How do you find a career path?

Some people stumble onto it. Others spend years trying things on for size, hoping something fits. For many, it’s a mix of doubt, guesswork and hoping that one day it’ll all make sense. But, every once in a while, you meet someone who found a trail early and stayed the course.

Chidinma found her path on the Nigerian Stock Exchange trading floor at the age of nine. It was meant to be a quick visit, a child tagging along with her mother to see a relative, but the trading floor piqued Chidinma’s curiosity. She didn’t understand the red jackets and flashing screens, but she knew she wanted to. And that was how it all began.

Today, Chidinma works in Mergers & Acquisitions and Investor Relations at Moniepoint. But long before she joined us, she was already building her career around the ideas that shape how we work here: the 4Ms. Coincidence? Maybe. Alignment? Definitely. Let me show you what I mean.

Before we head in, the 4Ms are our approach to ensuring everyone who works at Moniepoint has a reason to show up every day. They are meaning, mastery, membership and money. You can read more about them here.

Finding Meaning

At Moniepoint, we believe that, beyond executing tasks, work should be driven by a deeper meaning. We’ve found our meaning in creating financial happiness for the 10 million people and businesses our solutions serve. Even before joining us, Chidinma found meaning in a similar path. 

After visiting the trading floor, Chidinma started consuming every finance-related thing she could get her hands on.  “My dad used to buy the daily newspapers, and I remember there was a middle-page spread in some of them that covered the economy and the market. I used to read those, and when he got back from work, we’d discuss them.”

It wasn’t just newspapers; there were books and articles too. By 16, Chidinma was learning by doing, saving and investing her pocket money in money market funds and other low-risk opportunities. So, when it was time to choose what to study in university, Finance was a no-brainer.

Studying Finance moved Chidinma even further along her path, but something was missing. Most of the teaching focused on corporate finance and managing company cash flows, with little to no guidance on managing personal finances. Imagine knowing how to prepare an annual budget for a company but not how to invest with your monthly salary. Chidinma wasn’t in that boat, but most of her peers were.

“By our third or fourth year, many of my friends started coming to me for help with managing their finances—budgeting, savings, investments. When we graduated, I started thinking of creating a single channel to reach everyone. And that’s how FinLitAfrica started.”

What began as an Instagram page to reach her friends steadily grew as more people found real value in the content. As she speaks, I pay a quick visit to the FinLitAfrica page. FinLit is short for Financial Literacy. It’s a fitting name. The content breaks down complex topics into bite-sized pieces. The language is simple. The content feels relatable. 

“Finance is made to seem very complex, but it’s not. I started FinLitAfrica to make it easy to understand for [young] people like me.”

That is Chidinma’s meaning: making finance accessible to everyone. It’s the same meaning that drives her work at Moniepoint today. In Mergers & Acquisitions and Investor Relations, Chidinma identifies and evaluates opportunities that strengthen the business, while ensuring investors and partners understand the value of what we’re building. She helps shape the way our business scales, so that our growth aligns with our meaning: creating financial happiness for every African, everywhere.

Building Mastery

For us, mastery means knowing your onions. And not just that spring onions and leeks are different, but also how they grow, what makes them thrive and, very important to Chidinma’s world of Mergers & Acquisitions, how to spot bad ones before they spoil the bunch.

FinLitAfrica was Chidinma’s gateway to building mastery. Starting it early showed a resourcefulness that opened a door to the venture capital industry, where she honed her lens on markets, money, and the mechanics of scale. This was a solid foundation for her current role in Mergers & Acquisitions and Investor Relations, where she helps Moniepoint make smart decisions about where money goes and how it grows.

“On the M&A side, my job is to find companies we can acquire in the markets we’ve targeted for growth and carry out due diligence to make sure everything checks out, all the way through to post-merger integration. On the Investor Relations side, we act as the bridge between the company and our investors, preparing regular reports and giving them the data and context they need to make informed decisions.”

Chidinma’s work demands fluency in money and value, the skill to understand and to explain. This fluency is why she can move seamlessly between complex deal-making in her role at Moniepoint and everyday money conversations through FinLitAfrica. When I ask what it’s like to switch between both extremes, she lets me in on a little secret: money is money. The scale might be different, but it moves how it moves, and some principles can be applied whether you’re in a boardroom or in front of a personal budget. Chidinma gives me some examples:

• Start with a clear goal. Whether it’s personal finance or corporate investment, begin with a clear ‘why’. What outcome is this decision meant to drive?

• Do your due diligence. Always. Research deeply before you make a move, big or small.

• Be disciplined. You don’t rise to the level of big moves in one go; you build up to it. Small, consistent actions build the clarity and confidence to handle complex transactions.

Claiming Membership

Teams win when everyone plays their part. In football, for example, a striker can only score when the midfield creates opportunities. We operate with this same sports-like mentality at Moniepoint. Membership, for us, is about knowing you’re a part of something bigger and playing your part to help the team move forward. 

Chidinma is no stranger to this idea. She’s always believed that finance, even investing private capital, can be a tool for economic development. And her career path has been shaped by the desire to play her part in driving financial inclusion.

“I believe finance is a tool for empowerment, and I’m always looking for ways to reflect that in my work. I’m constantly asking how we can use finance to make people’s lives better.”

And she’s found answers to this in her role at Moniepoint, where her work contributes to expanding our reach to new markets and ensuring our partners understand the impact of empowering more people with financial solutions.

“Sometimes an investor comes in and we get to take them to the markets, where they can see the impact of our work in real-time. This is one of my favourite parts of my job because we get to show real stories of how Moniepoint is driving financial inclusion and empowerment. We’re helping people go from surviving to thriving. There are merchants with our POS terminal who, without it, may have never had the opportunity to earn the way they do. Our solutions are helping to expand access.”

Expanding access is the big picture, and Chidinma understands that her work is only a thread in the larger tapestry. That’s why, even with our work-from-anywhere policy, she chooses to come into the office often. 

“I like coming into the office to meet people, learn about different teams and what they do. I love asking questions. The best way to learn about the company and even more about how my role affects things is from people.”

For her, membership means showing up, building relationships, and understanding how other teams move so she can play in sync with the team.

Fun Fact: I first connected with Chidinma at the office when she came in to watch a screening of our recently released case study. There were only about 15 team members in the room, and she was one of them. Membership in action.

Making Money

This M (Money) is quite simple: people should be paid what they’re worth. We’re on a mission to create financial happiness, and fulfilling that mission starts with ensuring that the DreamMakers who power dreams feel valued and supported.

Chidinma has always believed that earning well is essential to financial empowerment. Financial knowledge only becomes powerful when it can be applied, and application requires access and resources.

Today, as part of the Mergers & Acquisitions and investor relations team, she plays a behind-the-scenes role in helping Moniepoint remain financially healthy and future-ready. It’s work that ensures the business can keep growing, weather shifts in the market, and very importantly, continue to pay people what they’re worth. In this way, her path mirrors how we think about money: not just as something to earn, but as a foundation that enables people to live better, dream bigger, and go further. It all ties back to the reason we do what we do: creating financial happiness.

There’s no blueprint to finding a career path. But Chidinma’s story is proof that, when you’re clear on what matters to you, the path has a way of unfolding in pursuit of that clarity. In stories like this, we see that the 4Ms aren’t just theory or ideals on our culture page. They are markers of a career worth having.

Join Chidinma and the 2000+ Dreammakers living the 4Ms every day. Start your journey here.