDon’t be so focused on past wins that you let yourself become complacent. Always strive for more.\nRegardless of that, once in a while, take a break. Don’t think of taking a break as an alternative to effective work, but complementing it. The idea is that you need to energise yourself and bounce back more aggressively.  \nI can’t tell you how to take a break as it varies, depending on your personality. For some people, it could be by going on a vacation. Others would want to hang out and spend time with friends. \nWhat matters is that you boost your energy and get back into the right mind frame for work. You need to keep in mind that you cannot give what you do not have. Everything will be a distraction if you’re not in the right mind frame. So, do whatever works for you in terms of refreshing yourself and coming back stronger.\nTo budding sales professionals…\nThere’s something about the mindset. If you set your mind on something, it’s fixed there. If I wake up and decide that I want to achieve N100 today, my mind stays set on that amount. \nHowever, I tell my sales team that if your target from the organisation is N100 per month, do not have your mind set on N100. Instead, push and challenge yourself to N1000 per month. So that even when you fail or don’t meet the expectation of N1000, you increase the chance of meeting the target of N100. \nLet this be a continuous habit for you as a salesperson. It helps you increase your chances of meeting the target that has been set for you. \nLastly, the secret to a goal sales performance is to build a model that guarantees you a detailed and healthy pipeline of leads. If you fail with this foundation, you put yourself at risk of not meeting that target. Your network is your net worth. \n\nIf you’re ready to take the bold step to hit new milestones in your sales career, visit; \nmoniepoint.com/careers\n\n

4 ways to level up your sales game - insights from our enterprise sales VP, Ifeanyi Duru

\n\n\n\nPawel Swiatek\n is joining Moniepoint as our Chief Operating Officer. Pawel is joining the team from \nCapital One\n, where he was the Managing Vice President for four years. In his time at Capital One, he focused on ensuring that millions of underbanked people across the U.S. had fair access to credit by refining the business’ data science system.\nAt Moniepoint, we’re committed to ensuring that businesses across emerging markets have the tools they need to grow, and Pawel will be using his experience in financial inclusion to help us further achieve this. He’ll be driving strategy and execution by building policies, tools, measurements and culture to help us reach our goals.\nHe’ll work closely with me, and the rest of the senior management team, ensuring that we’re able to more effectively serve our over 600,000 businesses through a data-science-led approach.\nPawel is Polish, but has spent a major part of his life in the US. Before Capital One, he was part of the management team at the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater. In his decade there, he oversaw growth from 150 employees to over 2,000. He also previously worked for McKinsey and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.\nWhen he isn’t working, Pawel spends his time with his family, but also explores quite a few outdoor hobbies. He enjoys both hiking and skiing, photography and most fascinating for me – flying airplanes. He learnt to fly while he was at Bridgewater, and although he hasn’t been in the skies for a minute, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t lost the airborne spirit.\nMoniepoint processed $100 billion in 2022, and currently does so at 25,000 transactions per minute. We recently \nshared a story\n of how we’re impacting businesses across local markets in Nigeria, just as we’re doing in other industries. And with Pawel joining the team, we’re looking forward to reaching even more businesses that can benefit from our solutions for their growth.

Meet Pawel, our new COO; Capital One veteran and hobbyist pilot.

If you think you read that title wrong, not really. Every 30 seconds on average, a new Moniepoint terminal gets activated for a merchant. \nHistorically African businesses have not gotten the necessary support they need to grow from banks or other financial services providers, resulting in low penetration of digital payments solutions compared to businesses in the US, Europe, India etc. \nDespite this lack of support, the reality is that businesses seek out the necessary means to grow without reservation, often turning to more informal options. Now, they’re making choices that are setting them on par with the rest of the globe. \n\nThe digital payment dilemma\nDigital payment acceptance hasn’t been the natural choice for many small businesses in Nigeria and across Africa, and for valid reasons such as ease of use, reliability and prevalence of fraud. Poor reliability usually leads to a significant rate of failed or fraudulent transactions that tie up the working capital for small businesses as they wait for chargeback issues or fraud disputes to be resolved. \nDigital transactions can also be costly, and for many small businesses, it’s a price that’s too high to pay. This is why they tend to stick to physical cash payments where they instantly get their value and with limited chances of fraud.\nSo why should small businesses adopt digital transactions? \nNew regulations in Nigeria have seen business owners turn towards alternative means to accept payments from their customers, and we’ve been the solution they can depend on. \n\n\nMeeting pain points with Moniepoint\nAlthough digital payment solutions have always existed, they haven’t quite been the SME-friendly alternative to cash that these businesses need. That’s what we decided to do differently.\nSmooth payment acceptance equals running a business smoothly. Merchants turn to us because having a solution with minimal downtimes and payments that always go through means less stress for the business owners. And in turn, their customers associate these businesses with seamless payments and keep returning to the business with the blue terminal that they can rely on.\nThese businesses realise this, and that’s why we’ve been a pivotal part of their evolution. Our fundamental understanding of the Nigerian payments processing infrastructure enabled us to solve the reliability pain point for businesses. We did this by pioneering dynamic transaction switching, giving businesses one of the most reliable platforms in Nigeria with a 99.9% uptime.\n\n\nThe outcome?\nEvery 30 seconds on average, a new Moniepoint terminal gets activated for a merchant. Whether it’s a supermarket, restaurant, fruit store, or even, sometimes, the small shop next door that you might overlook, these businesses are taking control of their finances through Moniepoint.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOur \n2022 year-in-review\n showed the scale to which we’ve been able to support these businesses, providing them with a comprehensive solution for all their business needs. And as these businesses evolve, we’re happy to help them every step of the way.


\n\n\n

We activate a new terminal every 30 seconds; what this means for digital payments in Africa’s largest economy.

\n\nAs a recruiter at Moniepoint, I come across tons of applications. There are a lot of people who would like to join the dream team, and we get a lot of applications for the roles we put out. But finding the right candidate is key, and this means that there is a lot that we have to consider during the process before finally settling on a candidate.\nWith this in mind, I’d like to share some reasons, based on my experience as a recruiter, why some applicants ultimately do not get the job. A lot of the mistakes are avoidable. Here are some of them;

\nApplying for roles with no experience\nA lot of people apply for roles in which they have no experience. Although they realise that they aren’t the perfect fit for that role, they surprisingly apply for the role anyways.\nOf course, you don’t have to be the perfect fit before you apply for a role, but when the gap between the requirements and your experience is large, you might want to think twice before applying.\nRemember that other people are also applying, and there will be someone who’s a right fit. It’s important to pay attention to the amount of experience the role requires and apply accordingly. Even if you’re not a perfect fit, ensure you’re close enough.\nPeople who apply for roles without experience won’t get the job. Beyond that, they can also leave a wrong impression in the recruiter's mind. As a result, the recruiter might flag that name and want to avoid considering them in the future, even if they are a right fit.\n

2. \nNot optimising your LinkedIn profile.\nOptimising your LinkedIn profile means positioning yourself as someone who’s skilled in your area of expertise. This involves placing all your career achievements, current role, and responsibilities there. It should also have your title and state some keywords relevant to your work. If you’ve won any awards or executed a remarkable project, let it go on there as well.\nYour resume can only obtain a limited number of things, but your LinkedIn profile allows you to put everything else that’s necessary out there. Many recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates, and by putting yourself in the right space, you might get recruiters reaching out to you before you even apply.\nLinkedIn provides itself as a platform to connect recruiters and applicants. If you play your cards right, you'd be landing your dream job in no time.\n

3. \nUsing one resume for all roles\nAs an applicant, your resume should communicate the fact that you understand the job function and you are ready to put in the work. It’s an opportunity to immediately put your best foot forward as you optimise to show your skills that are best adapted to that role.\nSo pay attention to the process. I always tell people that applying for a job also classifies as a job in itself. Take out time to read the job description and fully understand it, so that you can fit your resume for it and highlight the relevant skills. In a sea of applicants, a tailored resume will help you to stand out immediately.\n

4. \nBeing nonchalant about the interview process\nThere’s always room to communicate if you’re no longer interested in the role, but being nonchalant about the interview process communicates poorly to the recruiter and the hiring manager. Remember that an interview isn’t just about your hard skills. Your soft skills are taken into consideration too and can factor a lot in the eventual decision being made.\nAs an applicant or candidate, you must bring the right energy to all stages of your interview process. Show up to scheduled interviews on time and participate in the process actively. Endeavour to leave a great impression on the recruiter and interviewers as well.

\nPut in the work to get the job\nGetting a job involves many steps outside of just having the skill. Being mindful of the process can help you get ahead of other equally skilled candidates.\nMake it a point to appropriately match your skill and experience to the job before applying. Optimise your LinkedIn and tailor your resume for every role. Properly read the job description and adjust your resume accordingly.\nBe enthusiastic about the process - let the recruiter know you’re excited to work with them.\nUsing this as a guide, you can help yourself stand out of the crowd and put yourself in a better position to snag that dream role you’re been looking forward to.

4 common mistakes to avoid when applying for a job

In the \npilot episode\n of Ripples, we had a designer share how design impacts our experiences. Everything we use today was designed, but I’ve been in enough rooms where there’s an ongoing debate about which has the upper hand - User experiences or design. While some people believe that any design can catch on whether society is ready or not, others think that the readiness of the society or users determines how scalable a designed product will be. I’m not here to share my opinion, but I have Alison, one of our DreamMakers, powering dreams through design to discuss it. I won’t be sharing a quote today, so let’s get on the ride (smiling emoji).\n\n\n\nCelz:\n Hi Alison, thank you for joining me on RIPPLES today. I’d like to ask about your #100 days of the design challenge. I saw it on Twitter. What’s that about?\nAlison:\n Well, even if you didn't ask, my nickname is Coco. To your question, it’s a Design Interaction Challenge and the inspiration behind my desire to improve. Interactive design was not my forte, and I had struggled with adequately explaining to devs when I had a project that required interaction. I often needed to be with them as they pushed live, which was time-consuming. At other times, I would refer them to other team members who were better at it, but towards the end of last year, I decided to improve my design skills.
\nCelz:\n Nice! A determined queen, I stan. So talking about improving your skills, let’s start from the beginning. How did you get into design?\nAlison:\n I actually got introduced to design from my pre-uni days. You know that gap period when you have just written your university entrance exams (JAMB), and you’re awaiting admission. My parents felt I was too restless to be left idle, so they enrolled me in a design school. Between you and me, the tutors were great designers but not great teachers. They did their best. I learnt how to use Corel Draw, and by the time I was leaving, I could design church flyers. Looking back, my designs were horrible, but it was something. In 2015, I got admitted to the University of Uyo to study Biochemistry.

