Moniepoint: Empowering the underbanked with access to cloud-based financial solutions
About Moniepoint
Moniepoint is a global business payments and banking platform and the partner of choice for more than 1.9 million businesses of all sizes, providing them with equal access to the tools they need to grow and scale.
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About Africa Digital Group
Africa Digital Group oversees the strategic implementation of transformative cloud solutions for leading organizations across multiple sectors in Africa.
Moniepoint uses Google Cloud to provide underbanked SMEs and individuals with reliable, consistent financial services throughout Nigeria
Google Cloud results
- Provides 1.9 million businesses across Nigeria with a financial services platform they can rely on
- Scales to process 650 million business transactions (worth $14 billion) every month with Google Cloud
- Maximizes scalability and minimizes disruption by orchestrating more than 600 microservices
- Empowers underbanked and underserved communities with sustainable direct and indirect employment opportunities
Handles more than 600K requests per minute with GKE
In an increasingly digital world, cash is no longer king. With mobile phones penetrating even the remotest areas, non-cash payments more than quadrupled from 311 billion to 1.3 trillion between 2013 and 2023. For businesses to survive and thrive, access to financial services is more important than ever. But such services are not always accessible. In Nigeria, for example, 45% of adults did not have access to a bank account in 2021, according to the World Bank.
But a digital world comes with opportunities as well as challenges, and new players like Moniepoint aim to bring financial services to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in even the most remote parts of Nigeria and beyond. "Our guiding principle is financial happiness for everybody," says Felix Ike, CTO and Co-founder of Moniepoint. "Even if you are underbanked and in a remote area, you should be getting access to the best financial products available."
Moniepoint provides underbanked and underserved SMEs with a one-stop financial services platform they can rely on. Since launching in 2019, the company has combined advanced technology with local agents and business managers to help underbanked businesses process payments, access credit, and organize their operations online and through mobile apps.
After just four years, Moniepoint has grown into one of Nigeria's largest business payments platforms and was ranked by the Financial Times as Africa's second-fastest growing company. At every stage of its remarkable rise, Moniepoint has worked with Google Cloud technology.
"When we started out with Moniepoint, we needed a technology infrastructure that was reliable, mature, affordable, and most importantly easy to use," says Ike. "Google Cloud fulfilled all our criteria and helped us to build an infrastructure that grew with the business without straining our resources."
"When we started out with Moniepoint, we needed a technology infrastructure that was reliable, mature, affordable, and most importantly easy to use. Google Cloud fulfilled all our criteria and helped us to build an infrastructure that grew with the business without straining our resources."
—Felix Ike, CTO and Co-founder, MoniepointAddressing the challenges of the underbanked
The company started life in 2015 under the name TeamApt, helping banks to automate their back-end processes for a better overall customer experience. By 2019, however, Ike and his colleagues wanted to impact the lives of people more directly—that's when the Moniepoint platform was born.
With its prior experience of financial technology, Moniepoint was able to identify the key challenges faced by the underbanked community. "We found that one of the biggest pain points for underbanked communities was reliability of service," says Ike. "So we set out to solve that challenge with the best technology layer we can provide."
As a financial services provider, Moniepoint needed to keep some of its infrastructure on-premises for regulatory reasons but Ike and his co-founder knew that cloud-based services were essential for scalability and reliability. At the same time, as a startup, Moniepoint's resources were limited and needed to be used effectively if the platform were to succeed. After evaluating several solutions, Moniepoint decided that Google Cloud offered the best mix of technological power and usability. Getting up and running was a simple enough matter: "We are not cloud experts, but we were able to set everything up from the console and get started very quickly," says Ike.
Unlocking scalability with 600+ microservices on Google Cloud
As time went on, Moniepoint engaged the services of cloud specialists Africa Digital Group to help find the best possible solutions within the Google Cloud ecosystem for the company's unique challenges. Moniepoint now runs a hybrid infrastructure with some services running on-premises for regulatory reasons, while analytics and high traffic transaction workloads run on Google Cloud.
