How Moniepoint is going after remittances with Monieworld

Moniepoint, the Nigerian fintech unicorn, has launched Monieworld, its remittance product that allows UK residents to send money directly from a Monieworld account, cards, a British bank account or via Apple Pay and Google Pay to any Nigerian bank account.

In a live demo seen by TechCabal, it took just 17 seconds to send £1 to a Moniepoint account, which received ₦2,172—₦53 more than on other remittance platforms like Grey and ₦30 more than Lemfi.

Monieworld makes money through FX conversion fees, with plans to diversify revenue as it expands its offerings. For now, it can only send money to Nigeria, which received £2.7 billion in remittances from the UK in 2021 through formal channels, making the corridor one of Nigeria’s largest sources of remittances.

“We used to say we are creating financial happiness for Africans, but that has evolved to Africans everywhere,” Moniepoint’s CEO, Tosin Eniolorunda, told TechCabal. “Our goal is not just remittance but a full-fledged diaspora financial services platform to serve the African diaspora.”

Moniepoint is best known for its blue POS devices used by thousands of agents scattered across Nigeria to dispense cash. After expanding into personal and corporate banking in the past two years, Monieworld is its latest attempt to diversify beyond agency banking and build a financial services ecosystem.

Recently backed by $120 million from investors like Google and Visa, Moniepoint enters the remittance space with a familiar playbook: offer the best deal upfront. It currently offers the highest conversion rate in the market, a strategy it used during its agent onboarding phase when it gave out thousands of POS terminals for free to agents across Nigeria.

That strategy paid off. Moniepoint now processes over 1 billion transactions monthly, worth $22 billion, according to the company. Beyond offering a higher conversion rate for now, Moniepoint is also banking on Monieworld’s speed and reliability to retain users, as it has end-to-end control over transactions.

“We are using pricing as a pull factor. We want people to try the product because it’s affordable and stay because it works,” Eniolorunda said.

Monieworld processes remittances through a Nigerian international money transfer operator (IMTO) license under a Moniepoint subsidiary called Global Wire and a partnership between Moniepoint’s UK subsidiary and PayrNet, a licensed electronic money institution (EMI) in the UK.

It is also “deep” into acquiring its EMI license from the UK regulators—a move that will remove external influence in processing remittances, which might increase its speed and reliability by keeping the money within its ecosystem. Only UK residents can use the app after undergoing checks to verify residency, creditworthiness, and identity.

Monieworld is creating its customers

Moniepoint is no stranger to competition. In agency banking, it competes with OPay and PalmPay, while in personal banking, it competes for market share with Kuda. Its newest competitors, like Lemfi, Grey, and global players like Wise, have the advantage of focus, building products dedicated solely to cross-border payments. However, Moniepoint does not consider these companies as its immediate competitors.

“Our biggest competitor in remittance is peer-to-peer transactions (people sending money back home through friends and family),” Eniolorunda said. “Our approach isn’t necessarily to go head-to-head with Lemfi or Grey, it’s to go after the huge, untapped market—people still sending money manually.”

Over 290,000 Nigerians live in the UK, according to a 2021 census, forming the third-largest nationality. Moniepoint is betting that its experience in distributing financial services will help convert some of these residents into digital remittance users via Monieworld.

“You can have great tech, but if you don’t know how to reach customers at scale, it won’t matter,” Eniolorunda said. “ We’ve done it repeatedly at the B2B, agency, and consumer stages. Now we’re targeting the diaspora.”

Monieworld has over 70 people working on the product across the compliance, engineering, marketing, product, and customer support departments. Matthew Snell, a former vice president at Volt, a UK-based fintech, leads the compliance team.

Monieworld’s expansion outside the UK

While the app focuses on the UK-Nigeria corridor, Moniepoint plans to expand into several other remittance corridors. “We have a dedicated team exploring new markets,” Eniolorunda said. ”They’re constantly analysing licenses, partners, and compliance structures in other countries. That’s also why we set up Moniepoint GB as a separate entity—so we could scale responsibly and compliantly from day one.”

Still, new markets come with hurdles: compliance requirements, customer acquisition, UX localisation, and liquidity management. Building trust, network density, and market share takes time. Until Monieworld becomes a top-two provider in the UK-Nigeria corridor, Moniepoint says it will hold off on launching elsewhere.