Why a growing remittance business was not enough for Moniepoint

MonieWorld, the remittance product built by Nigerian fintech Moniepoint, is being shut down barely 16 months after it officially launched and three years after several stalled attempts, including its seed investment, reportedly $2 million, in PayDay in March 2023.

The product, which went live in April 2025, was designed to serve the UK’s African diaspora with remittances and digital financial services.

With more than 200,000 nationals, Nigeria is one of the largest recipients of remittances from Britain. One could therefore argue that the opportunity was obvious.

Moniepoint already had a large customer base and payments infrastructure in Nigeria, and it had spent years building a business around moving money. The thinking was that some of that infrastructure could be extended to Africans living abroad.

But entering the UK turned out to be an expensive proposition. Moniepoint’s UK subsidiary was incorporated in February 2024, and the group eventually set aside $7.39 million for the expansion.

Between February and December 2024, it spent $1.26 million on administrative and infrastructure costs and put another $2.51 million into the acquisition of Bancom Europe, an electronic money institution authorised by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. By the end of that year, the UK operation had generated no revenue.

That spending was necessary to get into the market, but it also points to one of the difficulties of remittances. The product may be a piece of software to the customer, but behind it sits a regulated financial operation that requires compliance, banking relationships, liquidity, fraud controls, technology and people.

Those costs have to be absorbed before a company can begin to worry about whether it is earning enough from each transaction.

Moniepoint has not said that weak demand forced it to shut down MonieWorld. In fact, the company says monthly transaction volume among its UK users grew 70%.

It has also not disclosed how much money the business processed or how many customers it acquired, so it is impossible to say from the outside whether the product was anywhere close to breakeven.

What the numbers do suggest, however, is that transaction growth alone was not enough to make the business compelling.

When timing becomes important

When fintechs such as LemFi began attacking the remittance market, their proposition was relatively straightforward.

Sending money through traditional providers could be slow and inconvenient, while fintechs could move money digitally and, in many cases, much faster. The technology gave them an obvious advantage. But that advantage was never going to last forever.

Once enough fintechs entered the market and traditional operators expanded their digital channels, speed became less of a differentiator. The competition moved towards exchange rates and fees, which is a much harder game to win because the customer can often compare several providers before making a transfer.

“It’s very difficult to compete on just fees alone,” Babatunde Akin-Moses, CEO of Sycamore, told Condia.

The scale of the competition is worth considering. LemFi, which launched in 2020, had more than two million customers and was processing more than $1 billion in monthly transaction volume by the time MonieWorld launched. It had also started moving beyond remittances into products such as savings and credit.

MonieWorld, then, was not entering a market waiting to be served but one where several companies had already spent years acquiring customers, developing their infrastructure and learning how to compete.

Fola Ijaiya, an investment professional, puts the timing problem this way. “If you are getting into the mix, your time was pre-2023. Anyone who came after that is probably fighting unit economics on a venture-scale problem.”

There is another factor that changed the economics of remittances to Nigeria. Before the country’s foreign-exchange reforms and the move towards a unified market-determined exchange rate, a significant part of the competition between remittance providers was about who could secure the best rate and access reliable liquidity.

A company with better access to dollars could offer customers a more attractive naira payout and still make money from the spread. The reforms reduced some of that arbitrage opportunity.

This left companies competing for customers on a much narrower set of advantages, including price, speed, trust and the range of services attached to the account.

MonieWorld was therefore launching at an awkward point in the market’s evolution. It had the capital to enter, but it did not have the first-mover advantage enjoyed by some of the companies already operating in the corridor.

It also had to spend heavily on the regulatory infrastructure required to operate in Britain while offering customers competitive rates in a market where switching between providers is relatively easy.

When an exit tells a bigger story

The fact that Moniepoint decided to leave despite having the financial capacity to keep funding the experiment is telling. It earmarked nearly $8 million for this expansion, and a year ago it was yet to burn through half of that.

It also raised more than $200 million in its Series C round in 2025, giving it considerably more room to make long-term bets, so this is not a company that ran out of money.

Instead, it looks more like a company that decided that the money required to become a meaningful player in the UK was better spent elsewhere.

This matters because the opportunity cost of expansion is often ignored when African startups talk about going into new markets. The question is not simply whether a company can afford to enter a market. It is whether the expected return from entering that market is better than the return from putting the same money into the business it already has.

Moniepoint’s recent move into Kenya allows it to extend what it already does in Nigeria to a new market. But even that may end up being like its UK move, as Nigerian fintechs have not exactly had a stellar record when expanding to Kenya.

Still, it allows it to apply more of what it already knows about payments, banking, credit and business customers to a new landscape.

This is also why MonieWorld’s shutdown should not strictly be interpreted as a verdict on the remittance market itself.

Nigeria’s remittance inflows rose to $20.93 billion in 2024, while the UK remains one of the country’s most important diaspora markets. There is clearly demand for the service. The harder question is who gets to make money from that demand and whether it is sustainable as a standalone business.

LemFi and, to a lesser extent, Kredete’s evolution offer one possible pathway. Start with remittance, then gradually expand into other financial services.

The immigrant customer who sends money home every month may also need a bank account, a card, credit, savings or investment products. The more of those services a company can provide, the easier it becomes to spread customer acquisition and infrastructure costs across multiple revenue lines.

Moniepoint had a similar ambition for MonieWorld. It simply appears to have concluded that getting from the first product to its end goal would require more time and capital than it was willing to commit.

There is a broader lesson here for African fintechs that are under pressure to expand beyond their home markets. Expansion can create enormous value when a company is able to transfer its existing advantages into a new market.

But when those advantages are mostly local, international expansion can mean paying to rebuild the same infrastructure, distribution and customer trust from scratch.