\n\nAlison, after secondary school.\n\nCelz:\n Did you continue designing when you got into the university?\nAlison:\n Honestly, I didn’t have much interest in the design itself at that point, not because of my course, though; I just wasn’t sure due to my learning experience. But in my second year, I realised I could make some money with what I learned in design school, so I started designing flyers for students campaigning for political positions in the school. By my third year, though, I switched and started learning to program because I felt I wasn’t a good designer. One day, a friend called me and asked why I was gallivanting from one career path to another. I told her I had picked an interest in design but didn’t think I was good enough. She then asked why I wasn’t trying to improve instead of switching. After that call, I decided to take some time and focus on learning more. I started learning on Youtube, and guess what?
\nCelz:\n You started designing better?\nAlison:\n Yes, that, but the guess was for something else. So I hopped from one video to another, and I realised I like product design. That’s when I discovered Leslie. I watched his tutorial videos on Youtube, and I was blown away. I started learning and practising while wondering if I could be as committed as this guy who had been in design for 16 years.
\n\n\nAlison, Leslie and other colleagues\n
\nCelz:\n Okay, I didn’t see that coming. How did you feel when you got into Moniepoint, and he was your colleague?\nAlison:\n Let me start with when he interviewed me. I was so star-struck that I became nervous. Even though he didn’t know why, he kept telling me to calm down and reassuring me that the stage I was at was to confirm where I was in my career journey and how the team could help me improve. In my head, I just kept telling myself, “I’m talking to Leslie”. Anyway, about working with him, I’m so glad that I decided to work at Moniepoint. Working with Leslie and the rest of the team has been one of my best career decisions.
\nCelz:\n Hmm. I see. Talking about work here, what exactly do you do?\nAlison:\n I am a product designer. I design the experiences for digital products from Monnify to Moniepoint. Basically, UI and UX.
\nCelz:\n Sounds interesting. Funnily, I am interested in design, but this isn’t about me. While working here, are there certain hiccups you’ve faced? How do you get past them?\nAlison:\n Of course, there are a few, but the major challenge I battle is imposter syndrome. One day I’m getting praise for delivering a good design, and I am so confident. But the moment I hit a roadblock, I start doubting myself again. I have a simple way of overcoming this; whenever I feel this way, I just go back to check my previous designs, and oh boy, I’m back to feeling good.
\n\n_Alison, working_\n\nCelz:\n Right! Almost everyone battles imposter syndrome. We’ll talk about those designs that get you going in a bit. But first, let’s talk about your design process. What does that look like, typically?\nAlison:\n It begins with the research and getting customer feedback. Using the insight gathered, we have meetings to brainstorm the best design solutions based on user needs. Even if we push a solution that doesn’t solve the problem 100%, we get feedback through direct testing and indirect user feedback. And this feedback inspires the direction or next phase of the design.
\nCelz:\n That's insightful. Let’s talk about getting feedback from customers. I had a conversation with a friend who’s an engineer, and we talked about how technology shapes society. For example, there was a time when you had to carry cash, but now we’re gradually getting to where we don’t need cash anymore. So as a designer, what would you say has the upper hand? Design or the society?\nAlison:\n Okay. Luckily, I have had this conversation a couple of times and how I see it is a two-way thing. But the most crucial factor is if there is a problem and how we are solving the problem. For example, before smartphones, my parents told me that there was a time they had to travel to Abuja to make phone calls. There were Landlines, and now, smartphones make our lives easier. So when you look at that story, you see a problem - communication wasn’t seamless, and now there’s a solution - smartphones. So the real question is, “What's the problem we're trying to solve?”. See the Metaverse, for example. It’s cute, but we haven’t said that the earth is so inhabitable that we want to relocate. Let’s pick our product - Moniepoint. We have a lot of underserved communities around the world - people who can’t always make it to the bank and need to make digital payments. By creating solutions for businesses, we’re solving the end-consumer’s problems through these businesses. Little wonder people are jumping at our products. My point is simple - once there’s a problem that people have, we can just solve it with design. Even when we launch a product, if the users have a problem with the interface or experience (UI or UX), we think of design solutions to make life easier. You get what I mean.
\nCelz:\n Yeah, I get your angle, and I agree. The idea behind the design is actually for problem-solving, so the design finds a problem and a solution. If your design truly solves the problem, people will adapt. Let’s circle back to the conversation about those designs that encourage you. What projects have you worked on here that you’d say you’re very proud of and why?\nAlison:\n Um, okay. So there are a couple. One hasn’t launched publicly, so I can’t discuss it. But this other design I worked on with the team that makes me feel great whenever I remember it is the UI for debt management. In the past, when we gave loans to businesses or people, we would have to manually remind them to pay. But this was not the ideal user experience we wanted to create, so we designed a feature to automate the management of loan repayment. Now, if a business owner cannot meet up with a repayment date, they just have to request a reschedule on the app. It hastens the process of managing credit and recovery and reduces any feeling of embarrassment.
\nCelz:\n That’s interesting. I can imagine that that contributes to our current default rate of less than 1%. Is there any customer story that has stood out to you the most?\nAlison:\n Yes! There’s this customer. He shared that there was a time he needed to expand his business, mainly because his wife was pregnant, and he needed to increase his financial capacity. So he took credit from Moniepoint and expanded, which meant he could provide for his family. Honestly, this is just one of many stories. I walk on the road and see our POS terminals, and I’m just so intrigued, like, “see what I designed!”. I was a part of the team that made this possible. You should see my smile, lol.

\nCelz:\n It sure feels good to see your work out there. So, what’s your favourite part about working here?\nAlison:\n The team that I work with. That’s my top favourite thing. The people in the design team are the best to ever do it. Everybody knows their craft; everybody is exceptional. That’s one of the reasons I'm constantly pushing myself to improve. When you work with intelligent people, you have to challenge yourself. My second best thing would be that we work remotely. See, whenever I step out somewhere, I need two days to recover, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to work from the office.
\n\n\nAlison, with her colleagues at EOY party’22\n

\nCelz:\n I can relate, Alison. I can. Got any words for someone looking to join the design team?\nAlison:\n I’ll simply say be willing to do the work. It is rewarding.\n\nCelz:\n I enjoyed having this conversation with you. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

RIPPLES: Alison on Why Society Needs Functional Design

\n\nTechnical Debt is a little tricky to talk about, especially since no engineer really wants to admit that they might owe tech debt. But with many changes happening on tech teams around the world, I think it’s important to get a sense of what tech debt is and what it really means for your engineering team and product development.\nIn an ideal world, creating new products would go perfectly every time. The engineering team would have just as much time as they need to execute projects, and they would be able to add just as many features as they wanted to. In reality, though, product development has to happen rather differently.\n\nWhat is Technical Debt?\nTechnical (tech) debt, or code debt, refers to the consequence of decisions or steps taken to optimise for speed and deliver solutions quickly, as opposed to taking out the time to fully create them.\nA company has objectives, as well as customers whom they’re trying to serve. This means that, often, there are deadlines within which the engineering team has to deliver to meet business goals. Usually, though, the engineering team needs more time than is available.\nThe middle point between creating solutions that work and meeting business objectives is where tech debt lies. Engineers might decide to take a quicker, less intensive shortcut to making that solution available while leaving it open for proper development (refactoring) later on.

\nIs technical debt necessary?\nThink of technical debt like the loan you would take to start a business. You need the money now, but it isn’t otherwise available, so getting a loan means that you can start a business now. But that loan has to be repaid, and everyone knows that repaying loans isn’t particularly fun.\nEvery engineer and developer would rather not incur tech debt, but real scenarios often dictate otherwise. Most experienced engineers realise that avoiding incurring some form of debt is virtually impossible. That doesn’t make a debt-free product development process any less ideal.\nPeople sometimes go live without certain features because going live as soon as possible is important. If you’re building a user management platform, for example, and you want to go live this week - you have to do a log-in, forgot password, send password via email and send pin features. You might want to add a fingerprint lock feature as well. These are all good features. But you can look at it and decide that you just need your users to be able to log in successfully, and when you’re live, you work on the other features like the fingerprint login, for example.\nConversely, it’s also the way you structure your code. This could include building a single microservice instead of multiple microservices. You know deep down that you should have built multiple microservices, but it will take a while. So you can build one, knowing it might break in the future, but you’d have to fix it before then; if not, it can go bust. There’s usually a point where you’ll know - sometimes, it can be the number of users or activity level. What you built might not be able to handle 2 million users a day. Maybe it can take 100 users a day, and you decide that before you get to 2 million users a day, you’ll fix it.

\nBuilding your MVP\nInstead of incurring debt, an engineering team might decide to focus on building an MVP. An MVP is a minimum viable product. That is, what makes your product or service usable? Say your company wants to go live today; what can you do to go live? What’s the minimum you need? Instead of writing code incorrectly, you can keep the extra features aside and focus on building an MVP.\nWith an MVP, you can focus on building something that works without necessarily accruing any debt. It’s arguably better to have calls requesting new features or complaining about side features than writing a primary thing wrong. Instead of owing the debt, just don’t build it. And even if you’re building something you’ll fix later, build it in a modular way. That is what microservices are for. So you can make it better instead of having to edit and fix the components you put in incorrectly.

\nThe debt you don’t want to owe.\nWhen we talk about tech debt, it generally applies to smaller things and features that can be fixed or tweaked without breaking the entire system. There’s a kind of debt that you don’t want to owe. Taking shortcuts to expedite the process only works when you have a foundation or core structure, but the foundation of your code needs to be stable. If you start out with a poor foundation, in the end, the interest on the debt becomes too much. So while you want to borrow to save time, you must be conscious of how big a debt you would owe. No one takes a million-dollar loan just to open a petty shop. If the debt isn’t worth it, then you’re much better off painstakingly building it properly from scratch.\nThat’s where a good engineering leader comes in. Sometimes it’s the work of the engineer to explain why the team needs to do things painstakingly now to the business leaders. It’s also the work of a good engineering leader to also meet the business objectives. So he has to meet them halfway and know what he can do without for now. Tech debt is generally a rather grey area, but here are some things you should note;\nProperly build the core structure.\n
There are some debts that you shouldn’t owe. Classify it properly and recognise that some things are too big of a debt to leave now. Sometimes the engineering leader or manager sort of ‘goes rogue’. He might need to put in extra hours to meet the goals because he knows that taking shortcuts might lead to serious consequences in the future. Business leaders might suggest a shortcut, but you should identify when the debt is too serious to pay. Take time to build it properly because you’re ultimately responsible for whatever mess occurs due to unnecessarily high debt.
\nDon’t leave your debt unpaid.\n
Of course, you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll return to fix it, but the truth is that a lot is happening. While you’re intending to fix it, the business might bring 7 more features that you need to add. So you leave the initial debt and don’t come back to it because there’s something more pressing you need to attend to. If the debt you left isn’t such a big deal and the impact might not be too much - it’s not a problem, and you can return when everything has settled. But if it’s very serious, you might run into trouble down the line that you might not be able to recover from. So don’t leave your debt unpaid. Always fix it.
\nDo not write code you cannot fix in the future.\n
The structure of what you’re building needs to be sound, and it needs to be built with the open-and-close principle. It should be open for expansion and closed for modification. You shouldn’t need to shut down the entire service before fixing whatever debt you’ve incurred. Do it in a way that you can fix it without everything going down. Sometimes tech debt is a result of sheer ignorance. Someone without experience might incur unnecessary debt. If you built a solution with 1000 users and architected it a certain way. By the time it got to 20 million users, they might have encountered a problem and learned that you should have started off differently. With that experience, the next time you want to build a solution, you’re going to start off building it the right way. So avoid writing code you can’t fix in the future, and of course, avoid incurring unnecessary debt.
\n\nTech debt vs bad code\nTech debt is a necessary risk you might have to take, but bad code is always a problem. Bad code is a different dynamic altogether because when you get to the point when you want to pay back the “debt” and fix it, it’s always too late. This is because it has this way of continuing to grow until it becomes a behemoth.\nBad code is bad code.\nWith bad code, refactoring is a very expensive endeavour. Refactoring is a live system, and people must not know you refactored, so everything must work exactly the same way it did after you’re done. Now, if the code was messy in the first place, you probably would not have proper documentation. Most of the time, you’ll end up introducing a bug while trying to fix it. So you might have to rewrite many things, and by that time, the context might have been gone. You see a line, but you’re not sure why this person wrote it, so you take it off, and boom, users can no longer log in because one line of code is missing.\nBad code is a debt you don’t want to owe. Code only grows, and the way code grows is exponential. One day it’s small, and before you know it, it has hundreds of thousands of lines, and you’re wondering what the heck happened. And if you don’t have a system from the beginning, it can get messy really quickly.\nSo, should you owe tech debt or not?\nWith tech debt, it’s often case-by-case. You really need to understand the situation and know the risks. Because, in the end, you can’t always want to build the perfect system.\nNo matter what you think about it, if you want to build the perfect system - a “science project” with very abstract classes - the best pattern and the best design, the world will move on before you’re done. Before you’re done, someone else might bring up something that is barely working and take all the customers. So yes, yours works perfectly, but everybody has moved on. You miss the first-mover advantage. You might have the perfect solution, but there’s a need for balance to meet business goals.\nSo there are no absolutes. Avoid unnecessary debt, but if you must, just do it in a way that you’ll be able to pay it back. Only owe tech debt that you can repay in the future and that you’d have the time to fix.

To owe tech debt, or not to owe tech debt?

