Moniepoint co-founder and Group CEO Tosin Eniolorunda has argued that African businesses are leaving a huge growth opportunity untapped by continuing to design products and services around formal economy customers while ignoring the vast informal sector that drives the majority of economic activity across the continent.
Eniolorunda made the remarks at the Lagos Business School Breakfast Club last week, where he spoke on the theme “Building for the Bottom of the Pyramid”.
He drew lessons from Moniepoint’s decade-long experience serving small businesses and traders that traditional financial systems have largely overlooked.
What Eniolorunda is saying
The Moniepoint CEO said the companies that will create the most value over the next decade will not be those chasing the most visible or well-documented customers.
- “The companies that will create the most value over the next decade will not necessarily be those building for the most visible customers. They will be those willing to understand and design for markets that have historically been overlooked. In many cases, what appears to be a constraint is simply an invitation to build differently,” he said.
He challenged the common assumption that informal markets are hard to serve because they lack data, arguing instead that the real problem is that existing systems were never built with those customers in mind.
- “Most businesses are designed around the visible economy. They serve customers with formal identities, formal records, formal addresses, and predictable financial histories. Yet a significant share of economic activity happens outside those structures,” he said.
- He argued that traders, artisans, transport operators and small business owners generate rich economic signals every day, but that big originations are the ones that have lacked the tools and willingness to capture and interpret those signals.
- “The problem is not the absence of economic activity. It is our inability to capture, interpret, and serve it effectively,” he said.
Eniolorunda said what many see as a limitation in serving informal markets is better understood as an invitation to build differently, and that organisations willing to do so will be well positioned to shape the future of African commerce.
- “The bottom of the pyramid is often discussed as a development challenge. Increasingly, I believe it should be viewed as a business opportunity. The scale is significant, the need is real,” he said.
More insights
Eniolorunda noted that when businesses spend enough time close to informal operators, they discover that these businesses generate rich signals every day, challenging the narrative that the informal economy is too opaque or undocumented to serve profitably.
The Moniepoint CEO said the companies that earn trust at the bottom of the pyramid will be the ones to take control of the future of African commerce, framing informal market penetration not as charity or inclusion work but as a core commercial strategy.
- “The organisations that earn trust at that level will be well positioned to shape the future of African commerce,” he said.
What you should know
Earlier this month, Nairametrics reported that Tosin Eniolorunda, said the next phase of growth in Nigeria’s payments ecosystem will be driven by building credit products directly on top of existing payment infrastructure.
He noted that transaction data can be leveraged to expand access to financing for millions of small businesses that have long been excluded from formal credit systems.
He explained that payment infrastructure has already established a foundation of visibility and trust through digital transactions, adding that the next step is to use that foundation to address long-standing credit gaps limiting small business growth in Nigeria.