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backIn September 2026, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery went public in what became Africa’s largest Initial Public Offering, with a valuation of about $50 billion.
For most people, buying shares in the IPO means going through a bank, a stockbroker, or an investment app. At Moniepoint, we asked a different question: what if someone could buy shares from the same POS terminal they use every day to make payments?
That question led to one of the more unusual things we’ve built.
An IPO for the people
If you’ve spent any time on Nigerian X, LinkedIn or WhatsApp recently, you’ve probably heard someone talking about the Dangote Refinery IPO. People are discussing how many shares they can buy, how much they need to invest and whether they should participate at all.
It’s hard to remember the last time a public offering generated this much everyday conversation. One comparison is the banking consolidation period of the mid-2000s, when Nigerians rushed to participate in bank public offerings. I was in primary school then, wearing an oversized uniform and knowing absolutely nothing about capital markets. Moniepoint did not exist. Smartphones were still a novelty, and accessing the internet meant paying by the hour at a cybercafé.
Taking part in an IPO was also very different.
People went to banking halls to submit their applications. Queues could stretch outside the building and into the street. Investors filled out physical forms, submitted cash and collected paper prospectuses. Then they waited for banks and stockbrokers to process the paperwork.
So much has changed since then.
The ambition with Dangote Refinery IPO was to let everyday Nigerians participate in the offering sans the queues and less paperwork. But reaching people beyond the traditional investment market required meeting people where they already were.
For Moniepoint, that meant our POS terminals.
“I’ll do you one better”
The Dangote IPO would be available to the public through the Moniepoint mobile app. That was a fact, even if it hadn't taken shape at the beginning.
But during a conversation about how the experience would work, Dennis, our CEO at TeamApt, had another idea. “I’ll do you one better,” he said. Instead of only putting the IPO on the mobile app, we’ll put it on the POS as well.
A normal capital market subscription involves identity checks, documentation, account information and several processes between the investor, broker and clearing system. We needed to take that process and create a customer experience that could happen on a small terminal operated by a merchant with customers always around the corner. The POS would not hold or trade the shares itself. It would become the customer-facing entry point to the subscription process. Behind the scenes, Moniepoint would connect that experience to the regulated capital market infrastructure through our partner broker and NGX.
A customer could therefore walk up to a Moniepoint merchant, complete the required identity checks, select the number of shares they wanted and submit their subscription. The transaction would move through the connected capital market systems, while the terminal returned the relevant details to the customer and printed a record of the transaction.
No POS terminal had ever been used to distribute primary equities this way.
“When I first brought it up, I hadn’t even fully worked out the technical design,” Dennis says. “What I knew was that it was possible. More importantly, it was a historic chance to democratise wealth creation, taking a process that had always stopped at the upper tiers of society and pushing it all the way to the bottom of the pyramid.”
Before this, in March 2026, Dennis and the team were working on an internal project called Go Subscribe. They were building a proof of concept for recurring payments and direct debits on POS terminals.
We built on that foundation for the IPO on the POS.
Engineering a public offer
The first step was turning the idea into something the team could build, and for that, I spoke with David, Product Lead for our Value Added Services team, who worked alongside Khalil, Habeeb, and Barakat.
For the product and engineering team, the challenge was clear. They had to meet regulatory requirements without making the experience so complicated that nobody wanted to use it. They started with one question: how do you take a process that could take days and make it simple enough to complete on a merchant’s counter?
A POS terminal leaves little room for complexity. You cannot expect someone to spend several minutes typing an email address, home address, or other personal details into a physical keypad while customers wait behind them. The team therefore started with a basic question: what is the minimum information legally required to create an investor profile? Answering that question became the focus of the next five months.
The team worked through regulatory changes, security requirements and several technical and UX redesigns before we had a system ready for launch.
From NIN to BVN
Our original onboarding flow was built around National Identification Number (NIN), validation. David’s team worked with Moniepoint’s internal identity teams to build APIs that could retrieve KYC information from NIN records.
