TeamApt Rebrands as Moniepoint; Opens London Office

TeamApt Inc. has become Moniepoint Inc., rebranding to reflect the name of its flagship digital banking product.

In a press release announcing the rebranding on Friday (Jan. 13), the Nigerian FinTech company also revealed that it is relocating its headquarters from Lagos to London as it looks ahead to the next phase of its journey.

The company also has offices in the U.S. While Moniepoint Inc. (formerly TeamApt) is the holding company of Moniepoint MFB, Moniepoint MFB is a Central Bank of Nigeria regulated company and it remains in Nigeria alongside its leaders.

Explaining the name change, Tosin Eniolorunda, co-founder and CEO at Moniepoint said: “When we started out in 2015, we were primarily providing back office payment infrastructure for banks and needed an apt team, hence the name TeamApt.”

Since then, however, he said the firm has “evolved significantly,” and that its business banking solution, Moniepoint, has become its core focus, “where we see the future.”

As Co-founder and TeamApt CTO Felix Ike explained to PYMNTS in a recent interview, in Nigeria, there is a need for business banking solutions that fit with the country’s payment infrastructure and consumer preferences.

For example, he said that whereas card payments are the preferred transaction method in some countries, in Nigeria, they accounted for just 18% of all business transactions, while account transfers made up 80%.

Moniepoint “currently processes the majority of the POS transactions in Nigeria,” per the company’s press release. The company reached an annualized total payments volume (TPV) of over $170 billion and a customer base of more than 600,000 businesses, enabling the firm to more than double its annual revenues in 2022.

In addition, Moniepoint won the National Inclusive Payment Initiative Award by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the release noted.

Moniepoint’s ubiquity in the Nigerian market has helped the startup secure backing from some of the biggest names in FinTech investments, including QED Investors.

And as Eniolorunda told PYMNTS during an interview in April, going forward the firm intends to hedge against Nigeria’s turbulent foreign exchange environment by expanding beyond the country’s borders, an ambition that likely informed its decision to relocate to London.

“If we’re able to provide services for people beyond the shores of Nigeria while providing our service in Nigeria, it will enable us to counter the effects of some of these macros,” he said. What’s more, he added that the firm is looking to add new currency services to help Nigerian businesses manage their own foreign exchange.

Ultimately, Eniolorunda said the company’s goal is to expand to the largest markets in the region and to be known worldwide as the digital business operating system for African businesses.

Comparing this ambition to the success of payment systems like Square in the U.S., India’s Razorpay or StoneCo in Brazil, he said those companies have grown “to be big players in their regions.” Likewise, he said, “we want to be the biggest player providing this business for small to large merchants in Africa.”

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