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backA week and a half ago, Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, and almost immediately, the internet did what it does best, walking you through everything that happened in football, culture, and life between then and now. And the point isn’t really about Arsenal if you give it a deeper look. It’s about time, and what time does to the world around us.
We thought we’d borrow that energy, pun intended, because a lot has happened since we disbursed our first working capital loan to a Nigerian business in 2023. The O2 Arena in London, one of the world’s most iconic venues, holds 20,000 people per show. Imagine five, six, or seven of those arenas, packed full, every seat taken, every person present; that’s a fair picture of the concurrently active business loans with Moniepoint today.
But it started with a supermarket chain on April 3, 2023, at 2:39 PM, the very first business loan we ever gave out (Arsenal were top of the Premier League that very week, chasing a title that would take them three more years to finally win). And since then, many more businesses have used our facilities to grow.
Here are a few we often look back at.
Oluremilekun, the hotelier who doubled her rooms
Oluremilekun runs Glasshouse, a hospitality business. She spares no expense or effort to ensure the quality and timely offering of services for her clients. She started with just 18 rooms and grew little by little. At some point, she needed to fund renovation projects for multiple rooms. “I’m always afraid of loans and the stress involved,” she confesses. However, she could not ignore the need to renovate 13 rooms. Oluremilekun was a bit sceptical about getting a loan, but she was motivated by the Moniepoint process. “It wasn’t so difficult. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.”
Around the time Oluremilekun got a Moniepoint loan to expand a legacy business, the Paris Olympics were lighting up screens worldwide. Nations were competing, records were falling, and the world was watching what was possible when you gave people the right conditions and got out of their way.
The loan facilitated the project’s progress. It made the renovation project successful and enabled her to expand Glasshouse into a chain of hotels.
Chef Stone, the man who parked his truck and built a park
When Chef Stone was planning the Lagos expansion for Truck Central, he was staring down the kind of decision that tests entrepreneurs: how do you grow one location without starving the one that’s already working?
Around the same time, Kendrick Lamar was headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, a reminder that the people who build patiently and persistently are the ones who eventually get their moment on the biggest stage.
He had built West Africa’s first food truck park in Abuja from nothing but one truck, then three, then a sitting area, then a full park with more than twenty vendors. But Lagos required capital, and he didn’t want to pull from Abuja. Moniepoint’s working capital loan solved that equation cleanly, keeping Abuja whole while Lagos launched.
Emeka, the oil and gas operator who built five stations from scratch
When Emeka stepped into Nigeria’s downstream oil and gas sector a decade ago, a truckload of petrol cost around ₦2.4 million. He started with one station, relying on supplier credit because there was no other way in. But the real builders know that supplier credit has a ceiling, and ambition usually doesn’t.
His Moniepoint loan came in late 2025, the same year Nigeria’s downstream sector was being reshaped by deregulation and the arrival of private refineries. With fresh capital in a changing market, Emeka now runs five Urbanwell Oil and Gas stations.
Bringing Joseph’s business back from the edge
When Joseph took his first Moniepoint loan, the first iPhone with a USB-C port had just shipped. And somewhere in Nigeria, a man who had been robbed one too many times sat inside his locked store for two days and wondered if it was over. It wasn’t.
Joseph had built his provision business from scratch, taking over from his father after university. But repeated robberies had drained not just his cash. He needed capital to restock and, more than that, he needed a reason to believe the business was still worth fighting for. The loan gave him both. Joseph restocked, reopened, and kept going. He is still going today.
In the 38 months since we gave out our first business loan, humans flew around the far side of the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The Grammy Awards created an entirely new category just to contain what Nigerian artists were doing to global music. ChatGPT went from a curious four-month-old chatbot to the fastest-growing consumer application in human history, used by over half a billion people every week. Nigeria became the engine room of African fintech, home to 28% of the continent’s fintech companies. Today, Moniepoint serves 20 million businesses and individuals. We have published two Informal Economy Reports, the most detailed look anyone has taken at Nigeria’s shadow economy, and launched the second cohort of DreamDevs and the fifth cohort of Women in Tech to build Africa’s next generation of tech talent.
Most importantly, tens of thousands of loans later, we are still in the business of creating financial happiness for African businesses, quite literally. It does give day one new meaning.
If you’re always on the lookout for more numbers and stories, you'd like moniepoint.com/blog or casestudies.moniepoint.com.
Till next time,
Keep your dreams alive.
