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backNifemi: Hi Ross! How are you doing?
Ross: Hi Nifemi, great, great, good to be here.
Nifemi: Before we get into the main conversation, Ross, I have some questions for you. Do you have any hot takes on food? If you do, what are they?
Ross: I really like all food, but anything spicy is the best. Second, Nigeria has the world's best prawns.
Nifemi: That's rather interesting. How spicy is spicy, though?
Ross: To be honest, probably like the 50th decile in Nigeria.
Nifemi: What is the most fun thing about working at Moniepoint?
Ross: The most fun thing is definitely the town halls and Slack convos.
Nifemi: Okay, so to my next question, what’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?
Ross: I'm not a spontaneous person, but the most spontaneous thing is when I got dragged into skydiving.
Nifemi: That's really nice.
Ross: It wasn't really at the time.
Nifemi: Really, what happened?
Ross: Well, my friends more or less peer-pressured me into it. I almost fainted, but in the end all is well.
Nifemi: In other words, never again?
Ross: Yes, for sure, never happening again!
Nifemi: Alright, alright. Let's get right into the conversation. Please introduce yourself to us.
Ross: I’m Ross, and I lead investor relations at Moniepoint.
Nifemi: For DreamMakers who may not work closely with you, how would you describe your role and what your team is responsible for?
Ross: The easiest way to think about the Investor Relations team is that we are Moniepoint’s ambassadors to investors. This includes both our existing investors and new potential investors when we are looking to raise outside capital. We are a lean team, just myself and Chidinma, but we work closely with a lot of other teams, including M&A, Corporate Finance and Legal.
Nifemi: M&A is the Mergers & Acquisitions team, I believe?
Ross: Correct! Shout-out to Anil and Peter. The Investor Relations team ensures Moniepoint presents itself in the best possible light to investors, and we showcase the full potential of the Group. We spend a lot of time with different Moniepoint teams to understand our products, processes and performance to enable us to present a complete and accurate picture to investors.
Nifemi: Speaking about presenting a complete and accurate picture to investors, we just released our first-ever impact report. You're familiar with the internal numbers, but were there any insights from our customer survey that you found particularly interesting that you've been excited to speak to investors about
Ross: The report was useful in showing the depth of our impact. We often hear about the scale, in terms of millions of users and billions of dollars in payments, but we don’t regularly think about how central our solutions have become to our customers’ daily lives. Some data points that stand out:
Three-quarters of our loans are to first-time borrowers.
Over 80% of customers said we improved their quality of life.
Very few companies globally can claim to have a meaningful impact. It highlights that we aren’t providing incremental improvement; we are providing a holistic financial services solution that businesses would struggle to operate without.
Nifemi: Absolutely true. If you haven't had the chance to, you can learn about our impact here: https://impact.moniepoint.com/.
If you could share with us, what’s one thing you’re currently thinking about or working on that you think we should know about?
Ross: As a company, we are at an exciting inflexion point, both from a product perspective, between being payments-led and a more comprehensive digital finance offering, and from a geographic perspective, being Nigeria-only to a multi-country platform. To tell this story well, we are researching similar companies globally and thinking about which metrics we need to showcase to support the huge potential ahead of us.
Nifemi: There’s clearly a lot happening behind the scenes as we think about where Moniepoint is headed next. As you help tell this story, what's one piece of feedback or lesson from your journey in Investor relations that has shaped the way you work or lead today?
Ross: I would say it's more of an overall career learning. It’s not only about having the right answer to achieve success at scale, but you also need to bring others along on the journey with you. The best leaders I've seen seek input from everyone on the team and build shared ownership. Even if you don’t agree with another POV, it’s worth understanding their perspective and identifying the exact point of misalignment. There’s an African proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together"
Nifemi: Thank you, Ross. Before I let you go, what are some things you enjoy doing outside of work?
Ross: Like many DreamMakers, travel is my number 1. Especially to new countries that are not typical tourist destinations. Some of my favourite destinations are Myanmar, Egypt and Kano. Also, shout-out to Abdulmumin and the team for being excellent hosts in Kano.
Nifemi: Did you go anywhere this summer?
Ross: In the last year, I got married 4 times (same woman), in 3 different places, so no, I am done with travel for this year. I am just working and hanging out with my best friend.
Nifemi: That's lovely. Thank you so much, Ross.
Ross: Pleasure! Thanks for having me.
Meet the DreamMaker is a series that spotlights the people behind the work at Moniepoint. In each episode, we introduce you to a DreamMaker (as Moniepoint employees are known), sharing what they do, the impact they're making, and a few fun facts.
