Moniepoint Microfinance Bank is using transaction histories, business patterns and payment behaviour to assess the creditworthiness of small businesses, as the financial technology company expands lending to a segment of Nigeria’s economy that often struggles to access formal financing.
The bank disbursed more than N1 trillion in credit to thousands of small businesses in 2025, with the businesses recording average transaction-value growth of more than 36 percent after accessing the loans, according to Moniepoint’s 2025 Year in Review.
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The approach relies on alternative data to assess borrowers, potentially helping businesses with limited conventional credit histories demonstrate their capacity to repay loans through their day-to-day commercial activities.
The strategy comes as access to affordable financing remains a major challenge for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which need working capital to maintain inventory, pay suppliers, expand operations and withstand fluctuations in demand.
By combining its payments infrastructure with lending, Moniepoint is positioning itself to use the financial activity of businesses on its platform to inform credit decisions and extend financing to merchants whose borrowing needs may not be adequately served by traditional lending processes.
Moniepoint MFB serves more than six million active businesses and, according to the company, powers eight in every 10 in-person payments in Nigeria. The bank processed N412 trillion in transaction value across more than 14 billion transactions in 2025, highlighting the scale of the payment network supporting its business model.
The volume of transactions provides a substantial pool of potential indicators of business activity, including payment frequency and transaction patterns. However, the effectiveness of this approach ultimately depends on how accurately those indicators predict repayment capacity and how responsibly the resulting loans are priced and managed.
The bank’s performance also highlights the growing convergence of payments and credit in Nigeria’s financial services market, where digital platforms can use their relationships with merchants to offer services beyond processing transactions.
Moniepoint’s latest recognition at the 14th BusinessDay Banks and Other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards reflects its position in the SME financing segment. The bank was named SME Microfinance Bank of the Year for the third consecutive year, while Tosin Eniolorunda, co-founder and group chief executive officer of Moniepoint Inc., won SME Finance Transformation Leader of the Year.
Ezekiel Sanni, senior vice-president, Distribution Network Sales at Moniepoint, who represented Eniolorunda at the ceremony, said the recognition reinforced the bank’s commitment to small businesses.
“Small businesses are the backbone of the Nigerian economy, and this award strengthens our commitment to give them the credit, payments and tools they need to scale,” Sanni said.
He added that the company would continue expanding access to credit and investing in the network serving businesses across the country.
The bank’s focus on alternative data offers one potential response to the information gaps that can make it difficult for lenders to assess smaller businesses. Yet expanding credit access at scale also requires effective risk management, transparent lending terms and repayment structures that reflect the cash-flow realities of small enterprises.
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For Moniepoint, the challenge will be to translate its extensive payments reach into sustainable lending growth while ensuring that businesses can use credit to expand without becoming overburdened by repayment obligations.
The company’s reported lending and transaction figures suggest that it has built significant distribution capacity. Whether that scale can translate into broader, lasting improvements in SME access to finance will depend on the affordability of its loans, the quality of its credit assessments and the ability of borrowers to sustain growth beyond the initial financing period.
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Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.
