Inside Moniepoint’s ambitious plan to dominate personal banking in Nigeria

At a media parley held on Thursday in Lagos, Moniepoint, the Nigerian microfinance bank that rose to prominence selling POS devices across the country announced more ambitious plans to roll out its new personal banking product.

Making its debut into the personal banking space just a week ago, Moniepoint is looking to replicate the strategies it used to dominate business banking across the country. Those same agents who sold POS to SMEs will now serve as mobile banks for customers as Moniepoint enters the world of personal banking.

Brandishing its successes from its business banking days – $12 billion in monthly transactions value from 400 million transactions, 1.6 million businesses – it said it is now targeting at least 4.8 million retail customers in the first three months.

“In every corner of the nation, we have our representatives known as agents. Even in areas where we don’t have a physical bank presence, we are there. We call our agents ‘man bank’ because you can actually do everything you can do in a banking hall with our agents. So, we are everywhere because we want to drive financial inclusion in Nigeria,” Babatunde Olofin, the acting Managing Director of Moniepoint MFB told the press yesterday.

“We have powered the dreams of a lot of business owners, and we know what individuals need. We want to include everyone from the regular Okada rider, to the market woman in the financial services space. We have built our infrastructure in such a way that it is very elastic. As transactions grow, we are able to expand our infrastructure and this is because we have several monitoring tools that help us to monitor how transactions are growing. Also, in every nook and cranny of the nation, we have our business relationship reps. Even in localities where there is no physical bank or ATM presence, you’ll find our precious blue boxes there,” he added.

Read also: Moniepoint enters Nigeria’s consumer banking segment, to rival Opay and PalmPay

Moniepoint’s drive towards financial inclusion

Armed with a heavy war chest for its marketing budget, Moniepoint has splurged billions of naira as the headline sponsor of Big Brother Naija: All-Stars show this year, a move more than capable of achieving the company’s 4.8 million retail customer target. It has also set aside another 200 million naira to be won by customers who get points by making transactions; buying recharge cards, sending money, and receiving money on the app.

“We want to supercharge financial inclusion because we realize that if you want to drive behavioural change and increase adoption, you should reward consistently good behaviour,” Ope Adeyemi, the Senior Vice President of Channels and Sales Tools at Moniepoint said. “Consumers are rewarded with coins on our personal banking app after they carry out transactions, and these coins allow them to take part in exciting weekly games such as Shuffle, Spin the Wheel,” he added.

Moniepoint will have to enter into a fierce competition with Kuda Bank, the single fintech/microfinance bank that has tried to dominate the market through targeted digital advertising and offering free transactions and for a time free ATM cards and free deliveries of the ATM cards to customers.

Right out the back, Moniepoint charges customers 10 naira for transfers and sells its ATM cards for the standard 1000 naira.

But keeping with CBN regulations, the fintech cannot offer customers cards that can process dollar transactions, another huge market that fintechs, many unsuccessfully, have been looking to dominate.

Moniepoint is also planning a huge expansion across the continent. Just last week, the competition regulator in Kenya, the Competition Authority of Kenya gave them the green light to acquire Kopo Kopo, a Kenya-based company offering payment services and credit to businesses.

With the rise of flash scams, Moniepoint said that it is constantly working to combat fraud if they occur. It added that it shuts down domains that are not its own, as quickly as possible.

“The CBN has mandated that there should be fraud desks at all financial institutions that will operate 24 hours and we have that as part of our measures to combat it,” Ladidi Agidani, the Head, Compliance and Risk at Moniepoint said.