Moniepoint Makes Tricky First Foray Beyond Payments With Moniebook

Moniepoint, the Lagos-born fintech that reached unicorn status last year after a major funding round, is making its first foray beyond pure payments, where it’s seen much success, into an arena that seems both tricky and valuable.

The company has rolled out Moniebook, a combined point-of-sale and bookkeeping product aimed at small and medium businesses across Nigeria. The company frames Moniebook as a single place for payments, inventory, staff management and sales reporting, sold as a subscription alongside Moniepoint’s existing terminals.

The new product follows the firm’s wider push into adjacent services, most recently a diaspora remittance product called MonieWorld earlier this year.

Moniepoint closed a headline-making Series C that put it in unicorn territory, and it processes billions of transactions through its network. That reach gives Moniepoint a distribution advantage most pure-play bookkeeping startups lack. Moniepoint says Moniebook was tested in beta by more than 4,000 businesses and that NGN 19 B (~USD 13 M) in transaction value moved through the system during that phase. The product comes in two subscription tiers: Core at NGN 6 K (USD 4.15) per month and Pro at NGN 8.5 K (USD 5.88) per month, with add-ons for extra registers and implementation support.

Babatunde Olofin, managing director of Moniepoint MFB, says the product is “engineered to be a growth partner for businesses” and promises “full visibility over sales, staff, customers, and inventory in real time.” Oluwole Adebiyi, head of product for Moniebook, stresses that the tool was built with “the realities of Nigerian business owners in mind.” Those direct lines from the company reinforce that Moniepoint is selling a practical fix for everyday pain points many merchants still juggle manually.

Still, this is hardly a guaranteed win. While it’s fair to say that everything Moniepoint has touched has turned to gold thus far, this new move comes with peculiar challenges.

Bookkeeping has proven a harder product to monetise than payments. Nigerian startups that leaned heavily on bookkeeping features have run into trouble converting users into paying customers or scaling beyond early adopters. Kippa, once a high-profile bookkeeping app backed by international investors, pivoted away from core bookkeeping ambitions after operational struggles. It signals that building bookkeeping into a durable, revenue-generating business is difficult in Nigeria even with a strong product story.

Moniepoint has advantages that other bookkeeping players that faltered may have lacked, as it already controls the payment rails and has on-the-ground relationships with merchants through its terminal business. Its funding and investor backing give it more runway to subsidise hardware, push sales, and bundle services. The pitch of a single vendor managing both payments and books could be appealing to merchants if the experience is reliable and if the subscription price proves affordable relative to the value delivered.

Moniepoint’s move is sensible in the context of its recent expansion strategy. The company has pushed into remittances and other adjacent services in quick succession, and its investor backing gives it room to iterate. Whether Moniebook becomes a profitable, standalone revenue stream or primarily a merchant-acquisition loss leader will say a lot about where Moniepoint wants to position itself in the next phase of growth.

For now, Moniepoint is wagering that combining its payments footprint with genuinely useful business software will be enough to clear the bar that felled others.