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backHave you made a transfer today?
Maybe you paid for a delivery, sent money to a friend, or transferred to a POS terminal at your neighbourhood supermarket.
Transactions like this are so seamless that they’ve become commonplace in how we make everyday payments in Nigeria. But have you ever wondered what makes them possible? The network of systems that work together to get your money where it needs to go?
One of the most important parts of this network is the payment switch.
What’s a payment switch?
To understand payment switches, it helps to consider the number of financial institutions and payment providers we have today. Commercial banks, microfinance banks, fintech companies and other providers use different systems to manage and process transactions. These systems vary based on each institution’s needs and the services it offers.
When you send money from one bank to another, the two institutions need a way to exchange transaction instructions so the money can reach the right account.
A payment switch helps make this possible by routing payment instructions between institutions and payment networks, allowing them to process transactions across connected systems.
You might be thinking: why can’t banks just connect directly to each other? They could, but imagine every bank having to build and maintain a connection to every other bank. Each connection would bring its own technical requirements, testing, and maintenance, making them harder to manage as more players inevitably join the financial ecosystem. A payment switch simplifies this process by providing a common route for payments between participating institutions.
How do payment switches work?
Think of it as a dispatch centre for payments. It receives information about where a payment needs to go, directs that instruction through the appropriate connection and helps carry the response back to the institution that initiated it. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
You initiate a payment: You enter the recipient’s account details and the amount you want to send, then press “send”. Your financial institution receives the request and runs initial checks to determine whether it can proceed.
The payment request reaches the switch: If you’re making an interbank transfer, your payment will need to go through a switch. Your financial institution sends the payment instruction to the relevant payment switch. The switch identifies where the request needs to go and routes it to the appropriate institution. For example, if you’re transferring ₦10,000 from your Moniepoint account to an account at another bank, the switch routes the request to the other bank.
The receiving institution checks the request: The receiving institution gets the request and carries out the checks relevant to that payment. This includes checking that the destination account exists and whether the payment can be accepted.
The response travels back through the network: Once the receiving institution has processed the request, it sends a response back through the payment switch, indicating whether the payment has been processed successfully. This is when you see a successful transfer notification, and the recipient gets a credit alert.
Making our switch
In 2015, we began as TeamApt Inc., building technology to help banks deliver seamless digital financial services to their customers. One of our earliest solutions was card switching, which helps route card payments between financial institutions via POS terminals. We built POS terminal applications for Payment Terminal Service Providers (PTSPs) in the country.
In 2019, we built our own payment switch — the Juliana switch — giving financial institutions even more ways to process payments. That same year, we also began deploying switching solutions through our own products: Monnify, our web payment gateway, and Moniepoint, which began as an agency banking solution that helped businesses receive payments into their banks through POS terminals.
Barely 2 years after launch, Moniepoint had become Nigeria's leading agency banking solution, processing up to $7 billion in over 120,000,000 transactions monthly. Monnify also hit a milestone of over $22 million daily in 500,000 transactions. The Juliana switch played a key part in these milestones, processing payments made via Moniepoint POS terminals and Monnify’s payment gateway.
Today, the Juliana switch powers card payments for 16 financial institutions across Nigeria’s financial ecosystem. In 2025, we upgraded it to support interbank account transfers. But why did we need to build our own switch when there are so many in the industry?
What’s the point of our payment switch?
Moniepoint powers the dreams of millions of people and businesses across Nigeria, helping them send and receive millions of payments daily. The core of our promise is creating financial happiness, and delivering on that promise depends in part on making sure our customers can rely on us to move money when they need to.
Every 60 seconds in 2025, we processed about 6,000 transfers. When you’re moving money at that scale, you need to be able to vouch for the systems responsible for getting it where it needs to go. Having our own switch gives us greater control over how payments move between Moniepoint and other financial institutions, and more direct oversight of that part of the payment process.
It also gives our teams better visibility when things go wrong. When a transfer fails or is delayed, understanding where the problem occurred is key to resolving it. Direct visibility into our switching layer helps us investigate issues and resolve them faster.
As we grow, we can also develop our switching capabilities to meet changing needs, giving us more room to make improvements based on what our customers need and what we learn from operating our services at scale.
If you’d like to create solutions that power dreams for millions of people and businesses, there’s space for you on the Dream Team. Check out our open roles to see where you fit in.