\n\nI had always wondered if sales played any part in product development, so in this episode of ripples, I went on a ride with our 2022 ‘Rainmaker’ (Most Valuable Player in the sales team), Isoken, to get her perspective. As usual, I’ve come back with gist, insights and pretty good learnings for anyone interested in sales and products.\nBefore we get into it, let me share one of my favourite sales-related quotes by Brian Tracy -  \n‘sales is rooted in approaching each customer with the intent to help him/her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not just to sell a product or service’.\nCelz: Hi, Isoken. Good to have you here. Before we go on, do you have a nickname your friends call you?\nICE: My friends call me ICE; I'm not sure why but yeah.\nCelz: Because they think you're very fierce?\nICE:  To be honest, I really don't know. They randomly started calling me ICE in secondary school, and it just caught on. It was cool, so I never questioned it and just went with the flow. \nCelz: I agree that it’s cool. Before we talk about your role here, can you\n \nshare a bit of your career journey?\n \nICE: Okay, so I started straight out of school in 2012. I did my NYSC with e-transact, and they were at the peak of the tech industry then, so I was happy to be a part of them. I studied mathematics, and when I got in, I thought I’d be more interested in doing the core of tech and wanted to be in the IT department, but I was posted to sales. My then-boss made it his duty to mentor and teach me the ropes of sales and business development.  \nCelz: So you’ve been in sales from day 1. That’s interesting. How did you begin your career here at Moniepoint?\nICE: I joined Moniepoint in July 2019, and it has been a very, very interesting journey. I remember when I interviewed with Tosin, he gave me heads-up that Moniepoint is fast-paced and kept asking if I was sure I could keep up. Me? A full sales force? Why not? I felt like he was exaggerating until I got in. It was then I understood what fast-paced meant. We’d have meetings where we discussed the goals for the company and how we could set out to meet them.\nIt has been just as exciting as challenging. Here, especially in my department, you don’t wait for anyone to tell you what to do. You do it. Over the years, I have improved at being proactive, and I have learnt to instil values in myself without waiting for anyone to be on my tail. \n\n\nIsoken’s first week in Moniepoint\nCelz: Talking about values, what pillars would you say have guided you to this point in your career?\n \nICE: First, I’d say \npersistence\n - that is definitely the foundation because, in this field, you’ll get many NOs. Many people come into sales thinking they’re about to hit a lot of money, but it’s not all that easy. Another pillar is \nempathy\n. Surprisingly, this works with persistence; rather than focusing on how to get someone saying NO to say yes, be empathetic. Maybe they love what you’re selling, but you haven’t said how it solves their problems. That’s where empathy comes in. Also, \nconnections\n. Typically, the first people you think of selling to are usually within your network, so it is important to strengthen your connections. Finally, learn to \ncut yourself some slack\n. You may have all the pillars in place, but the best way to always come back up after a NO is to cut yourself some slack. I’d say these are the things that have helped me to this point.\nCelz: Whoosh! My jotting pad is full. Thank you! So let’s talk more about your role. What does your work look like daily?\nICE: Well, my daily routine has grown over the years. When I started, the two things I had to do daily were prospecting and selling. After a while, I started joining product meetings, and this is probably one of my favourite exercises. Also, I check up with the business management team to ensure there is no lag on the end of support.\nCelz:\n  \nAll right. You mentioned product meetings are your favourite. Can you shed more light?\n \nICE: These are meetings with the product development team (product manager mostly), where we discuss the features of the product. A segment of this meeting is when we get to tell them what the experiences of the merchants have been. I sell Monnify, so if we have a case where a merchant has complained about a problem he/she is facing in his/her business, we speak with the team to know the possibility of developing a feature to solve that problem. Also, If they have a new product feature or update, we are informed to keep our merchants updated and meet their needs. \nCELZ: Interesting.  So, is there any feature the sales team has brought before the product team that was implemented and is currently being deployed in the market?\n \nICE: Yes, definitely! One thing about us at Moniepoint is that we live for our customers. There are many cases, but I will stick to one - Abia State University.  They were one of the earliest adopters of Monnify. Then, in 2019, they needed a feature that made it possible to split payments into various accounts when received. For example, if I am paying N100,000 to the school and 30% is meant for books and 70% for tuition, it should be split at the school's end. That way, I don’t have to pay twice, and the school doesn’t have to separate the money manually. When they made this request, I remember being in the meeting with Tobi Amira. We were trying to discuss how we would implement this. Since then, it has been the routine with our customers. Sales do not stop at getting them in. There’s a place for getting feedback from them regularly and listening to their needs to ensure we provide the right solutions to these business owners. \n\n\nIsoken, representing Moniepoint at an event in Ghana\nCelz: Love it. Speaking of these new features, how do you feel when you see people use this feature or when it comes up in conversations with prospects?\nICE\n: Surprisingly, I have never spent time thinking about it, honestly. But if I look back at all the times this has happened, even apart from the split account feature, I can say I feel glad. Another feature that gets me like this is the virtual account. I remember when Piggyvest mentioned a challenge they were having that affected the number of their daily users as people considered it unsafe to add their card details on the site. We thought up the virtual account feature and walked through it with them. So it was all hands on deck, from business to engineering. Today, I had lunch with my friends, and in the middle of a conversation, someone was adding funds to their savings or investment, and it was so easy that it was no longer a big deal. So you’re taking money from your virtual account? So what? Do you get it? That’s the goal. To make our products such a part of people’s everyday lifestyle that it no longer feels like a big deal. \nCelz: This conversation, for me, drives homes one of our core values - empathy.  It’s great to realise that customer feedback influences our product updates. Regarding this, is there any other customer story that stands out for you?\nICE\n:  I guess that’ll be FairMoney. At first, we weren’t sure there was an opportunity in the lending sector until we started with FairMoney. Who would have known that borrowers would prefer using a platform because they had the option of paying from a virtual account? According to Fairmoney, the borrowers feel like you are putting power in their hands by giving them the option of virtual accounts, meaning they do not have to add their card details to be debited for their loan. Most of them end up paying faster, surprisingly. It’s just so incredible. \nCelz: On to incredible things; Monnify recently hit 300,000 daily transactions. How does that make you feel?\nICE\n:  Excellent! I was like 300 what? It is also humbling. We used to have a target of hitting 20,000 weekly transactions. Then it looked unachievable, but today, we are doing over 100% of the projection daily, not even weekly.\nCelz: What's your favourite thing about working in Moniepoint?\nICE\n: Easy - the people. I really like the people, the people, I mean, the people, they're just great. You can always feel that genuine desire to help. I like the fact that even though we work remotely, you can literally reach out to anybody, and you can be sure to get what you want. Whether you guys have ever spoken or not. If they don’t have the answers, they refer you. So yes, the people, absolutely.\nCelz: If it’s the people for you, you must have enjoyed the End of Year event.\n \nICE\n: Definitely!\nCelz: And how did it feel being voted as the Rainmaker of the Sales team?\n \nICE\n:  It was nice and surprising.  I wasn’t expecting it, but it felt good to be recognised for my work. \nCelz:  Congratulations, once again. And thank you for joining us on RIPPLES.

Ripples: How Isoken Explores Product Development Through Sales

\n\nTeamApt Inc. is now Moniepoint Inc.: here’s why we’re changing our name, and what’s different.\nTeamApt was founded in 2015 with the aim of providing financial happiness by creating infrastructure and payment solutions for financial institutions and banks. We needed an apt team, so the name “TeamApt” came naturally, but a lot has changed since then.\nIn 2019, we took a different approach and decided to achieve our mission more directly. We began by offering financial solutions to merchants through our flagship product, Moniepoint. With time, Moniepoint has grown to become an all-in-one tool for businesses, offering a comprehensive solution that includes payments, business banking, credit, and business management.\nWe’ve also hit a few milestones along the way. We currently process the majority of the POS transactions in Nigeria with an annualised Total Payments Volume (TPV) of more than $170 billion. Our customer base grew to over 600,000 businesses which enabled us to more than double our annual revenues in 2022. Also in 2022, we became QED’s first investment in Africa, were named Linkedin's top company to work for, and won the National Inclusive Payment Initiative Award.\nEach of these milestones has come from our deep devotion to helping businesses grow. We recognise that businesses are an essential part of not just the economy but everyday lives. With the solutions we provide for our businesses, we’re able to touch people out there every day, powering not just their businesses but their dreams. This is our goal.\nWe’re also relocating our headquarters to London, inspired by our strong ambition to be an employer of choice, not just in Africa, but globally.\nThis rebrand represents the next level in our growth as we intensify our devotion to making access to digital financial services available to businesses in Nigeria and everywhere across the Africa.\nOur commitment to keep doing this is a great driving force for this change. Every business deserves a shot at greatness, and as Moniepoint, we’re doubling down and working to create a world where businesses everywhere, no matter their size or stage, have the necessary tools they need to grow.

TeamApt Inc. rebrands as Moniepoint Inc.

\n\nBusiness owners must realize there’s beauty in taking your business online. For starters, you reach new customers who might never even come to your store’s location. Secondly and more importantly, you can significantly increase your business’s revenue. Getting your business online is easier than you think. Let’s run you through the essential steps you need to get started. \nCreate a professional and user-friendly website.\nYour website is often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers, so making a good impression is essential. Use a clean, professional design, and include clear and concise information about your products or services.\nUtilize social media to connect with your audience.\nSocial media can be a powerful tool for engaging with your customers and promoting your business. Choose the most relevant platforms for your audience and use them to share updates, offer special promotions, and provide customer support.\nInvest in search engine optimization (SEO).\n \nSearch Engine Optimisation is the art of ensuring your website and its content rank higher in search engine results, making it more visible to potential customers. When your SEO is well taken care of, you appear in your customers’ search results more often, making them more likely to do business with you.\nConsider offering online products or services.\n \nIf your business offers products or services that can be delivered to your customers’ physical locations, consider selling them online. This would increase your customer base and provide another opportunity to make more money.\nProvide excellent customer service.\n Providing excellent customer service is just as important online as in person. Respond promptly to customer inquiries and concerns, and make it easy for them to contact you. This will help to build trust and loyalty with your customers.\nTaking your business online means connecting it to a digital world of endless opportunities. Although the world becomes a potential customer, you must also be aware that you’re competing globally. To make the most of your online presence, you must do everything it takes to stand out. Ensure your business is visually distinct and delivers premium service; nothing will stop it from becoming a worldwide success. 

How To Take Your Business Online

\n\nYou’re now in the big leagues. You’ve gone from making a few sales in a month to pulling in the big clients. Now, like any successful business owner, you dream of more. You’ve been eyeing a particular company for a while now, but you know they will never take you seriously if you don’t have a well-thought-out, professionally and articulately written business proposal. Let’s show you how to craft a perfect proposal that would help you persuade anyone to work with your business. \nWhat is a business proposal?\nA business proposal is a document that outlines your product or service offering, its value proposition, and how it can benefit the potential client or partner. It is crucial for persuading others to support your idea or invest in your business.\nWriting a business proposal can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With some planning and effort, you can craft a professional, persuasive, and easy-to-understand proposal. Here are some tips to help you get started:\nIdentify your audience and tailor your proposal accordingly.\nBefore you begin writing, think about who will read your proposal and what they need to know. This will help you determine the tone, style, and level of detail to include in your proposal.\nStart with a clear and concise executive summary.\nThe executive summary briefly summarises your proposal, including its key points and benefits. It should be no more than one page long and immediately grab the reader’s attention.\nClearly define the problem or need that your proposal addresses.\nWhat is the issue or challenge that your product or service can solve? Be specific and provide evidence to support your claims.\nExplain how your product or service meets the needs of your target audience\nThis is where you can highlight the unique features and benefits of your offering. Be sure to include any relevant data, case studies, or testimonials to support your claims.\nClearly state your financial strength.\nHow much is your company currently worth? How much would it be worth if your plans worked out? Stating your company’s financial value is a great way to make even the most apprehensive reader sit up and pay attention. \nUse simple, straightforward language.\nAvoid using technical jargon or complex words your audience may need help understanding. Instead, use plain language that is easy to read and comprehend.\nInclude a call to action.\nYour proposal should end with a clear next step for the reader, such as contacting you for more information or setting up a meeting to discuss the proposal further.\nProofread and edit your proposal carefully.\n \nBefore you send your proposal, review it carefully for spelling and grammar errors. Consider having someone else read it as well to ensure it is easy to understand.\nIn conclusion, writing a business proposal doesn’t have to be intimidating. By following these tips and using a friendly, straightforward tone, you can write a proposal that’ll help you land your next big client.

How To Write The Perfect Business Proposal

\n\nYesterday December 6th 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria in line with the Naira redesign policy introduced guidelines that will impact the way we receive payments, especially cash transactions.\nWhat the Policy is\nIn detail the policy states that;\nThe maximum cash withdrawal over the counter (OTC) by individuals and corporate organisations per week shall henceforth be N100,000 and N500,000 respectively. Withdrawals above these limits shall attract  processing fees of  5% and 10% respectively\nThird party cheques above N50,000 shall not be eligible for payment over the counter, while extant limits of N10,000,000 on clearing cheques still subsists\nThe maximum cash withdrawal limit via Automated Teller Machine (ATM) shall be N 100,000 subject to a maximum of N20,000 cash withdrawal per day.\nOnly denominations of N200 and below shall be loaded into the ATMs\nThe maximum withdrawal via point of sale (PoS) terminals shall be N20,000 daily\nIn compelling circumstances, not exceeding once a month, where cash withdrawals, above the prescribed limits is required for legitimate purposes such as cash withdrawals shall not exceed N5,000,000 and N10,000,000 of individuals and corporate organisations respectively and shall be subject to the referenced processing fees in 1 above. In addition to enhanced due diligence and further information requirements\nHow it affects you\nCustomers without bank accounts may not be able to pay for your goods.\nThere will be limited access to cash for customers, therefore alternative means of payments will be required (Bank transfer, POS etc.)\nThere may be increase in fraudulent electronic transactions \nWay forward\n \nEncourage your regular customers to get a bank account, to enable them to pay either with a card or a transfer.\nActivate and make sure your Moniepoint business account is your primary mode of payment to enable you to receive payment on the Moniepoint POS\nUse features like the POS transfer feature to accept and confirm payments instantly to avoid fraudulent transactions.\nOnce again, thank you for choosing Moniepoint, we wish you a profitable business. \nTo learn more about our products and services, \nclick here\n or contact us at \nsupport@moniepoint.com\n.

