At Moniepoint, billions of naira move quietly across digital rails every day. Businesses collect payments, customers use their cards, and terminals beep approvingly. Behind each transaction lies a deeply engineered and maintained entity called Monnify, our payment gateway built to help businesses accept and make payments reliably and seamlessly every time. 

Behind Monnify is Damilare: calm, methodical, and eight years into a journey that began with writing code but has evolved into running an entire product.

This is the story of the product that quietly powers billions in revenue. And the person who’s kept it stable, scalable, and surprisingly human.

From first line of code to first billion

Damilare’s journey to Monnify began in the Computer Science department at Covenant University, where he graduated with a first-class and the kind of ambition that doesn’t shout. He wanted to build something of his own someday. Entrepreneurship was in the air at Covenant University, with several alumni members, such as Yomi Adedeji of Softcom (behind Eyowo), speaking to the students. Damilare was paying attention, dreaming of being in that position someday, and coming back to tell his story. 

So, when the opportunity to join Moniepoint (then Teamapt) arose after learning about the company from a friend, it was a perfect alignment to witness firsthand how a business is built from the ground up.

A software engineer at heart, he began building in 2016, after returning to the company following his stint at the National Youth Service Corps. His first major project was Olympos, a POS business backend automation platform used by top financial institutions in Nigeria. He also worked on ALM, another backend automation project used by a top bank in Nigeria.

By 2019, he stepped into managing the implementation of internet banking applications for a commercial bank. Four months, he says, that changed everything. He transitioned from writing backend logic to being the face of the product, explaining trade-offs, handling customer escalations, and absorbing feedback in real-time. That experience stripped him of his conservative nature, marking the beginning of his career in product management. He would formally take on a product management role at scale later that year with Monnify. 

Then, in mid-2019, he was handed something new. Unpolished. Undefined. Full of potential. That product was Monnify. The payment gateway that, five years later, processes billions of dollars daily and has grossed approximately $ 5 million in annual revenue.

The birthday launch of 2019

Conventionally, every transaction tells a simple story: payment made, payment received. However, behind that simplicity lies a complex web of banks, APIs, compliance checks, edge cases, and technical dependencies. Monnify abstracts all that away, so merchants can simply get paid.

Damilare joined Monnify just weeks before its launch, building on the foundation laid by a brilliant and visionary early team: Tobi, Chidum, Solomon, Paschal, Olamide, and Neme. Their early work, along with contributions from many others, continues to shape the product he now leads.

Monnify went live in the early hours of July 3rd, 2019, just a few hours after Damilare’s birthday on July 2nd. The timing felt poetic. A new product, a new chapter, a personal milestone folded into a professional one.

But if the launch was quiet, the impact that followed was anything but.

Monnify was the first to launch a virtual accounts product. We made it real, clean, and scalable, and today, that technology is widely used by many financial technology companies.

That same year, with the announcement of PiggyFlex and Stash, nearly 100,000 virtual accounts were claimed in just a few hours. For most people, it looked like another fintech milestone. But on the backend, it was the kind of controlled chaos that tested everything Damilare and the team had built: server capacity, system logic, database structure, error handling, and customer support response time. 

2019 forever changed the way Nigerians paid online, and how people thought about "Pay via Bank Transfer".

Today, Damilare tells me, over 70% of online payments are made using virtual accounts.  A former experiment is now infrastructure.

Monnify and Damilare in the 2020s

The dawn of the 2020s arrived with fresh promise and new challenges.

For Monnify, the stakes grew higher; from a fledgling product to critical payment infrastructure powering millions of transactions, it had to keep running through sudden shocks and shifting partnerships.

One of its defining moments came in February 2021, just after Damilare returned from a retreat.

A key bank partner suddenly pulled out of Monnify’s virtual account services. Within a day, transactions plummeted from over 100,000 to zero. While many might have stepped back, the team faced the heat head-on, and within days, they built backup integrations, restored the product, and resumed payments faster than anyone had expected. For Damilare, he became immersed in every facet of Monnify’s product journey. He led the requirement gathering process through direct customer engagement, research, and collaboration with sales and management teams, ensuring that the product roadmap remained tightly aligned with real-world use cases.

Product, people and the pulse of Monnify

Building something invisible yet effective takes a team, and Damilare sits at the centre of the Monnify team. He currently defines the product strategy and leads its execution through cross-functional interactions with sales, engineering, product, finance, and operations teams. Sometimes he's on a particular team's standup; other times, it's a session with a customer, third-party service providers, the sales team, or a problem that's been referred from support. In those meetings, he's doing one of four things: discovering user needs, solving problems, getting or sharing updates.

Sales is where the product listens

Damilare works as efficiently as the payment gateway he leads, waking up every morning and checking his numbers before 8 A.M. If you have a product manager friend, you know they love their numbers and for good reason. These metrics serve as vital signs, helping you track your progress and make course corrections on the road to your destination. Numbers, like Shakira’s favourite feature, don’t lie.

