Moniepoint has released its inaugural 2025 Impact Report, revealing that the fintech disbursed more than $700 million in loans to Nigerian micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises during the year — with three out of every four recipients accessing formal business credit for the first time.
The report, published this week, also contains a finding that challenges one of the most entrenched assumptions in Nigerian SME lending: women-owned businesses default on loans at a rate 2.5 times lower than male borrowers, yet continue to receive a disproportionately small share of formal business credit.
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The scale of what was deployed
The $700 million disbursed by Moniepoint in 2025 was spread across Nigeria’s most commercially active MSME sectors, reaching businesses in retail, food services, logistics, and professional services. Moniepoint’s lending model does not rely on conventional collateral or documentation requirements. Instead, it uses proprietary transaction data — cash flow patterns, payment consistency, and business activity visible through its platform — to assess creditworthiness. This approach directly removes the primary reason most formal lenders decline MSME applications.
The results are measurable. Businesses that received Moniepoint loans recorded an average 36 per cent increase in transaction value following disbursement. Of those surveyed, 88 per cent reported business growth after accessing credit. More than 27 per cent hired additional workers, with businesses across the Moniepoint ecosystem collectively employing over eight million people during the year.
Three-quarters of the businesses that received those loans had never held formal business credit before. The $700 million did not just provide working capital — it brought hundreds of thousands of Nigerian entrepreneurs into the formal financial system for the first time.
The gender finding that should change how banks lend
The most commercially significant finding in the report is the gender lending gap. Women-owned businesses in Nigeria make up approximately 33 per cent of the MSME sector but have historically received a fraction of formal credit, with only 45 per cent of Nigerian women having access to financial services compared to 56 per cent of men.
Moniepoint’s portfolio data shows that this exclusion is not based on risk. Women borrowers on the platform defaulted 2.5 times less frequently than men. A separate Credit Direct report covering approximately 300,000 borrowers confirmed the same pattern. Despite the evidence, 62 per cent of surveyed women who received Moniepoint loans said it was the first formal business loan they had ever taken.
In response to its own data, Moniepoint increased lending to women-owned businesses by more than 300 per cent in 2025. Women now account for 36 per cent of the company’s loan portfolio — well above the industry benchmark of 15 to 25 per cent.
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The case for lending to women-owned businesses in Nigeria is not a development argument. It is a credit risk argument. The data shows that women are among the most reliable borrowers in the market, and excluding them has been costing lenders money while depriving businesses of capital they would use well.
Nigeria’s MSME financing gap stands at an estimated $32.2 billion according to Moniepoint’s own assessment. The $700 million deployed in 2025 is meaningful progress, but it represents a fraction of what the sector requires. Co-founder and Group CEO Tosin Eniolorunda framed the company’s mission as extending beyond payment infrastructure toward what he described as financial happiness for every African — a goal that will require continued scale, product innovation, and the willingness of more institutions to follow the evidence on gender lending.
