Moniepoint Moves $300 Billion a Year — and Wall Street Missed It

Moniepoint processes more than $300 billion a year for over 6 million Nigerian businesses — 39% of Nigeria's digital payments volume and 8 out of every 10 in-person payments. You have probably never heard of its founder, Tosin Eniolorunda. By Nnamdi Okike's account, you should have.

Okike, co-founder and managing partner of 645 Ventures, argues in a Crunchbase News essay that the next generation of super apps is being built far from the markets American investors watch. Moniepoint, Sea Limited, Grab, Kaspi, Yassir and Nubank are worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, following the trail Tencent, Alibaba and MercadoLibre blazed.

"These are companies most Americans have never heard of, despite them being worth several tens or hundreds of billions," Okike writes.

Why no super app in the U.S.?

The idea never took hold in the United States for one reason, in Okike's framing: trust is cheap there. With 96% of U.S. households already banked, per the FDIC's 2023 survey, a specialist app inherits the credibility of the financial system. Where trust is cheap, there is no need for a super app.

In emerging markets, trust is the whole problem. Okike identifies four conditions that tend to precede a super app:

• High mobile penetration, which makes distribution cheap
• Weak incumbent competition
• Poor existing financial services
• A financial crisis severe enough to strip incumbents of legitimacy

"These populations are not merely underbanked," Okike writes. "They were harmed, and the institutions that harmed them still hold the market."

What did the crises create?

The pattern repeats across markets. Brazil froze roughly 80% of bank deposits and financial investments for 18 months in 1990 to break hyperinflation. The consolidation that followed left five banks holding about 80% of banking assets and charging card rates north of 300% — the void Nubank was born into.

Kazakhstan went through it twice: savings erased by inflation in the thousands of percent when the ruble zone collapsed in 1993, then a 2007–09 banking crisis in which BTA, the country's largest bank with roughly a quarter of system assets, was nationalized and defaulted amid allegations of multibillion-dollar fraud. Kaspi grew into that void.

In Southeast Asia's 1997 crisis, Indonesia closed 16 banks in a single announcement, the rupiah lost about 85% of its value and output fell 13%. Two decades later, roughly half of Indonesian adults still had no bank account — the gap Sea built Shopee and SeaMoney into.

Are these markets too small?

Kaspi answers the objection Okike hears most from American investors — that these markets can't produce large exits. Kazakhstan has only 20 million people, yet around 14 million of them, nearly 70% of the population, use Kaspi. The average user transacts roughly 77 times a month. The company earns $9 billion of revenue at 56% EBITDA margins, with an enterprise value over $17 billion. Depth of spend, not population, sets the ceiling.

Nubank makes the same point against Chime. Nubank has 127 million customers to Chime's 9.5 million — 14x — about 7x the revenue and a market capitalization more than 6x larger. It has also brought over 31 million previously unbanked Brazilians into the financial system.

"A technology applied in an overlooked market with a large unaddressed pain point can build a bigger and more defensible company than the same technology applied in a rich one," Okike writes.

Where's the next Moniepoint?

Screening for the four conditions, Okike flags four markets:

• Bangladesh: Five banks looted from the inside for years before the 2024 change in government exposed them; the government now must pay 7.5 million savers whose money is gone.
• Egypt: Repeated devaluations of the pound between 2016 and 2024, shrinking savings held at state-owned banks.
• Vietnam: Savers pulled 80% of deposits out of one major bank in 2022 after its owner was arrested in a $24 billion fraud.
• Pakistan: A near-default and 38% inflation in 2023, followed by government-built rails and a national ID that makes onboarding nearly costless.

One boundary condition applies. The crisis must be severe enough to delegitimize incumbents but contained enough that the currency and payment rails still work.

What does this change for investors?

The payoff precedent is concrete. In 2001, South Africa's Naspers paid roughly $34 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent — a stake later worth more than $100 billion and one of the best tech investments ever made. Sequoia Capital's stake from Nubank's $2 million seed round, plus its lead Series A, was worth $7 billion at the company's IPO.

The second generation of super apps is scaling now. Okike bets the third will be built on stablecoins and AI, in Abidjan, Buenos Aires, Karachi and Lagos, by founders like Eniolorunda — meaning the largest returns of the coming decade may sit in markets most U.S. capital has already screened out.

Disclosure from the source: Okike owns shares in Kaspi, Sea Limited and Nubank; none are 645 Ventures portfolio companies.