And who better to share numbers with than a salesman?

Damilare’s favourite salesman is Ifeanyi, our SVP of Enterprise Sales and Partnerships. He speaks with Ifeanyi almost every single day. You know that kind of work dynamic. Unofficial escalation partner. Soft accountability check. Cultural shorthand for “we’re in this together.”

With sales, it’s target vs reality. What did we agree on? What’s standing in the way? Which merchant requests are coming in hot? How do we respond quickly, yet effectively? Product ideas often originate from a sales call, a complaint, or a pattern repeated across merchant types.

Monnify’s diverse client base spans multiple key industries driving Nigeria’s digital economy, including retail and e-commerce, fintech, renewable energy, logistics and transportation, and travel and tourism, as well as FMCGs. Each of these industries has unique payment needs, ranging from handling large volumes and microtransactions to facilitating complex integrations and cross-border transactions. 

Engineering is where the product takes shape

Once there is clarity on the numbers, Damilare takes the conversation to product and engineering, which also encompasses design. 

When he meets with the product and engineering teams, the focus is on translating requirements into actionable solutions. Together, they explore what can be done and carefully consider any constraints that might affect the solution.

These constraints are not only technical but also encompass compliance requirements, system performance, and financial implications. Every angle is examined to understand the full implications. This thorough approach ensures that any proposed solution not only addresses the immediate problem but also aligns with the broader product strategy and operational capabilities.

The discussions often raise new questions about feasibility, priorities, and potential trade-offs. This is a collaborative process where engineering, design, and product work together to refine ideas and anticipate challenges before anything is built.

Once they reach consensus on the best way forward, the solution is added to the product backlog. From there, it is prioritised and planned into upcoming development sprints. During implementation, there is close collaboration between all teams, with continuous feedback loops to address any issues or necessary adjustments.

This iterative process allows the product to evolve in a way that is both deliberate and responsive, ensuring that what gets built truly meets the needs of merchants and supports the broader business goals.

Finance keeps the product honest

One of his favourite teams is finance, not just for the numbers, but for the truth they reveal. It is the reagent that shows the difference between dashboard metrics and mint metrics. One gets printed, the other gets minted. 

Revenue. Spend. Budget discipline. Strategic decisions depend on visibility, and finance ensures that every decision is viewed through the right lens. Damilare wants to know where we stand, what isn’t going as planned, what we can afford, and where we should make a strategic move. 

It’s not unusual to find Damilare huddled with the finance team during roadmap reviews, mainly when a new integration, product experiment, or pricing change is being discussed. From cost modelling to revenue tracking, from payout structures to pricing frameworks, finance ensures that product decisions not only feel good but also make business sense.

The collaboration is deep. They run margin simulations together. They review usage versus cost to serve. They pull out insights from merchant cohorts. In those moments, strategy sharpens. The product grows up.

Operations delivers the promise

Financial happiness for every African, everywhere. Operations delivers this promise to every business with Monnify.

He described it to me like this: If Monnify were a meal, sales and product research gather the ingredients; raw customer insights, data, and market needs are the raw materials. Product defines the recipe, and Engineering cooks up the solution. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team serves it hot to the table, while operations ensure the entire dining experience is smooth, the meal stays warm, the service is fast, and the customer leaves satisfied.

But serving, in this case, isn’t passive. Operations is the team that ensures Monnify consistently delivers on its promises at scale. This is where uptime becomes sacred. Where SLAs aren’t just contracts, they’re commitments. Where every new feature has an operational implication, and every edge case has a human or system it must fall to.

Damilare’s conversations with the operations team often revolve around onboarding and integration support, SRE and customer support. It’s not just about fixing things when they break. It’s about designing processes so they don’t.

Some of the most valuable feedback loops come from ops. They feel the friction first, whether it’s a merchant confused by setup steps or a support ticket that spikes after a release, the team pays attention. Because if the gateway is quiet, it means ops is doing its job.

Growth, grit and the payments ahead

Today, Monnify processes over ₦50 billion every day. It serves thousands of businesses, powers transactions across sectors, and continues to evolve as the “IT girl” of payment gateways in Nigeria. 

Damilare has grown with Monnify, not just in title, from engineer to strategist, or in influence, from quiet coder to team lead, but also in life. The same years that saw him launch products, lead teams, and make key decisions also saw him become a husband and then a father.

After eight years in Moniepoint, a rare tenure in tech, he told me he doesn’t draw hard lines between work and home. He finds rhythm. Automation buys him time. Delegation keeps him focused. Evenings and weekends are for his family. The rest of the time, he’s fully present, building the product he believes in and the life he’s proud of.

And the truth is, both journeys feed each other. Growth at Monnify is growth within him, in how he sees, thinks, and loves. There’s a clarity that runs through it all.

And as long as merchants need to get paid reliably, simply, and invisibly, he’ll be there, doing what he does best: making sure it all just works.