Naira Redesign Policy – Revised Cash Withdrawal Limits

Design touches every part of our lives every day – the products we buy, the interfaces we interact with, and the spaces we work and live in. And it’s interesting to think about the impact designers make when they do – the power they have to influence our lives, shape the way we live, and the products we use.\nWhen you pick up a tool, or a product, or enter a space, do you stop to think about the thought process that went into it?\nThe role of design in impacting lives is quite huge and designers have become the ultimate advocates of users in various scenarios. In this pilot episode of ‘RIPPLES’ our Internal Communications Manager (Celz) interviews a Senior Designer here at TeamApt, \nWisdom Ndebe\n. Here he shares his journey and thought process:\n\n\nWisdom Ndebe\nC: Tell me a bit about your journey into Design.\nW\n: Okay. I studied Biochemistry and was working at a mundane job and always felt like nothing intriguing was happening. One day, I was on Twitter, and people were discussing brands. I was captivated by the conversations, especially those about identity, design, etc. So, I started reading a lot about design. I remember reading about a Logo case study, and I was just blown away.\nAt about the same time, I got my hands on a book titled ‘design for non-designers, and I read it from back to back. I think that was the first book I finished reading. I  was literally obsessed with understanding design. Of course, over time, my interest in design kept growing. I still wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to do, but after a while, I quit my job and went to learn design, and now I’ve been a designer for four years. \nC: Hold up! You weren’t sure what you wanted to do, but you quit your job. Who does that?\nW: I know, right?!😅 Yeah, I was working with Guinness, and some opportunity came up to learn how to design & print things. I was like, you know what? I’ll take it. It’s better than anything. So I was a printer boy at Shomolu for about a year, and then I met somebody at TeamApt. Very funny story. You know that thing when someone says, “I’ll talk to somebody else for you and just call me back tomorrow?”. Well, I called him, and I got an interview date. Lucky me, yeah?\nAt that time, though, I didn’t know what TeamApt did, but I was supposed to come in as a Brand/Marketing intern. I joined TeamApt, and one day, Leslie asks me, “do you know what Figma is?” I didn’t know it.\nSo, I downloaded Figma and as soon as I saw it, I was enthralled. You know what they say about “love at first sight”? For me, it was love at first click. That was a moment for me that I’ll never forget. That was how I started learning Product Design in TeamApt.\nC: It’s been four years since you started your design journey. Got any thrilling moments on this journey?\nW:  I think the first one was Monnify. Monnify was the first thing I worked on, basically the first product I ever made, and it got shipped! And I’ll never forget the day they rang the bell in the office for our first transaction. Then we’d go out for these exhibitions and I’d get to talk about it. Here I was, some newbie talking about something I’ve done that was being used out there. It was mind-blowing.\nBut I think the one that gets me every day is Moniepoint. Actually, I still thought about it this morning. You know how you have milestones that you want to reach? For me, one of them is maybe designing Google OS. And the second one for me was designing an ATM. I was really fascinated by the ATM user interface and it just hit me a couple of months ago: “\nYo, Wisdom, you might not have designed an ATM, but you have helped design a POS that has far more reach now.”\nSo when I go outside and I see people using the POS, it lights me up, or when my mum calls me because she’s just seen a Moniepoint POS – even when my family members used to send me pictures of the POS.\nAlmost every day, I see a business owner using Moniepoint; it is just mind-blowing. The more I see people use it, the higher the goals and expectations I set for myself. \n\n\nWisdom’s early days at TeamApt\nC: The other day, I was thinking of the design process that goes into products and the kind of responsibility it takes to be a designer – crafting the products that shape people’s lives. So, I’m curious about how being a designer makes you approach things. How has it affected your thought process?\n \nW: I think I was lucky that I came into TeamApt when Monitor was a thing we used to do for Banks, for Sterling, GT Bank, and Fidelity – building banking applications for them. And it helped me understand what financial application and education meant for the first time. You didn’t want to see people use banking applications and struggle.\nI remember seeing my grandfather a lot back then, and I had to teach him how to use his first banking app. And I would just think to myself, \n“this is not very nice and how would you change this, Wisdom?”\nSo when I had the opportunity to build something from scratch, it was with a lot of empathy. So the way I see it is that we should be more conscious. I’m more conscious of what I do, and how I design because of the way things are. And Adrian was telling us the other day about how the app we’re currently building has a huge chunk of the market share and how we have to be very very intentional about what we’re building and how we choose to go about it.\nIt’s a lot of responsibility. If you’re building something, especially when you are designing something that has to do with finance and people’s money, you don’t want to mess around. Money is very important and it’s a whole lot of responsibility because you have to be really careful. You have to know what you are saying. You have to think about things from different perspectives. You get to wear many hats, and you get to learn many things so that you can be… what’s the word? So that you can be for everybody. Right?\nDesigning with empathy is not just a buzzword. You have to really feel. You have to understand and feel, but not enough to not be biased and not enough to now be stuck up, to be level-headed. So, yes, it’s a lot of responsibility to navigate.\nC: Does empathy imply thinking about one persona as the audience/user or when you’re building with a particular image in your head like you’re building for one person?\nW: Here, we don’t design for one. Because If anything is drummed into your mind from the very beginning, it’s that we are designing for a multitude.\nWe have to design for, say, think of your grandpa at home. I lived with my grandfather for years, and you don’t want to explain how to use a banking app to him. I used to want to pull my hair out, just trying to show him what buttons to press. \nLike I inferred earlier, in my own head, I design for my grandfather. I’m just like, \n“Grandpa has to be able to use this thing, the woman who owns a large shop beside my house has to be able to use this easily”.\n \nSometimes I fail. Sometimes I get stuck up in my head and design for myself. But it’s definitely not one person. It’s drummed into my head from the get-go – you are designing for a plethora of people. You are designing from the baseline that all of these people can use this and not be lost. So basically, you have to carry everybody along in the most basic and elegant fashion. Yeah.\nC: So, this means that your design solves for inclusion, in a way.\n \nW: Yes, definitely. It does. I have to be so inclusive in my thought process, even to the point of UX copy. Although, I sorta broke this unsaid rule recently. I was designing something in bookkeeping that has to do with variants, and I was geeking out with Loki references until my teammate pointed out hilariously that I was being in my own head. We had to look for simpler ways to explain how variants worked and how we could easily represent what we meant.\nSo yeah, inclusion is an important aspect of designing for me.\nC: Beautiful. Talking about inclusion and the impact of your designs on people. What customer story stands out for you that you would attribute to the design you were part of?\nThere’s this guy a couple of streets from mine who runs a really large supermarket and uses Moniepoint POS, and the day he realized that I work at TeamApt, he gleefully told me about how easy it was for him to use. That was one good story I will never forget. Every time he sees me, he just vibes with me and chats – it’s such a good feeling.\nAnother important one for me is perhaps the fact that a couple of my family members use Moniepoint POS, and they reach out to me about how easy it’s made their lives. Or when I go out and bring out my Moniepoint card, it automatically starts a conversation, and the feedback just makes me happy!\nSomething happened to me a while back, I went to the Market wearing a Moniepoint T-shirt, and a couple of young women in the market were talking to each and staring at the T-shirt. When I gave them my card, they immediately opened up and said they needed another POS, talking to me about how much they liked using the POS.\nThere are many of these stories. I see them on Workplace, LinkedIn, etc. But there was \nthis particular one\n. It was the story of a guy that we featured, the one that said he has made so much profit since being a business owner with us, so much so that he could send his family abroad.\nI read that story and it struck a chord because it was very important in measuring the work that I do. Because it’s not just about providing business solutions for people to survive. It’s like you’re helping actual families put food on their tables. Right? It’s not just helping the next person withdraw money. But someone is making some money off it, right?\nThis work that I’m doing is helping families, and that’s very, very important. Someone somewhere has a way of taking care of his family, and I am part of that? That amazes me.\nC: Awesome. I love how you can see your work cascading across narratives and lives. So, what’s your favourite part about being a designer at TeamApt?\n \nW: First of all, the guys I get to work with are like badasses. You know how you see your teammates and friends and are super-excited. Everybody’s working, and you can just feel the synergy behind it. I don’t know how to describe that in detail. \nMaybe for writers, it’s like you notice when you get ten people to write, and they can all have the same point without you having to give them a direction. Everybody is on the same wavelength. I love the energy! \nC: How did you feel when you saw that we hit $10b?\nW: I was like 10 billion what? \nIt felt really special, to be very honest. In fact, I have this group of friends whom we meet every Saturday to just talk. We’ve worked together in Product for a very long time, and we just catch up every Saturday. I remember the weekend after I saw the milestone update. I was the focus of all the jokes that weekend because everyone told me, “you are making like 10 billion”. Just felt good to be associated with that level of success. To be very involved in the process that does this, and I can talk about it. \nC: Got any final words?\nW: Trust the process. If you’re trying to figure out a design, and it doesn’t seem to be working, just keep trying. I would say that process is everything. You may suck at first. Think of yourself as a working skill. You can learn everything that you need to learn. Today is a very good tomorrow where you’ve done a goooood job. But my baseline is as far as you can walk, you can keep going. You’re better tomorrow. Just make sure you don’t stop improving. You’re good to go. Okay.\nC: Thank you. This was such an insightful conversation.\n \nEnjoyed this conversation and getting pumped about doing work that ripples? Explore our \nopen roles.\n

Ripples: Wisdom Ndebe on how design impacts our experiences

Everyone has a story to tell. When you read the story of career growth, it’s usually in the form of progressive growth within the same field in which they’ve been or started with. My story is a bit different — Software engineering is currently the role of my dreams but it wasn’t always so.\nLet’s take a quick trip down my memory lane.\n\n\nIt was sometime in April 2019, when I had just finished school and was looking for internship roles to keep me busy before I got called to serve my fatherland. I put the word out to my friends to be on the lookout for me, and one of my former coursemates sent me a link for a business analyst role at TeamApt Inc. That was how I applied.\nA few days later, I got an invitation for a physical interview. After the interview, I was told that my qualification set wasn’t exactly in line with what was needed at that time. Not one to give up easily, I told the interviewer I wanted to do this before starting my service. He asked when I could resume and I told him I was ready to resume immediately. Maybe it was the speed of my answer or my refusal to give up, but he was convinced and I resumed that day after I got my work tools.\nAnd so the journey began……\n\n\nI started with the Moniepoint team. We had a list of people that were interested in getting our POS terminal and my job was to go through the list, reach out to them via phone call, screen them and ensure that they met the requirements that our business owners had to meet. One thing that caught my attention and I found really impressive was the fact that every day, we would get thousands of people interested in getting a POS terminal. We used color codes like yellow, blue, and red to highlight the list depending on how qualified the prospects were.\n\n\nThat was the routine, most of the time. Then NYSC called, and during the course of the orientation camp, I tried to ensure that I got posted to TeamApt for my PPA. When I got back from camp in August, I was moved from Moniepoint to the Monnify team.\nReturning from NYSC orientation camp to TeamApt for my PPA\n\n\n\nBefore going to camp, I had already fallen in love with the team, a factor that influenced my decision to stick with TeamApt all through the service year. I liked the bond I shared with the guys, especially because we had an on-site work policy then. In one month, I built relationships that look to last me a lifetime and it was a sign of an even greater future to come.\nThere were additional perks to the TeamApt work experience, from how we could dress casually, to the immense opportunity for growth, especially because of the people I had access to. In a nutshell, I just knew that I was where I was meant to be.\nEasy peasy? Not really\n\n\n\nOn the Monnify team, I worked in Customer Support, and my earlier experience made me assume it would be fairly easy to do since I had been relating with customers at Moniepoint. At first, I wasn’t doing much because it was a new product and we were trying to break into the market.\nThen, little by little the work started to come in droves. I guess that’s what happens when you have a stellar sales team because dealing with so many requests turned out not to be as easy as I had imagined. I had no major experience working on a payment gateway, more so being the main support officer. I learned on the job and I learned pretty fast; from banking systems and the process of collections and disbursements to steps to take in resolving various payment issues customers might face. As time went by, I fell in love more with my job, going from handling my first transaction to dealing with numerous transactions each day.\nA day to remember\nWhen I started getting complaints, initially, there were things I could easily sort out like pending transactions that just required confirmation from the bank.\nThen there are the big guns, one of which I don’t think I could ever forget.\nA customer had reached out via email complaining that money was sent using our payment gateway and it had been pending for too long. I was really confused because I checked everywhere — from our system to the bank — but the money was nowhere to be found. It was scary to me.\nWhen I had exhausted all of my options, I informed my line manager, Tobi Amira, to figure out our next step. It was after he took a look that we realized it had been a NEFT payment (a type of transaction that only reflects the next business day), and we were able to close down what had seemed to be an impossible problem.\nThat one experience would improve my approach to work. I started asking more questions and building friendships with bankers, which made it easier to just put a call across to clarify situations. As a result, we resolved cases much faster.\nOf course, as our transaction numbers grew, the Monnify team expanded in response.\n\n\n\nThe Big Switch\nI like to think of the future a lot, and during one of my usual musings, I began to consider what steps I would take next in my career. My love for TeamApt and what we continue to do has always been a major point to consider, and it became apparent that I could do more than I already was.\nI liked the idea that we were building products to better the lives of Nigerians and the world as a whole, but I had yet to directly influence the development of such solutions. And then it hit me.\nThe engineering team got to do exactly just that, and soon the idea that I could work on products and get thousands of people to use them the way I engineered them to work became etched in my mind.\nActing on that train of thought, I asked a colleague who had just made a similar decision. I reached out to her to get a sense of what it would entail, and when I was convinced, I reached out to my direct manager - Damilare Ogunnaike. I told him I wanted to delve into software engineering, a decision he was very supportive of.\nGetting approval from HR was really easy, a testament to TeamApt’s dedication to developing its employees, and by December 2021, I handed over leadership of the Monnify Support team to someone else. By January 2022, I went to Moat Academy for Developers and started my engineering journey.\nLife after Bootcamp\n\n\n\nRemember how I said the process of switching from one role in TeamApt to another was seamless? Well, it’s a different cup of tea personally, when you’re switching from one career to another.\nAfter the BootCamp ended in April, there were a lot of instances where I developed cold feet. The rather rough hands of doubt would grab me on some days, and I’d ask myself questions like —\n“G_uy, do you think you’ll be able to do this? Do you think you’ll be able to cope_?”\nHowever, for every difficult situation I found myself in, there were people that made things really easy. I had a family with the Support team, and now with the engineering team, I can say the same thing. Everyone has been great. I get to ask questions without fear and there are always people available to answer me, even when the timing is not really convenient for them.\nI think the most important part of the journey for me has been the access to tasks and projects. With TeamApt, I get to work on some complex use cases, and with the available resources, I’ve conquered more than I would have on my own.\nWhat’s next?\nWe’ve only just begun! There’s so much more to do, and I can’t wait to see where this road takes me. I already know I have a great foundation, thanks to TeamApt Inc. and Moat Academy for Developers, the sky is really just the starting point.

