What Moniepoint's $294B Year Tells Us About African Fintech Infrastructure
A single fintech processed more transaction volume than most African nations produce in GDP. The lesson isn't about Moniepoint — it's about what happens when you build the right infrastructure first.
In 2025, Moniepoint processed over 14 billion transactions totaling ₦412 trillion — roughly $294 billion. The company now handles an estimated 80% of in-person payments in Nigeria. To put that in perspective, $294 billion is larger than the GDP of most African nations. A single fintech moved more money in one year than many countries produce in economic output.
This isn't just a Moniepoint story. It's an infrastructure story. And it has direct implications for every bank, fintech, and developer building financial products in emerging markets.
Moniepoint didn't win by building a better mobile app. They didn't win by offering a flashier user experience or running more aggressive marketing campaigns. They won by solving the infrastructure problem first. They put POS terminals and software into every shop, every market stall, every corner store across Nigeria. They built the rails — and once the rails were in place, the transactions followed.
This is the pattern that repeats across every successful payment ecosystem. M-Pesa didn't win Kenya by building the best savings product. They won by becoming the rails that money moved on. Once you're the infrastructure layer, you capture the market.
The scale of the opportunity across Africa and other emerging markets is difficult to overstate. Nigeria alone moved $294 billion through a single fintech in 2025. The total market is significantly larger when you include bank-processed transactions, mobile money, and cross-border flows. Kenya's M-Pesa ecosystem handles over $30 billion annually, and that number grows every year. Ghana, South Africa, and East Africa are all on similar digitization trajectories.
Across the 15+ countries where Korastratum operates, the combined addressable market for digital payment infrastructure runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. And these markets are growing at 30%+ year-over-year — faster than any other region on earth. The question for banks and fintechs isn't whether this opportunity is real. It's whether they'll be positioned to capture it.
The Moniepoint story teaches us something important: whoever builds the rails first captures the market. This creates a strategic problem for two groups. Banks are slow to modernize. Most tier-1 African banks run on core banking systems that are 10-20 years old. They have the customer relationships and regulatory licenses, but they lack the modern infrastructure to compete with fintechs on speed, cost, and user experience. Every year they wait to modernize is another year fintechs capture more of their market share — exactly as Moniepoint captured 80% of Nigeria's in-person payments.
Fintechs, on the other hand, are fast but fragmented. They move quickly but spend months building infrastructure from scratch for each new market — payment rail integrations, compliance frameworks, identity verification, settlement reconciliation. By the time they've built the plumbing, a competitor who launched on existing infrastructure is already live and growing.
The gap in the market is clear: a unified platform that gives both banks and fintechs the infrastructure to launch and scale financial products without building from scratch. That's the gap Korastratum fills.
For banks, the lesson from Moniepoint is urgent. Fintechs are already capturing your customers. In Nigeria, 80% of in-person payments now flow through a fintech — not through banks. The same pattern is emerging in digital payments, lending, and cross-border transfers across the continent. Banks that modernize their core infrastructure now will retain their customers and capture new growth. Banks that wait will find themselves increasingly irrelevant.
Korastratum gives banks a path to modernize without the risk of a big-bang migration. Kora CBA deploys alongside existing legacy systems via a parallel-run strategy — old and new systems run side-by-side while you validate every transaction before cutting over. Banks can modernize module by module, launching digital products in weeks while maintaining zero downtime for existing customers.
For fintechs, the lesson is about speed. The next Moniepoint-scale outcome won't come from the company that builds the best infrastructure from scratch. It will come from the company that launches fastest on infrastructure that's already built. Every month spent wiring up payment rails, building compliance frameworks, and integrating identity verification is a month your competitors are acquiring customers.
Korastratum gives fintechs pre-built compliance, white-label digital banking, local payment rails, and multi-currency support across 15+ markets. Teams that would spend 6-12 months building infrastructure can launch in weeks. One neobank went from zero to live customers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana in 12 weeks — on a 4-person engineering team.
For developers, the lesson is about scale. When you choose infrastructure to build on, you want infrastructure designed for the scale these markets demand. Korastratum offers 350+ API endpoints, sub-200ms latency, 99.99% uptime target, and pre-built integrations with the payment rails, identity systems, and compliance frameworks that matter in each market. Build once, scale across markets — without rewiring your integration for each one.
Moniepoint proved that African payment markets are massive, growing, and ready for infrastructure-first players to capture. The next wave of winners — whether banks defending their position or fintechs racing to capture new markets — will be the ones that move fastest on modern infrastructure. The infrastructure question is settled. The only question left is speed.