Kewaco

It’s funny when you think they care about your sacrifice

A Nigerian founder borrowed money from his wife to pay his staff's salaries.

A few years later, a dyed in the -wool investor wrote a $5.5 million check after seeing his pitch deck.

That company is now worth $1 billion .

Around 2019, while most Nigerian fintech companies were chasing online payments, Tosin Eniolorunda, Moniepoint's founder, made a different bet:

He made a bet on POS agents and offline commerce.

Eniolorunda and his team made a decision that most people in Nigerian fintech thought was backward.

Online payments were the future everyone was chasing; offline, point-of-sale business, was considered unglamorous and too dependent on physical distribution to be a real tech play.

Many thought it was the less exciting path.

Then came COVID-19 in 2020.

Suddenly, millions of Nigerians needed alternative ways to access cash and make transactions.

The market Moniepoint had been quietly building for exploded and settled the argument for everyone.

“COVID made people realize they could not go to banks to withdraw cash,” Eniolorunda said.

Agents popped up overnight.

The cashless policy that followed pushed the market even further.

What had looked like a niche bet turned out to be the center of the entire ecosystem.

By the time the dust settled, Moniepoint was the winner, processing transactions at volumes that put it among the top eight financial institutions in Nigeria by that measure.

But to understand how Tosin Eniolorunda got to that point, you have to go back further, to a pitch deck that landed on the desk of Jim Ovia, the founder of Zenith Bank.

The turning point came even earlier.

After seeing an early pitch deck, Jim Ovia reportedly invested $5.5 million for a 20% stake of Moniepoint because he believed he was looking at “another Interswitch in the making.”

Mr. Ovia, the founder of Zenith Bank and one of the earliest investors in Interswitch, had been watching the new wave of Nigerian fintech with interest.

When Eniolorunda and his team were preparing to shut down their bank software business, TeamApt, and go directly to consumers, they needed capital to bridge the transition.

Their deck found its way to Ovia.

“He was already interested in fintech because he was one of the first investors in Interswitch,” Eniolorunda explained. “So he knows the story.”

Jim moved fast.

He made inquiries at Zenith Bank, where TeamApt had delivered a project and left a strong impression. Team Apt, the parent company of Moniepoint, was a vendor with Zenith Bank.

The feedback was good.

Within roughly six to eight weeks, a deal was done.

Jim Ovia’s Quantum Capital put in $5.5 million for 20% of the company.

Jim Ovia was like, ‘Stop raising, take this one, take 20% of your company, and we’ll build,” Eniolorunda said.

His read, according to Eniolorunda, was straightforward. “I think what he found was that this is another Interswitch in the making.”

Without that early bet and investment of $5.5 million on Moniepoint by Jim Ovia, Moniepoint would not have come this far.

They would have probably died, another stillborn dream.

Jim Ovia later exited (cashed out) his investment in Moniepoint at three times what he put in, $15 million, when Moniepoint was raising fresh capital in 2021.

If he had held on, that investment would have been worth close to $200 million.

But that is not the point.

The point is that it took one man's conviction and risk on another person's dream for Moniepoint to become a successful company.

People like Jim Ovia are what Pentecostal church of this world called destiny helpers, and in the true sense of the word, that is what he is.

You need one person to change your life, to believe in your dreams, to open doors you can’t open for yourself, to stake his/her goodwill for you, and to invest in your dreams, convinced you will make something out of your life.

You need one person who will get interested in you and be invested in seeing you succeed.

It is my prayer that every hardworking and honest entrepreneurial young person in Nigeria meets this person soon.

It is important that you do so.

It is important for our ecosystem because that is what the story of Moniepoint has taught us this morning.