Finally a software engineer! Here’s how my dream came true

Being part of the customer success team at \nTeamApt\n means that I get to see things from a slightly different point of view. The product and engineering teams create new features, and our business owners use them, but in the middle, customer success has to ensure that both these sides understand each other. Here’s a little insider perspective on what working with these two sides looks like.\nA little about my journey\nI joined TeamApt as a customer support staff almost three years ago. I found customer support quite interesting. Picking up issues, handling them and giving feedback to businesses is what it involves daily.\nIn January 2022, I got promoted and became the regional team lead of customer success for Lagos state, and that’s when I really started to embody the role of a customer success personnel fully.\n\n\nBeing in customer success is an entirely different ballgame from being in customer support. It is wholesome and holistic. Fancy words, I know, but that’s just it. Customer success deals with everything; from when the product feature is introduced to the customers to getting them to adopt it, educating them, and helping them to get used to that feature.\nEven more, we take their feedback to see what we can do to improve their experience with our products and features. That’s what it feels like — a more extensive approach. We’re with the customer throughout the journey.\nTaking this more involved approach is great because we help business owners enjoy our products fully. Even more, we get valuable feedback that the team can use to develop useful features for their businesses.\nStaying in touch with our customers\nNow, for our flagship product, Moniepoint, it isn’t possible for us to be with every one of our businesses, so what we do, is host town hall sessions with members of our distribution network. In that town hall, we have a feedback session regarding support, product features and any issues they might have.\nWe also bring top-performing business owners to the town hall and reeducate them on new deployments and specific features. Importantly, we get feedback from them.\nAs the regional customer success lead for Lagos, I relay this feedback to the head of customer success, and she sends it to the product team. For the Lagos team, I have a sheet that the support staff fill out whenever they get feedback from a business owner, BRM or a state coordinator. We sort through the feedback and escalate the important ones.\nReal-time feedback, real-time change\nOne thing I enjoy about our process is seeing the feedback we receive translate into features that make business easier for our users.\nOne way that has happened most recently is with the POS transfer feature. You can read the more geeky details \nhere\n, but the POS transfer feature basically lets a customer directly make a transfer to a business owner’s POS in order to get cash in return or make a purchase. Essentially, a customer will not need his/her ATM card in order to carry out a withdrawal from a Moniepoint business owner. It is a form of cardless withdrawal.\nAlong with an earlier feature, the card transfer feature, it provides business owners and their customers with multiple and non-conventional ways of carrying out basic withdrawal and deposit transactions and doing business. Both of these features were created to ensure better security for our business owners as they transact.\nThe cool part?\nMy team and I have seen a difference in the complaints that come in since we launched these features. Our business owners have called in less about the wallet top-up problem since we released POS transfer feature because they now have alternatives.\nNot only do we now get more enquiries about these features, but we now also have something to introduce to business owners who are seeking safer options for transactions.\nHonestly, there are some businesses that might not have made use of these features before. People get scared to try something new, and that’s understandable. But often, when we introduce these new features, they’re always excited because it’s useful to their businesses.\nThis is another reason why customer success is particularly important for business owners in the product development cycle. Because we’re with them through every step of the journey, it is easy for them to adapt to suggestions that we make since they trust our decisions. We’re on their side and they know that, and this makes them willing to try the new features.\nCollaboration for customer success\nWhat makes this all go as smoothly as it sounds is the level of collaboration between the product team, the customer success team and our business coordinators.\nWe have an information hub where we stay updated with what the product team is working on. This is great because it means that we’re not caught off-guard when something comes up. It also makes it easier to talk about upcoming updates in our town hall sessions.\nWe know the features that are coming up and can also give feedback based on our interaction with the customers. Whenever we give feedback, we can see that what we gave feedback on is being worked on.\nSometimes we invite people from the product team to those town hall sessions as well. There was a time we had Awal, our Program Management VP, and he was able to explain some things clearly to the business owners.\nThis type of synergy is great for our business owners.\nWorking in customer success means that we have to know our product in and out. It also means that we’re in constant communication with our users. We’re at the forefront, educating business owners on our products and getting real-time feedback from them on what’s working or not.\nI think this affects product development in that sense because it is through educating the business owners about these products/features that they’ll adopt and continue to use them.\nCollaboration is a huge part of product development, and while the customer success team isn’t writing codes or designing screens, we’re a piece of the puzzle that makes it whole. TeamApt’s products are a favourite for our businesses because we listen to their feedback, relay them, and create features that solve their problems every time.\nSo, even though I’m not involved in the back end of developing the feature, when I see businesses having a very positive reaction to a feature, there’s this joy that comes with it. It’s always lovely to see and know that we’re not just building for the sake of it. We’re building features that matter and are useful to the customers.

Product development and the Customer Success piece of the puzzle

\n\nIt takes more than passion to succeed in business. To succeed in business, you need to wear different hats, which might mean taking up various roles in your business.\nTo execute these roles, you must equip yourself with the right skill set to ensure success.\nBeyond managing people as an owner, what other essential skills should a business owner have? \nHere are 3 must-have skills;\n1. Customer service skill\nYou are the first contact point for your customers; do not forget that you understand the company’s dreams and visions better than anyone else. Hence, you are better positioned to know how best customers can be served. As a business owner, you must learn how to provide excellent customer service at all times.\n\n2. Marketing skill\nIt is essential to be able to promote your business. It would be best to learn how to get people to take action. You are in business only to make money; it takes some marketing to achieve this. In the early days, you can take courses, sign up for master classes, etc., and learn how to sell.\n\n3. Accounting skill\nAs a business owner, you must understand how to keep track of every penny coming in and leaving your business. \nYou need to know how much you have made, where you made it, how much you have spent, where you spent it and every single thing that has to do with the cash flow in your company. This way, you would be better equipped to make the right financial decisions for your business.\nWhat other skills should a business owner have?\nReach out to us on \nsupport@moniepoint.com\n for any questions

3 Essential Skills For Every Business Owner

When I hear a lot of women complain about not having enough support to begin their tech career, I empathise with them, although my experience has been different. Granted, I was a little confused at the beginning of my career journey but I would say that I got the best support anyone could have gotten for that stage.\n\n\nIn the Beginning\nI’ve always found the tech industry fascinating and constantly evolving. I got very interested in it toward the end of my undergraduate degree — I was already seeing myself as a Woman in Tech. I could already see the career opportunities and I was convinced that it was something I was never going to get bored of. The people who know me personally know that I’m quite adventurous and if something is not driving all my adrenaline, it gets harder to stick to it. So yeah, tech was that thing and I could already see that I wanted to do it instead of biochemistry.\nIt wasn’t easy in the beginning, or should I say pre-beginning. But I was eager to understand front-end development. I had to combine it with my university education. So there’ll be times when I had tight deadlines to deliver small gigs, yet needed to study school materials. It was a little bit hectic because I had little knowledge, but I knew it’ll be worthwhile soon. Then COVID happened. And I had more time and opportunity to focus on my dream. I joined a bunch of programs and by the time the covid break was over, I had gotten very familiar with the tools and basics. When school resumed, I realised that it was easier for me because I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was just building on what I already knew. I got into front-end development because I honestly just love a good website. You know how you visit a web page to get something and you are just so attracted with the ease and you just smile every time you have to visit that website. Yes, I loved that I was going to be a part of the process. Building something that users will interact with directly feels like I’m touching lives and it comes with a sense of fulfilment. I remember my first code — I wrote it and went to the browser and it was just there. It felt so good to see it come to life, and I still feel that way when I work on a good design.\nGaining Experience and Progressing\nOne of the habits I picked up while learning to develop websites was to join communities like SheCodeAfrica, etc. I was scrolling through my messages one afternoon when I saw a link to join the TeamApt Women in Tech internship. Initially, I was worried about scaling through the assessment but I decided to apply first and see where it goes. I applied, and there were a series of interviews. I think there were four stages. It started off with a criteria test, and then I was given a project to work on. I then had an interview with HR, after which I had an interview with Felix, TeamApt’s CTO. The interview process went well. Although at that point it felt challenging because I was not used to so much structure and processes, but I would say it was good. The TeamApt Women in Tech internship offer letter came on my sign-out day from school. It was the perfect gift and it crowned the whole day. Imagine signing out and getting an offer letter — double blessings.\n\n\nI started my internship with TeamApt as a front-end developer on the Monnify team. Oreoluwa Falomo was assigned to be my mentor and I learned a lot in that period. I wanted to expand my knowledge too, so I took courses to come up to speed with some of the tasks I was assigned.\nThere was a period when my product manager (Damilare Ogunnaike) needed someone to work on a project that had to do with Angular. I had no idea how it worked because at that time I had only worked with React. In fact, I had never used Angular before but because I really just love learning new stuff, I just went on and told him I could do it. He asked if I knew how to use Angular and I remember replying “No, but I can quickly take a course on it and brush up on it myself”.\n\n\nI gave it my time and it went well. I was able to complete the task and he was impressed with what I did. I remember that some of my teammates were surprised that I could pull it off after saying that I didn’t know how to use Angular. I was just happy to have learnt something new. The internship in general was a very exciting time. The hardest part was the first month but afterwards, I was pretty much caught up with everything and it was a great experience. I learnt something every day and the growth has been massive.\nGetting a Full-time Job\nWith the internship coming to an end, I began to think about my next steps and deep down, I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere else. The experience was unlike anything I was previously used to and I didn’t want that to come to an end. The major selling point for me was the people. Everyone was so relatable. There was no barrier, stigma or anything of the like. I was free to talk to my boss or anyone when I had a roadblock. I didn’t feel less, no matter what the issue was. Everybody was open and willing to help, and it felt safe to be here. Working remotely is an addition that I was also happy with. The fact that I got to just work from the comfort of my home or from wherever I choose is always a relief. As the internship drew to a close, I had a meeting with Damilare Oguinnaike, the head of online payments, and he told me that I was doing really well. I then had a formal appraisal where I was told that I did very great and that I’d be retained. I remember I got an offer letter in my mail, after which I spoke to HR and they helped me with the whole stuff.\nI joined TeamApt in August 2021 as an intern and by February 2022, I got retained in a full-time role. An exciting thing about being at TeamApt is that growth is paramount and the value I add to the team is evident. I work here and I know that my input is beneficial to the company. I work on features that are being used by people out there and it is satisfying. Being in tech is a mix of fun and work, this seems unreal but TeamApt has a perfect balance. I’m here and I’m loving it. If you ask me, an internship is a great path for anyone to start their tech journey, because it still looks like the easiest way to get experience. I have learnt a lot while interning at TeamApt and most of what I do now is based on that knowledge I gained. I think back and I’m happy I took that step by applying for the Women in tech internship.

