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backMy first memory of a bank's closing time was in my first year of university. As an undergraduate, I was expected to take charge of my life and set up a bank account, so I tried to do that. I arrived at the bank at 4:01 p.m., only to be turned away by a security guard because the bank was closed.
But that was a different time, a time when payments weren’t as instant, when you'd make a deposit and beg the teller to post it immediately so the person on the other end didn't have to wait until the following day, a time when your money was only truly accessible between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. on a weekday (tough times).
Then things shifted.
Digital banks disrupted the logic of banking hours. You could create an account at 2 a.m., make a transfer at 4 a.m., file a complaint at 5 a.m., and have a resolution before your morning coffee at 8 a.m.
To understand what that actually means, what it takes, who it requires, and everything that goes into ensuring banks like Moniepoint are always working for you, I sat down with Emeka, the SVP of customer support tools, one of the people responsible for keeping Moniepoint running at all hours, to talk through the systems and tools he and his team have built and put in place to ensure Moniepoint never stops working.
How Emeka and his team go the extra mile
It’s 4:01 p.m., and Moniepoint is in the middle of a busy stretch. The volume of human need arriving through our support channels at this hour is significant, and somewhere behind all of it is Emeka watching all of this closely.
Emeka is the SVP of customer support tools, but his team's actual work is closer to product building. They built MonieDesk, the support platform that’s both a customer-facing self-service experience and a tool that allows internal teams to resolve issues seamlessly.
MonieDesk splits support into two parts: customer communication handled by the support team, and problem-solving handled by the team that owns the service or built the function responsible for the problem; the owning team. This distinction matters more than it might initially seem. In most support systems, the person who picks up the complaint is also the person expected to resolve it, which sounds efficient until you realise that customer support agents are trained in communication, not in the specific technical or operational knowledge required to fix every problem a customer might face.
Emeka believes in a simple fix: whoever owns the problem must solve it.
This sounds obvious, but in practice, it’s one of the hardest things to get right inside any large organisation, and inside a bank that serves millions of customers across every state in Nigeria, getting it wrong is immediately and visibly felt.
Take a failed transaction flagged at 1 a.m.; in most support systems, the agent who picks up that complaint has to become a detective, chasing people, guessing at which internal team might know what went wrong, while the customer waits.
Under MonieDesk, that same issue is routed straight to the team that owns the transaction process, the people who can actually see why it failed and fix it, while the support agent keeps the customer updated.
"MonieDesk is what separates the acknowledgement of a problem from the actual resolution of it," Emeka explains.
It’s a subtle shift with significant consequences: recurring problems get fixed at the root rather than managed at the surface.
What makes all of this possible is a decision Emeka's team made that most organisations would consider unusually ambitious: they moved away from an external support platform and built one solely for Moniepoint’s growing demands. The specific ways the bank needed to categorise issues, build workflows, and integrate its support infrastructure with its internal systems had exceeded what an external platform was designed to accommodate.
So his team built one for the bank’s growing needs. Each process was built exactly the way our problems required it to be built.
"When you own the integration," Emeka says, "you can build for your exact use case."
A resolution that takes three hours instead of six might be a fair enough wait time for some businesses, but in ours, three hours can be the difference between a small business owner paying for a restock and another apologising to customers for unforeseen delays they can’t explain. Emeka’s team is buying back the hours businesses can’t afford to lose.
Maybe somewhere right now, someone is trying to send money. They opened their Moniepoint app, entered an amount and pressed send; the transaction began its journey, and a few seconds later, the money arrived. The customer probably didn't think much about it, and that, it turns out, is the whole point of going the extra mile; nobody notices or sends you a certificate for walking it. You do your job well enough so no one ever does.
Looking to go the extra mile? Start HERE.
