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# Moniepoint CEO says Africa’s biggest business opportunity lies in informal sector
- URL: https://www.theglobalbanker.com/moniepoint-ceo-said-africas-biggest-business-opportunity-lay-in-informal-sector/
- Published: 2026-06-17T01:09:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T00:29:07.000Z
- Description: Moniepoint co-founder and Group CEO Tosin Eniolorunda said African businesses were missing a large growth opportunity by focusing on formal customers while neglecting the continent's informal economy.
- Author: TGB Editorial Team
- Tags: Fintech, Africa

Moniepoint co-founder and Group CEO Tosin Eniolorunda said African businesses had left a significant growth opportunity untapped by continuing to design products and services around formal economy customers while overlooking the informal sector that drives the majority of economic activity across the continent.

Eniolorunda made the comments at the Lagos Business School Breakfast Club, where he spoke on the theme "Building for the Bottom of the Pyramid", according to Nairametrics, drawing on Moniepoint's decade-long experience serving small businesses and traders that traditional financial systems have largely overlooked. "The bottom of the pyramid is often discussed as a development challenge. Increasingly, I believe it should be viewed as a business opportunity. The scale is significant, the need is real," he said.

#### WHY INFORMAL SECTOR MATTERS

"Most businesses are designed around the visible economy. They serve customers with formal identities, formal records, formal addresses, and predictable financial histories. Yet a significant share of economic activity happens outside those structures," Eniolorunda said.

He challenged the common assumption that informal markets are hard to serve because they lack data, arguing instead that existing systems were never built with those customers in mind.

Eniolorunda said what many see as a limitation in serving informal markets is better understood as an invitation to build differently. He argued that traders, artisans, transport operators and small business owners generate rich economic signals every day, and that the problem is not the absence of economic activity but businesses' inability to capture, interpret and serve it.

#### A COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITY

He said the organisations that earn trust at the bottom of the pyramid "will be well positioned to shape the future of African commerce", framing informal-market penetration as a core commercial strategy rather than charity or inclusion work.

Earlier in June, Eniolorunda said the next phase of growth in Nigeria's payments ecosystem would be driven by building credit products directly on top of existing payment infrastructure, using transaction data to widen access to financing for small businesses excluded from formal credit, Nairametrics reported.

**Sources:** [Nairametrics Finance](https://nairametrics.com/2026/06/16/moniepoint-ceo-says-africas-biggest-business-opportunity-lies-in-informal-sector/)