The Right Shoulder: A Story of beginnings and progress

\n\n\nBuilding financial products is no easy feat and often requires months of hard work and devotion. Yet, at the heart of everything that we do at TeamApt are our users. We innovate for business owners that rely on our product to live out their business dreams.\nSometime in 2021, we found a need that wasn’t being met as well as it could be. Our businesses were facing security challenges and so our team got to work on creating a solution for them.\nThe result of this effort went live in August 2022 and here’s how it’s changing the Moniepoint experience for our users.\nIn the beginning…\nThe journey of creating this solution began in 2021. We had gotten a couple of reports of fraud from our business owners. We wanted to create a system that could better protect them and their businesses.\nWe needed a way for them to be able to confirm who was making the transaction and this would help them verify that any transaction that they received was legitimate. The first iteration was a system that enabled you to upload the picture of the person making the transfer. This would serve as evidence that could assist with defence in court.\nHowever, this proved to be somewhat impractical. As much as we wanted to, we couldn’t show up to defend everyone. We had to create a solution that would scale better and work effectively across the board.\nWe went back and decided to build a feature we called “Protected transfer”. This would give our users the ability to accept or reject transfers and hence, give them a measure of control. This idea formed the basis of what we modified to create the feature that we now have.\nInnovating with empathy\n\n\nTeamApt’s core values\nEmpathy is one of the core qualities that drive both teamwork and innovation at TeamApt. For everything that we create, we think about our users and how we can make the best experience for them.\nCreating this feature with our users in mind, we had to focus on their needs. We created this feature because:\nThey needed better security for transfers:\n The primary need that made this feature important was better security. We wanted to ensure that businesses could receive transfers without the fear of being defrauded or unwittingly aiding a criminal. Hence, the solution we created needed to have a KYC feature alongside the option to receive or reject transactions.\nBusinesses wanted more control over inflow:\n With the usual transfers, business owners had no say in the kind of transactions that happened on their accounts. It was necessary that whatever we created would give them more control. They needed to be able to accept or reject transactions as necessary.\nThey needed more flexible payment options:\n Large businesses were often unable to receive direct transfers from customers. This meant that they lost business from customers who did not have their cards with them. This feature had to also expand the possibilities for POS usage beyond cards, and create an additional payment option for these businesses.\nIncreased transaction limits became necessary:\n I’ll be honest and admit that we didn’t see this use case until the feature went live, but there was a limit on the volume of transactions that people could do with their cards. Soon after we went live, we received feedback from people who could now do higher transactions than before. Transaction value was no longer constrained by card limit.\nMeet the star of the show\nWhat is the feature we created?\nTo solve the problems we identified above, we went through a series of iterations that resulted in the POS transfer feature.\nThe transfer feature on our POS is a cardless purchase or withdrawal feature that allows businesses to accept transfers from people with a proper KYC (know your customer) process. To put it simply, it enables businesses to make secure transactions by confirming the identity of the sender before accepting it on their POS.\nBusinesses can now accept payments from individuals without compromising the security of their business. With a proper KYC system, businesses can confirm the identity of the person making the transfer before choosing to accept or decline it. This means that businesses can receive direct transfers to their POS systems without fear of fraud. It’s a more secure transfer feature. \nLet’s geek out for a bit…\nHow does the POS transfer feature work?\n\n\nThe flow of POS transfer transactions\nAnytime a terminal is assigned to a business owner, we generate an account number for that POS – a special purpose account number. The first thing to note is that this inflow comes from any bank. So, we needed an inward service that would take this transfer anytime it comes from NIBSS (Nigeria Inter-bank Settlement System), look for the actual bank it is and credit the account number. \nAfter the credit happens, we have an alert engine that picks up the transaction. The Moniepoint notification system that listens on a particular API sends a notification of the sending bank, account number, BVN number and all the details of the account.\nThere is a notification queue where it will publish and write the record as a transaction record. The Moniepoint notification service accepts the transaction and publishes the transaction to this queue.\nThe purpose of the queue is for us to be able to push the notifications to the terminal. The terminals are connected to the queue via the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).  The number of queues is based on the number of terminals. Even if the queue goes down, we would still have the information retained. So, when the queue comes back up, the terminal consumes from it and continues. \nHence, when the transfer enters, there is a notification. If a business owner chooses to accept it, the POS terminal will make an API call to the Moniepoint front office system that this particular call is to be approved. This means that it will debit the special purpose account that has been created for this terminal and credit the business’s account with the funds. If they reject it, it debits the POS transfer account number and reverses the money back to the sending bank.\nWe also have redundant systems in all of this where, if the queue connection fails for any reason, the business owner could use the polling approach. They could go to the pending notification screen on the POS that makes a direct API call to the Moniepoint system and fetch all the pending notifications that they have. Here, they can accept or reject it manually. This happens in the case where they don’t get a notification on the POS directly.\nJourney of a thousand steps\nHere’s how we got to the current solution…\nThe first iteration started in the middle of last year and we called it protected transfers. We focused mainly on the security aspect then. We wanted a system where we would be able to protect businesses from crime and fraudulent practices by people. The idea was that the business owner would be able to upload an image of the customer that made the transfer. Therefore, if there was an issue, we would be able to defend them in court, etc. We finished building it but had legal constraints back then.\nWere we going to always show up in court to defend everyone? We didn’t factor in practical legal constraints; so we had to pause. \nAfter we did business banking, we talked about it again from the angle of security; the kind of people we were onboarding and their issues. So to meet up with demands, we needed a way that would be secure. Something different from the typical transfer method.\nWe went back and decided to build on the protected transfer feature. It didn’t have the notification feature initially. We adjusted it as we wanted people to have a window to either accept or reject transactions. Therefore, we generated single account numbers for all the POS devices. \nThis first model –  one account number for POS transfer per business, was a start, but it didn’t scale properly either. It was the same number across all terminals so if we wanted to do notifications, a notification would go on all their terminals if all their terminals were listening on the same account number.\nImagine getting a notification on all your social media apps when you got a message on just one. Your WhatsApp would feel less intimate and the entire system would be generally less efficient.\nOne account number per business could only work for those who had just one terminal. We had to make amends to ensure that each terminal would have its own account number. \nOur next idea was to use one socket. We placed the queue at the back of a web socket connection from the terminal. We didn’t have a direct interchange between the POS and the queue which gave us lots of issues. Things were not synchronising, notifications were not coming in, etc. So, we solved this by taking out the socket and allowing the terminals to connect directly to the queue. It helped us a lot in the end. \nWe understood that terminals got retrieved now and then. So, we secured the ability to also retrieve NUBAN account numbers when terminals were retrieved. \nAnother problem we had was that people had gotten used to a particular account number. For example, a supermarket displayed its account number on the wall and people were already used to it. What would happen if people sent money to that account number when we had already retrieved the terminal?\nOur solution to that was to do it on the web. Even if the terminal was retrieved or not working, you could always go to the web to accept or decline as it showed all the transactions you’d ever had as a business owner irrespective of the terminal. \nThe next problem was the issue of reversal. For example, if a business owner rejected a POS transfer, it had to be reversed back to the destination bank. One of the problems with that was that there were some banks that ran services where you couldn’t reverse money to the originating account number. We were relying on the fact that the originating account number that came from that transfer was the account number we were supposed to transfer to. If someone sent money from banks with such services and the business owner rejected it, how would the money go back to the customer?\nThere was also the problem of banks that sent mock BVNs.\nTo solve these problems, we had eligibility criteria per bank, account numbers, BVNs, etc. Also, if we tried to reverse a transaction three times and we couldn’t, we would give the business owner the prompt to go ahead with a secondary choice. Here, we would state that we have tried to reverse and it didn’t go through. So, the business owner could decide to accept the transaction or initiate a manual reversal.\nSprint to the finish line\nWhat was the development process like?\n\n\nThe actual development took about four months. We were a team of 7 cutting across devs, QAs, etc. and most of us had worked together before. This made collaboration easier but there was also curiosity because it was something we hadn’t worked on before or were used to. We all learned something new while creating this feature. It kept us constantly on our toes.\nWe started from the business objectives to a User Experience (UX) from the POS perspective and how the journey would look like on Figma. Under the business objectives, we spoke to some relationship and regional managers – people on the field, getting ideas on how we should work from them.\nThen we moved to the technical deep dive level where we had a technical document on what the engineers would do, the APIs to write, the services to create, what would be the architecture of it, and more.\nAfter that, we did sprint planning to distribute the work amongst individuals, creating tickets on Jira for timelines and work schedules. From there, our Quality Assurance team members also wrote test cases.\nThen the sprint began.\nPeople started delivering their items, testing cycles, milestones and demos in between to show what we’d done so far. There were always changes within the sprint cycle.\nWe had to be certain of everything. We had a one-month period where we released it to internal testers and we got feedback in that period like application crashing, applications going down, etc.\nWe started around April and went fully live in August.\nAre we there yet?\nWhere we are and what’s next\nSo far, there has been steady growth and abduction of the product since it launched. Stories abound from our users who find increasingly diverse and specific ways that this feature makes their business transactions smoother and more secure. There have been increased transactions by businesses in terms of volume and value. We have had to even increase the limit for transactions.\nFor us and our users, this feature is one more way to push the boundaries of financial inclusion and easy payments for both businesses and their customers.\nEmpathy is one of the core values at TeamApt and by embodying this, we created a feature that is helping our users break the boundaries on what they’re capable of. We believe in creating solutions that are relevant to our users and are devoted to doing that, one feature at a time.

Creating empathy-driven solutions for moniepoint users: The POS Transfer Feature

\n\nKamona Design System\nDesigning for one of Africa’s foremost fintech companies is an experience comparable to little else. Fast-paced and continuously evolving, \nTeamApt\n has an ecosystem of products that keep everyone on the team engaged.\nIn the early days of TeamApt, we were building everything for the first time. So we designed as the ideas led, full of passion and excitement. Soon, however, everything got increasingly inconsistent and we knew that something had to change.\nHere’s the story of Kamona, and how it changed our work process.\nWhat is Kamona?\nDuring the lockdown, we worked on a \nMoniepoint\n mobile app targeted at consumers. It was an exciting process. I spent my days designing the already hashed-out flow but I soon noticed that something wasn’t quite right with our process.\nMost of the features we were building out were repetitions. Whether they were components, widgets or entire screens, most of the things we now worked on were fundamentally similar to something we had previously designed.\nFor a fast-paced company like TeamApt, I realised that we needed to do things differently. It felt redundant having to create the same things repeatedly. I figured that if we continued at that rate, the entire project would be a chaotic mess. Something had to change.\nThe name “Kamona”, gotten from an iconic scene in Attack on Titans, is said by Levi, whose speed and skill embodied what we needed our design system to accomplish.\nThe goal was to optimise speed and effectiveness, creating faster delivery time for designs and the engineering team. In essence, it was to be a single source of truth — useful for all departments — designers, engineers, marketers and the like.\n\n\nKamona Components\nI sat with a team member, Adrian, and pitched the idea to him. We’ve been working with it since.\nKamona is a design system created to be a platform-agnostic and consistent experience. Like most design systems, there are three main components of Kamona:\nBrand identity/brand assets\n — visual design elements, typography, colours, etc.\nUI Library\n — interface elements and how they are styled.\nCodebase\n — the code elements to be designed i.e. the code translation of the UI elements that have already been designed.\n\n\nDesign systems are living and there are currently a lot of features on Kamona, including; Widgets, Illustrations, Icons, Input fields (form elements), Logos in different formats, for different platforms, Dialogues, and lots more.\n\n\nWhy did we need a design system?\nWhile our work began with a greatly inspired burst, it was soon taking us a little too long to complete projects. This was because we had to create all of our designs from scratch. These designs mostly had some recurring features and yet, we often had to go back to the drawing board.\nWe had been building products and creating features but this time, it became glaring how time-consuming it was to create them from scratch every time. A design system was necessary because;\nIt was more efficient:\n Creating a design system would save us time and resources, and it has. It effectively cut down the time it took to accomplish tasks and innovate because we cut out the repetitive aspects. We could easily use components that we had created before. Creating new things was also easier because we had a system to work with.\nIt eased communication between teams\n: Although it was difficult getting the teams to adopt Kamona, having a design system made communication between teams relatively simple. Design, product and engineering teams now had a central point where we could collaborate easily. This also meant better optimisation for our users and a better product experience.\nIt standardised our design process:\n Kamona became the standard for our designs, and as we evolved, it did too. Since we started using Kamona, we’ve had up to 5 recruits. Once I showed them Kamona, they seemed to get it almost immediately without much explanation. I just had to explain that it was the company library and tell them to use it with care. Once they saw it, they instantly knew what to do with it. We structured it in a way that made you know where things were and what to do. Now, we have faster design times and faster delivery times.\nGetting acceptance for Kamona\nThe hardest part of building a design system is getting the organisational willpower to commit to it. With Kamona, we faced difficulty getting the engineering team to accept and adapt to it.\nFor them, it was understandably safer to stick with what we currently had. They wanted things to be stable and the change did not seem necessary at the time.\nHowever, understanding how important it would be to the efficiency of our work process, in the long run, I knew I had to find a way to upsell it to them. Many didn’t warm up to it at first, but having convinced Adrian of its importance, I figured I just had to keep trying.\nEven though it wasn’t initially accepted, we kept using the Kamona system. We worked on it and when we got to a stable point, I decided to make an explainer video for my colleagues and post it on our internal social media platform. This helped to sell the value of the design system to a lot of people.\nThe moment I knew we had won, however, was when I dropped the name “Kamona” and it was accepted.\nI realised that it was about proving to them the value of having a design system, and by the time they could see how genuinely important it was, they were sold on it. They now saw that we didn’t need to continue with our current chaos as there was now a system to save time and stress.\nA more efficient work process\nPeople make the mistake of assuming that design systems are built to only cater to visuals and the design team, but it is important for everyone. Our engineering team uses Kamona. There are numerous times when they want to flesh out new features that require design assets. These could be complex features that require a lot of time to be put into thinking and playing out the user journey, but with access to Kamona, the story is different.\nCurrently, the engineering team only reaches out to us when they want to flesh out new features requiring assets they don’t have. These may be complex features that require critical thinking in plotting out the user journey. They can easily access the design system. They only reach out to us when they run into a hitch and don’t want to make mistakes when implementing.\nWe use Kamona to create the solution and features and walk them through it. We ensure everyone agrees and is satisfied and that what we designed meets their expectations, and then we do a proper handoff.\nTo put how much time this saves us into context, if we were to design Monnify from scratch, a team of 7 would take 18 months to complete the design.\nHowever, with a design system like Kamona, the duration drops to about 8 months. That’s less than half the time it would have taken us before.\nFinal thoughts\nPitching Kamona has been one of my most exciting projects at TeamApt and I had the best team to work with. We are prepared to evolve as Moniepoint’s visual language and strategy evolve. At every point in time, the goal is to have a design system that is tailored to the company’s needs.\nToday’s realities were yesterday’s dreams and as we align with the company’s mission to power dreams, we know that this is just the beginning for us and Kamona could be bigger than we currently imagine. While Kamona isn’t publicly available right now, we’ll keep sharing what updates as we go — so stay tuned for future posts!\nP.S. Want to join us in making the most of Kamona, and building a design system for world class financial products? Explore \nopen roles\n.\n