Then the requirements changed. During architecture reviews with the NGX and the issuing houses, the team learned that BVN was the mandatory identifier for capital market clearing. The team had to change direction. They put the NIN pipeline aside and rebuilt the onboarding flow around BVN.
But there was another issue. Under the traditional stockbroking process, a new investor could wait days for their brokerage firm to process their information and assign the relevant Central Securities Clearing System number and Clearing House Number. That would not work on a POS terminal.
Once the transaction was approved, the terminal could generate the investor’s clearing details and print them on the receipt. The receipt was no longer just proof of a payment. It became the customer’s immediate record of the transaction.
By late May, the team had completed an initial integration with a partner broker and moved into testing. The IPO timeline later shifted from June to September, giving the team more time to refine the system.
Then, two weeks before launch, the requirements changed again. Stakeholders across the participating institutions met to discuss how to make the process easier for more people to use. The Dangote team and NGX agreed to remove additional fields from the subscription flow.
For the product team, that meant another round of changes. Backend, POS and mobile engineers had to remove the fields from the customer journey, update the API payloads and check the resulting data structures. They had 24 hours to do so.
The security audit
Before our system could connect directly to the exchange, we had to pass a mandatory Vulnerability and Penetration Testing audit conducted by an international audit firm.
Usually, external security testing involves rounds of reports, fixes, and retesting. The team wanted to do it differently because we were running out of time. We arranged for the auditors to conduct an intensive session with the engineering team on standby. Backend, QA and mobile engineers stayed available while the auditor tested the staging environment from the office. When the audit identified minor vulnerabilities, the engineers fixed them while the testing was still happening. By the end of the day, around 7 p.m., we wrapped up testing and waited for the report. We got the report two days later, and it said we were in the green.
Then seventy-two hours before launch, the team found an issue during production dry runs. The system had been designed to prevent identity fraud by comparing the customer’s BVN with the BVN returned when checking their dividend bank account. The problem was that live bank responses did not return the full BVN. They returned a masked version showing only four digits.
That created a problem because different BVNs can share the same visible digits. We needed another way to confirm that the person subscribing was also the person associated with the account. Our team worked through the night to replace the BVN string-matching logic with a name-matching system.
Instead of comparing the full BVN, the new system compared the account holder’s first and last names with the information attached to the BVN. The team tested the change, got it approved and deployed it to production 48 hours before launch.
The POS IPO
With the BVN patch deployed and testing complete, the team set up a final dry run with the NGX and partners on Sunday night, hours before the offer opened. A test product was published to verify end-to-end routing, and everything passed cleanly. The offer was scheduled to go live at 8:00 AM on Monday, September 14.
By 7:55 AM, the team were already on a group call, setting up the products across Moniepoint's mobile app and POS terminals. At 8:30 AM, we ran a test transaction to confirm the production purchase flow. When the team checked the transaction table, we saw that 15 people had already bought shares before us in the minutes before any public announcement went out.
The immediate task shifted to monitoring. An exceptional project required exceptional work modes, so the team worked 16-hour days through the first week, reviewing logs and resolving minor user experience issues as updates rolled out to terminals nationwide.
During launch week, the President/Chief Executive of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery travelled to Kano for an official IPO roadshow, where the team had planned a live demonstration of the new experience. A Moniepoint POS terminal would process a real share purchase in front of corporate executives and government officials.
On stage in Kano, our Regional Manager for the North West opened the investment feature on the terminal, entered the number of shares and completed the transaction. The system sent the request and began processing it. Then the transaction went through, and the terminal printed the receipt, complete with the investor’s newly generated CSCS number.
He held up the slip as the entire room applauded.
For the longest time, Moniepoint POS terminals have been used by Nigerians everywhere to process payments worth 100 million annually. Beyond payments, our terminals are widening pension coverage and bringing millions of Nigerians in the informal sector into the retirement savings net. Today, Nigerians can also buy into historic initial public offerings on them.
Whether it's pensions or investments, our mission is the same: financial happiness for Africans.
Disclaimer: Moniepoint is simply the channel you use to subscribe to the IPO. We don’t provide investment advice or guarantee returns, and any gains or losses remain with the investor.