When the company first launched, Moniepoint ran its cloud services on Google Compute Engine virtual machines. But as the platform gathered momentum and the customer base rapidly expanded, Ike and his team evolved the infrastructure into a more services-oriented stack, centered around Kubernetes, the open-source container technology developed at Google.
Today, Moniepoint orchestrates more than 600 microservices with Google Kubernetes Engine and Pub/Sub for messaging. Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring provide visibility into the infrastructure, while Cloud Armor and Security Command Center help Moniepoint to stay as secure as possible.
From the start of Moniepoint's operations, Cloud SQL has handled the database management for transactional workloads alongside Cloud Bigtable, which helps relieve performance bottlenecks by taking on very large datasets. "There are several use cases where Bigtable has helped us, especially with persistent data. It's extremely fast and handles datasets with billions of records very efficiently," says Ike.
As Moniepoint enters its next phase of growth, Cloud Spanner is set to replace Cloud SQL as the backbone of the company's high traffic transactions workload. "As a financial services provider, relational databases are very important for us, but they can be hard to scale," says Ike. "Cloud Spanner provides us all the features of a relational database, but with the massive scalability of a NoSQL database—and without disrupting our performance."
"As a financial services provider, relational databases are very important for us, but they can be hard to scale. Cloud Spanner provides us all the features of a relational database, but with the massive scalability of a NoSQL database—and without disrupting our performance."
—Felix Ike, CTO and Co-founder, MoniepointFueling growth with community empowerment
Since its launch in 2019, Moniepoint has exploded in popularity: today, around 1.9 million businesses use the platform to send and receive over $12 billion in 400 million transactions every month. The ability to swiftly and sustainably expand and evolve its infrastructure with Google Cloud has been crucial to processing huge volumes of transactions and helping the company to keep its momentum as it grows. What started out as a few virtual machines to support a handful of customers, is now a complex, sophisticated microservices-based architecture that handles up to 600,000 requests per minute.
Even as it scales up, Moniepoint is still able to offload its overheads with Google Cloud, allowing developers to concentrate on what they do best and create the best possible financial products for their customers.
For Ike and his colleagues, however, the real measure of success has been the impact on communities. In addition to growing its own team, Moniepoint has added more relationship managers to its roster across Nigeria in order to cater to demand. That has led to the direct employment of more than 10,000 people, most of whom live in underbanked and underserved parts of the country. Indirectly, by empowering its business customers to stay agile, Moniepoint is also contributing to the employment of millions more.
"Google Cloud gave us a very reliable playground in which we could try and test our ideas," says Ike. "In that environment we could turn these ideas into reality and build a significant financial platform that we hope can change people's lives for the better."
The playground is still in use. Ike and his colleagues are currently exploring BigQuery and its advanced analytics and machine-learning capabilities. "We have so much data but we have not yet taken full advantage of it," says Ike. "We're on a journey to make Moniepoint AI-capable, and we're laying the foundation for that with BigQuery."
Moniepoint's growth rate only seems to be accelerating, as the company looks to expand beyond Nigeria to other markets in Africa. In mid-2023, the company also branched out into providing financial services for individuals as well as SMEs, which will result in a flood of new customers. Rather than being overwhelmed at such a rapid change, Ike is energized: "We're building an all-in-one financial platform for businesses in emerging markets, and to be able to handle this level of scale, you need an infrastructure that can handle anything you throw at it. For us, that's Google Cloud."
"We're building an all-in-one financial platform for businesses in emerging markets, and to be able to handle this level of scale, you need an infrastructure that can handle anything you throw at it. For us, that's Google Cloud."
—Felix Ike, CTO and Co-founder, MoniepointTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Moniepoint
Moniepoint is a global business payments and banking platform and the partner of choice for more than 1.9 million businesses of all sizes, providing them with equal access to the tools they need to grow and scale.
About Africa Digital Group
Africa Digital Group oversees the strategic implementation of transformative cloud solutions for leading organizations across multiple sectors in Africa.