Meet KAMONA: The Design System Pulsing Through TeamApt’s Products

\n\nIt’s not enough for Moniepoint to have a POS that is popular across Nigeria for delivering the most reliable network to transfer money, accept payments and pay bills. We have to work hard every day to learn about your needs and add new features that improve the experience of running your business. That’s why our latest update is something we believe you’d be excited to hear.\nA new way to transfer\nThe new update allows business owners to receive transfers with their POS. In our opinion, this is one of the most secure ways to receive money directly to your business bank account. \nWhat is so special about POS transfers?\nBusiness owners get tamper-proof records of all money transferred to their business account.\nBusiness owners never have to deal with fake alert fraud.\nBusiness owners are protected from fraud cases as they are able to validate the client through the BVN image.\nBusiness owners automate refunds when they reject a transfer.\nYou get to print receipts for all transfers\nHow do you get this update?\nClose the app market (if open) and then relaunch it,\nSwipe left on the homepage until you get to the ‘Manager tab’,\nClick on ‘installation packages,\nThen click ‘delete all’ at the bottom, and,\nGo back to the homepage tab and download the new version.\nTo stay updated on all the amazing features we have planned to empower business owners, stick with us at Moniepoint. \n\nWhat are the unique benefits of POS Transfer?\n\nIt reduces fraud and fraud liability - as transactions and the senders are validated through the BVN image to protect business owners from receiving fraudulent transfers.\nBusiness owners can delegate to their staff or salesperson and confirm transfer inflows conveniently, even when they are not around or when the transactions are processed by their staff.\nReceipts can be printed for transfer payments.\nBusiness owners can instantly initiate a refund for any transfer they want to reject, where value was not given, or the identity of the sender is in doubt.\nAs a cardless transaction, business owners can now render services to customers that do not have their cards.\n\nWhat account number is used for POS Transfer?\n\nA dedicated account is created for each terminal specifically to receive POS Transfers before the settlement is processed instantly to the business owner's account.\nThe dedicated account number is displayed on the POS under POS Transfer, and business owners or their staff can easily share with customers to receive funds. It is specifically for customers that are physically present so it is easy to
validate their image for due diligence/KYC).\n\nWhat is the transaction fee?\n\nThe transaction fees is 0.5% capped at N100, however, select business owners with massive transaction volume will get an optional fee concession soon.
The existing cashback on withdrawal will also be extended to POS Transfers soon.\n\nWhat is the transaction limit?\n\nBusiness owners with full KYC will enjoy the same limit they currently have on their profile for the normal transfers and have up to a N25 million cumulative daily limit.
Business owners with pending KYC have N900,000 as the maximum limit per POS Transfer and N5 million daily cumulative.

New Update: Receive Transfer payments with your POS

I’m in Abuja for the first time. It’s a lot calmer than Lagos. And so while I’m in this lovely, quiet city, let me tell the story of how I went from being an NYSC corp member to a customer support rep to a software engineer.\n\nMy story begins in 2019 at NYSC. Fresh out of orientation camp, I needed a PPA, Primary Place of Assignment, so I printed out many copies of my CV. Every day I would wear my khaki and walk the streets of Lagos going from one company to the other asking if they had job openings and handing out my CV.\nOn one of those days, I ran into a friend from my platoon. We exchanged phone numbers. He was coming from Flutterwave where he had gone to apply for a job. He told me about a lot of other places where I could apply to. It was from him that I first heard of TeamApt.\nI found the email address of the Head of People Operations at TeamApt, Naza, online and immediately sent an email with my CV attached saying I needed a PPA. I didn’t even know what role I wanted. I just knew I wanted to work in an organization and find myself. I saw on Google that the easiest role to start out with was customer support and so that was what I applied for.\n\n\n\n\nNaza replied to my email saying they didn’t have any openings. I texted the guy from my platoon telling him about TeamApt’s response. I asked him, “Should I still go to the office?” And he was like, “Yeah, if you feel like.”\nI felt like.\nSo I went to the TeamApt office and liked what I saw. Everyone dressed really casually, the place had a nice vibe. I still got an L sha, because just like their email had said, they really weren’t hiring at that moment. I asked if it was okay for me to drop a copy of my CV. They said it was. I dropped two copies, in case one went missing.\nI didn’t hear back from them for almost a month. I was about to give up on my job search. I had an offer from another place but I really didn’t like the job. I decided that if I didn’t hear back from TeamApt before the end of that month, I would resume at the other place.\nTwo days to the end of the month, on a beautiful Wednesday, I got a call from Ope, who is in the people Operations team at TeamApt. They had an opening. She said to check my email as I had been invited for an interview.\nOmo, I was shocked. I thought she called the wrong person. Because they had said no to me twice. Also because imposter syndrome is a problem I have.\nBut I did not have the luxury to indulge in self-doubt. This was my ticket out of the trenches. I studied hard for my interviews, to the extent that the hiring manager, Solomon, asked if I had crammed for it. Lol, sapa dey motivate.\nI was on a bus to Ibeju-Lekki on my way home from the interview when I got an offer for the job. And that was how I started off at TeamApt in August 2019 as a customer support rep for Moniepoint.\n\n\nI loved my job and was really determined to succeed because like I said, I have ambition. And so I went from a novice who needed constant guidance to a resource whom people came to for solutions. After a while, I was moved to operations. There I also gave that 110% energy.\nTo be fair, everyone at TeamApt approaches work with a similar devotion to excellence so my work ethic wasn’t an anomaly. Aptians are super into their jobs. I admired that a lot. I especially liked what the developers did at TeamApt and had been nursing the idea of changing careers for a few months.\nThe thing though was that I was afraid to tell anyone about this goal. I felt like a joke. I mean, I studied English at uni. I couldn’t see how I would go from that to being a software engineer.\nOne random day, while gisting with my team lead at the time, Odun Adeboye, about personal goals, I told him about my dream to become a software engineer.\nOdun not only encouraged me to go for it, he literally took me to Felix Ike, TeamApt’s CTO for advice on how to make the transition.\nFelix whom I had never spoken to before was immediately invested in my journey. He sent me a course on Udemy called Python for Everybody. Felix said to try out the course and if I liked it, I could come back and we would plot the next step together.\nI loved the course and would stay back after work to study. Things were going really well.\nThen COVID hit.\nThe uncertainty, lockdowns, all of it took a toll. And I zoned out and stopped working on the course. That was the end of my python journey.\nI stuck to doing my job to the best of my ability while navigating the anxiety of COVID. As the world settled a bit and the novelty of COVID wore off, I started to feel the nudges to pivot again.\n\n\nAround the same time, I made friends with a technical support staff on the Moniepoint team called Onome, and a reconciliation officer, Tosin Olubiyi. They both held me accountable.\nIt became a thing where every day on Workplace Tosin would ask if I had started working towards actualising my dream.\n\n\nTo get Tosin off my back, I got serious about my goals. I joined this class online where the tutor would teach us at night. It cost about 10,000 naira which was really cheap. We first learned git and then moved on to HTML. That was when I first felt like I was performing magic. I absolutely loved HTML and CSS. After those, we moved on to Javascript.\nI couldn’t have advanced in that class without Onome. Every time I had difficulties, he did his best to help me through them, walking me through the solution. There was a time he stayed up till midnight helping me through a particularly tough problem.\nAfter a while though, the tutor stopped teaching us. I barely knew anything. I needed quality knowledge.\nJust then, I saw that there was an opening at Decagon Institute. Decagon is a software engineering institute in Lagos. My plan was to write the entrance exams just for research so that when I was truly ready to apply next time, I would have the context of what to expect.\nI took the exam and failed.\nDecagon informed us that those who failed could retake the test in two weeks. I don’t like to fail. So I called Onome and with his help, I studied really really hard, sat for the exam again, and passed.\nIn November 2021, I was admitted into Decagon.\n\n\nBut there was a problem. Decagon requires a six-month commitment. I could not learn part-time while working at TeamApt. On the other hand, I love TeamApt and did not want to leave the company.\nWith the help of my team lead and HR, we worked on a compromise that suited all parties. I went on a sabbatical with the understanding that I could come back to my job as a Customer Operations rep. If I wanted to rejoin the team as a developer, I would have to go through the hiring process and tests. I agreed.\nI have to pause my story here to send a shout out to the HR team who made sure that sabbatical or not I got a birthday cake in January. That meant a lot.\nAll right, where were we? Decagon.\nDecagon was an experience of a lifetime. Challenging but really good. They operate a flipped learning system which means most of the learning is self-driven. I was placed on the Java path. There was Agile to learn, weekly classes to attend, and two weekly algorithms.\nAs the training was rounding up, I knew it was time to come back to TeamApt. I didn’t want to work anywhere else.\nEveryone in my cohort who learned that I came from TeamApt would immediately say something like, “Oh wow, you work at TeamApt? You’re my new best friend. I want to work there.”\n\n\nSo yeah, even if I didn’t already want to come back yet, seeing how excited others were at the prospect of working here would have been enough to motivate it.\nThe program at Decagon involves a four-month training and a two-month internship. At the end of the four-month mark, Decagon immediately tried placing me in an internship.\nI responded thanking the company for the offer but declining it. The HR manager at the company called me saying she went through my CV and she had a question.\n“How could you have worked at TeamApt and be thinking of working elsewhere?”\nI laughed and assured her that the plan was to get back to TeamApt.\nAbout three hours later, she called back saying she thought my story was amazing and that she had called her friend at TeamApt to ask if there were openings.\nGuess who her friend was…\nFelix Ike, the CTO who started me on my journey to software engineering.\nBetween Felix, my former team lead, Simpa, and Solomon, I was able to find an internship position on the backend Moniepoint team.\nThis worked great for everyone. TeamApt has very high standards and wasn’t going to give me a full-time role off the bat. I also wanted an opportunity to ease myself into my new software engineering shoes.\n\n\nMe at work these days\nI’m two months in and loving it.\nSome of my code has even been merged with production! That makes me feel so good. I told my friends all about it.\nThis job is seriously fun. I still get scared quite often and worry that I’m a fraud. But I have the support around me to help remind me that the voice in my head saying those things is a liar.\nThese days, when I’m not writing code or watching YouTube tutorials about code, I spend my time watching sitcoms on Netflix or talking to friends on the phone.\nOne of my best friends works at TeamApt as well. So most work days we stay on a call from morning till evening. We don’t even have to speak. It’s just nice to not be alone while you work.\nThat has to be my favourite thing about being an Aptian — the quality friendships that blossom here.\nSo folks, there you have it. My journey so far at TeamApt. From an NYSC corp member to a customer support rep, and now a software engineering intern.\n—\nI have to get back to my friends now. We are going on a hike tomorrow morning. I’m so excited. Remote work sweet gan.\nI’ll leave you with the most important lesson I’ve learned on my career journey so far.\nDon’t be afraid to make that career pivot. I’m especially speaking to women who would like to explore a career in a technical role. You’ve got this. Feel the fear but do it anyway.\nIn the words of the poet Erin Hanson, \n“There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky.\nAnd you ask, “What if I fall?”\nOh, but my darling, “What if you fly?”

How I Got My Dream Job: From Customer Support Rep To Software Engineer

\n\nThere was a conversation on Twitter last week about how "Moniepoint became king" and with everyone wondering how we grew,  I thought to write about it.\nMy name is Tobi and I am the Vice President of Loans at TeamApt.\nThree years after its inception, our flagship product, Moniepoint, has evolved into a full-service business bank. So far, Moniepoint has enabled 171,000 businesses process a billion transactions worth over 26 trillion Naira.\nThis is the story of how we became market leaders with very little funding within two years. \n—\nGround Zero\nOne afternoon in May 2018 as I was having lunch, my CEO - Tosin - stopped by my desk, tapped my shoulder and said “Tobi, let’s build an agency banking app.” \nI swallowed the spoonful of rice I had just put in my mouth and said, “Okay.”\nIt was my first month on the job. \nBut TeamApt wasn’t new to agency banking. Before then, we had been building Point of Sale (POS) terminal applications for some of the biggest Payment Terminal Service Providers (PTSPs) in the country. \nNigeria’s financial inclusion numbers were pretty bad at the time and Tosin thought we could do more good servicing Nigeria’s largely unbanked and underbanked people by using our market expertise to build a better agency banking system.\nI agreed with him. \n——\nSangotedo\nThe next day, I got in a cab with a colleague on the marketing team and we drove to Sangotedo - a bustling open market area on the outskirts of Lagos. \nThe goal was to understand what was missing in the market. \nEvery agent I spoke with had the same problem - \nreconciliation.\n \nAt this point, it is important to quickly explain how a POS works.\nEvery POS transaction goes through a central service called NIBSS, which is short for Nigerian Interbank Settlement System. \nYou have a card issued by a bank, let’s call it Bank A. The POS terminal being used by the agent is owned by another bank, Bank B. \nWhen your card is inserted into the POS terminal, its details go to NIBSS, saying, “Hey, I’m trying to debit this card from this other bank.”\nNIBSS then sends it to Bank A saying, “Hey, we’re trying to debit this your card.”\nBank A does the debit and tells NIBSS, “How far, I’ve done this debit o.”\nAnd the NIBSS tells the POS, that the debit has been done. \nAt this point, the terminal displays that the transaction was successful. \nBefore Moniepoint, the only party that knew all of the transactions that happened was NIBBS.\nFor the agents, this flow posed a problem - it meant that the agent’s bank wasn’t really involved and this created a blindspot that made reconciliation nearly impossible. \nYou know how when you use a POS, two receipts are printed out? One is the customer’s copy and the other is the merchant’s copy.\n \nThe agents literally had rubber bands and would tie the merchant copies for the day together.\nThey would then manually check each receipt the next day to make sure everything corresponded. \nIt was tedious.\n— \nFixing the problem\n\nhttps://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D12AQFOgUiR-OQ9Aw/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1653051856890?e=1676505600&v=beta&t=HJ3y-y9nmxVWhw5SaC4-_zGqs9M3OwJ9Xvz3KMhu-NM\n\nBack in the office from my market research at Sangotedo and many other communities, we put together a small team of three and got to work.\nI was the product manager, Toba Ojo was the backend and frontend and everything engineer, and Dami Ajiboye was in charge of the POS app.\nWe also got someone from the sales team, Deji, to try to get us customers. He was a little too good at his job. Our promise of real-time reports meant that in no time, Deji had gathered a waitlist of agents who needed the product we had not finished building.\nMy office at the time was unfortunately close to the reception. And our only protection was a semi see-through glass wall. \nThe agents would come to the TeamApt office, sit at the reception and intently stare daggers at my office while the team and I were building. Some of them would even knock on the glass wall asking us, “Guys, how far? Is it ready?”\nIt’s funny thinking about it now but back then, it was extremely nerve-wracking.\nAt some point, I begged Deji, the salesperson, to please stop bringing on more people. We needed to concentrate on making the best solution without pressure to rush what was already an efficient run time. \n— \nVersion 1\nAfter six weeks, we finally had something for the agents who had been staring daggers at us.\n\nhttps://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D12AQH-XjaPtczwoA/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1653050655631?e=1676505600&v=beta&t=UoVUuV_D7z7mkoKcnjAzl5iQX_lhxSYERINedgqVMgM\n\nTo solve the reconciliation blindspot, we added another leg to the transaction process flow where once NIBSS sends confirmation of the transaction to the POS, the terminal sends the transaction to us. This allowed agents to get real-time reports of the transactions they carried out. \nIt wasn’t fail-proof but it was simple and solved the problem. \n—\nAnother serious problem was stability.\n \nWhen NIBSS was down, nothing would work.\nThis problem could be completely fatal to their businesses. \nThere were rumours of an agent who almost experienced jungle justice because a customer’s card was debited but the POS showed that the transaction was unsuccessful. \nThankfully, TeamApt is full of rockstars. One of them is Solomon, an engineer who had been working on our payment switch called Aptent. Solomon came on board and got to work upgrading Moniepoint by ensuring better connectivity with banks.\n—-\nAll hands on deck\nAt the start of 2019, we all realised Moniepoint had the potential to be something special. Tosin refocused over 80% of the entire team on Moniepoint, and helped turn what had been up until that point just a product, into a business:\nWe doubled down on growth, giving each other targets of the number of terminals to distribute in a day, how many agents to onboard, and so on.\nWe  executed a structure within our distribution network that spurred our growth. \nWe built out a hyperlocal support system for the agents that was very personal\nOur numbers blew up! \nWe went from processing millions of Naira in a month, to billions in a day. \nWe were hitting our daily milestones, forcing us to set higher goals each day. \n—\nYet another problem\nAlthough some of our competitors had distribution networks as well, their systems lacked transparency. \nCluster managers and aggregators with our competitors had no way to confirm they were paid the correct commissions. \nWe did the opposite. We made commissions transparent. \nEveryone could track what they earned, and how they earned it. \nThis incentivised agents to work hard at processing more transactions and delivering the best service to their customers.\n—\nScaling Moniepoint\nSometime in 2019, I found myself in another kiosk. I had been summoned by one of our agents. Why?\nBecause he kept getting requests from community members asking for loans.\nThis was an interesting proposition. So we ran a pilot. We gave out some loans and things went great. People paid back at the appointed time, with no issues. \nThis watered the idea that agents were business owners who sold cash. It made sense to expand our offering so we could better cater to the needs of these businesses.\nBut to give out loans and the other solutions we had in mind, we needed a banking license. \nSo we first partnered with an existing bank to enable us to provide these services.\n—\nA Valentine’s Day gift\nSometime in 2021, we applied for a banking license and on the 14th of February this year, 2022, we got the coolest Valentine’s Day gift; our banking license.\nWe could now build our bank. \nWe had name ideas like Kuwego, a combination of the word ‘money’ in Nigeria’s major languages - Kudi (Hausa), Owo (Yoruba), Ego (Ibo). \nThe team ultimately decided on retaining the name Moniepoint.\nOn Apr 13, 2022, we officially launched Moniepoint, our full-service business bank\n\nhttps://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4D12AQHzr3jciJ_Yrg/article-inline_image-shrink_1500_2232/0/1653052079182?e=1676505600&v=beta&t=uwUify7Opxkg37yiWcMovKmcyqBUf0qQPFlcUHJKY4A\n\nThe summary of how Moniepoint became king?\nWe identified problems around reconciliation, support, and distribution that no one was addressing and created reliable solutions for agents.\nMoniepoint today has evolved to provide banking solutions that enable over 200,000 businesses to collect payments, access loans, manage operations and ultimately grow their business.\n_\nNow, you might be wondering how the evolved Moniepoint is different from other business banks. I’ll write about this in a week or two but, in the meantime, if you’re a business owner serious about growing your business, you should check out \nMoniepoint\n today.

How Moniepoint Became King

\n\nOn a Sunday morning in February 2021, an email from our team, the Monnify Team, caused an uproar within the Nigerian payments industry. Our then-partner bank had just temporarily suspended our virtual account service and the email notice triggered a panic. Although the email did mention that the service would be restored within a few days once we switched partners, it was apparent that most companies had already become heavily reliant on the service. As a result, any downtime had serious implications for their businesses.\nQuickly, most of these companies scrambled to roll out backup options to keep their operations going. This is interesting because the virtual account service was still relatively new — it had barely been around for a year at the time.\nAt first, when it launched, collections via virtual accounts were dismissed as an inefficient payment method that would struggle to gain traction. But it quickly went mainstream, stunning the industry. While Monnify successfully restored the virtual accounts service with new bank partners, we’ve seen how many other payment processors have quickly jumped in to offer the same solution.\nFor curious readers, you might be wondering what changed? Why did a service that was “supposed” to fail, or at least struggle, become a massive success instead? How did everyone become so reliant on the virtual account?\nConsider the Effort Paradox, a cognitive psychology model. It states that effort is rewarding in the long run; it takes effort to make something seem, err, effortless. “Effortless” performances are the result of a significant amount of dedication and grit — a key part of TeamApt’s core values. This is relevant because it underpins all of our product innovation. And collection via virtual accounts was one product we saw a need after the opportunity presented itself — it literally walked through the front door — a few years ago.\nThe backstory, and some history lessons\nOn a busy weekday, sometime in 2018, at TeamApt’s HQ in Lekki, Lagos, a group of frustrated men walked in. One of them had just struggled with his car insurance provider. He explained that even after he had successfully paid to renew his auto insurance cover, the insurance company was yet to verify his transfer. The insurance coverage is only active from the time of confirmation and not the time he initiated a transfer, and the process of confirming the transfer was purely manual. What a chore!\nWhile this sounded like a typical issue with insurance companies and their processes, right there, we knew there was more to it. We saw a significant opportunity in a common, albeit tiring, problem. All payments via transfers required manual confirmation. Someone had to check to see if the funds had entered the company’s bank account and then confirm that the name of the sender matched the name of the customer. This is why it was never a popular means for online payments at the time.\nThis insurance incident was a perfect use case for us to grasp the problem and the really massive opportunity hidden within. Soon, more and more use cases emerged. From transfers at offline sales points to transfers at hotel receptions, we found a need across different sectors and payments scenarios. The scales fell from our eyes and we realized how prevalent the bank transfer payment method was because nobody had developed a better alternative.\nPOS and card payments over an online interface were fantastic, but our studies at the time showed they weren’t the right options for some use cases — in fact, in some instances they were impractical. That’s where Monnify comes in, and we built it to mirror a payment experience every Nigerian has become comfortable with.\nThe innovation simplified\nThanks to mobile banking apps, internet banking, and USSD, bank transfers have become a very familiar and simple method of transacting for the average Nigerian. This option is not just popular because they save people time on bank queues, but also transfers are instant.\nTo appreciate the work that was done and for the sake of readers not familiar with how the standard instant transfer system works for most banks, let me first give you a quick and easy picture of NIBSS instant transfer (NIP). \nThink of the WhatsApp messages with the grey and blue ticks when you are chatting. All bank accounts are like several WhatsApp accounts with their unique numbers, and the ticks are just like API calls.\nLike WhatsApp, when you type a message and send it, the first grey tick tells you that your message has been sent. If the recipient is online and able to receive the message in their WhatsApp account, the second grey tick comes, indicating message delivery. Still not a blue tick until the recipient has read the message, right?\nThe same thing happens with your money; with banks, when you trigger a transfer from one account to another, the first call is made to check if the other account is active to receive the incoming funds. The first grey tick is usually credit notification. When the account gets credited with the funds, then the second grey tick shows up. This is called the Transaction Status Query (TSQ). At this point, it’s clear that your message was delivered, and eventually, your recipient will read the message. \nLike your WhatsApp messages, the money was undoubtedly sent to the other account by the second call. When the banks do their accounting, the cash value will be settled between both banks. At this point, is when the grey ticks become blue. Well, while NIBSS instant transfer is designed to execute in seconds, we can see the level of calls that need to occur for a transaction to be successful. \nWith this picture in mind, the ingenuity of the Monnify team can better be appreciated. To keep it simple virtual account numbers are like a series of dedicated WhatsApp numbers to help businesses receive their messages (aka funds). These numbers can be assigned to a particular customer for recurring transactions or designated for a one-time purpose. Either way, Monnify, now having those numbers, can tell when a message is received on any of the ticks, meaning that even before the blue ticks, businesses are notified of payments with the relevant details, eliminating any form of manual confirmation.\nMonnify handles the entire backend, by creating the virtual account, verifying funds that come in, and notifying businesses when funds arrive. So nobody has to ever do the grunt work of manually checking who sent what and when. If you give a customer a virtual account number and they make payment, the business can easily track it and handle it better. Virtual accounts are so efficient they’re now used by so many companies in Nigeria today,\nCheck this out\nEarly Tuesday morning, on July 30, 2019, two emails from Bukola and Ope, the personalized email characters from PiggyVest and CowryWise respectively, made many tech headlines and were the top Twitter trends that day. Piggyvest and Cowrywise had just announced the introduction of the PiggyFlex and the Stash accounts respectively, two virtual account products. Wallets Africa had made a similar announcement earlier.\nEverything changed from that point. Hundreds of transactions followed, and in less than three hours, about 100,000 virtual accounts were claimed.\n\nhttps://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQGZjHREGuRduw/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/0/1637914768791?e=1676505600&v=beta&t=XATuwLdgLGkqZEXmBcmNu-Q1zTsvewf2Rc4WlJIQRpU\n\nAt that point, the opportunities became apparent across industries, as more businesses reached out with their different use cases. Lending companies, bill payment providers, betting companies, educational institutions, and many others.\nIt was evident that the service was fit for diversified uses. During the first month after Monnify’s launch, a special team was set up for one-on-one use-case reviews, revamping the documentation to make it clearer and more accommodating to new scenarios that had not yet been considered.\nHowever, like every truly novel product, there were countless challenges at several points of the development lifecycle. The nature of the transfer infrastructure in Nigeria made some of those challenges tougher.\nFor one, not all banks use the same architecture, which means that some banks behave differently with traditional transfers and virtual account services. For some banks, your funds will not get debited until it’s been confirmed that the other account is active to receive funds, while others debit you first, and if the receiving account is unable to receive funds, a reversal occurs. The team had to account for all these variations in the design.\nRegardless, beyond the technical challenges, adoption by the user is a crucial measure for success. And in retrospect, the user numbers today indicate that virtual account payments are becoming mainstream and now widely adopted even by other players in the payments industry.\nOn a particular Thursday, one of the top lending companies decided to go active with over 500,000 users all at once. At first, there was the initial fear of the system’s capacity to handle such workload until the team’s lead engineer gave his 100% assurance that nothing could go wrong. Indeed, nothing went wrong.\nThere was no going back at that point. The team felt ready to take on the world. So even when new challenges and sleepless nights characterized the following weeks and months, the team had built on sturdy grit with a growth mindset.\nThe current & future growth\nOver the last two years, Monnify has processed over 45 million transactions with a transaction value of around $3.9 billion.\nWe continuously seek new channels and logic to help promote the ease of payments for organizations within Nigeria and Africa as a whole. We have developed, and customized new payment models via virtual accounts and other channels to ensure all types of businesses can adopt the solutions and grow their businesses. A multi-bank model has also been implemented to avoid a repeat of the February challenge.\nMonnify has been a resounding success, but there is still more to be done. Not settling or complacent, we believe the job is not close to finished as we continue to work in line with TeamApt’s vision to serve the underserved by building bridges to close financial inclusion gaps and truly create financial happiness in the country.\nDo you need more information on Monnify and how we can assist your business to grow, please send a mail to \nsales@monnify.com\n.

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