Moniepoint Co-founder and Group Chief Executive Officer, Tosin Eniolorunda, has said that African businesses are missing a major growth opportunity by focusing primarily on formal-sector customers while neglecting the continent’s large informal economy.
Eniolorunda made the remarks at the Lagos Business School Breakfast Club, where he spoke on the theme “Building for the Bottom of the Pyramid,” drawing insights from Moniepoint’s decade-long experience serving small businesses and informal traders.
He argued that the most successful companies in the next decade will not necessarily be those targeting the most visible or well-documented customers, but those willing to design solutions for underserved and often overlooked markets.
“The companies that will create the most value over the next decade will not necessarily be those building for the most visible customers. They will be those willing to understand and design for markets that have historically been overlooked,” he said.
Eniolorunda noted that many businesses wrongly assume informal markets are difficult to serve due to a lack of data, stressing that the real challenge lies in the fact that existing systems were not built to capture or interpret their activity.
“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,” he said.
He added that traders, artisans, transport operators, and small business owners generate valuable economic signals daily, but these signals are often ignored by traditional systems.
“The problem is not the absence of economic activity. It is our inability to capture, interpret, and serve it effectively,” he said.
According to him, what is often described as a limitation in serving informal markets should instead be seen as an opportunity to innovate and build differently.
“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.
Eniolorunda further stated that businesses that succeed in earning trust within informal markets will be best positioned to shape the future of African commerce, emphasizing that engagement at that level should be seen as a core commercial strategy rather than a social intervention.
“The organisations that earn trust at that level will be well positioned to shape the future of African commerce,” he said.
He also highlighted that sustained engagement with informal operators reveals consistent economic activity that challenges the belief that such markets are too opaque or unstructured to serve profitably.
What you should know
Earlier in the month, Eniolorunda said the next phase of growth in Nigeria’s payments ecosystem will be driven by building credit products on top of existing digital payment infrastructure.
He explained that transaction data can be leveraged to expand access to credit for millions of small businesses that have historically been excluded from formal lending systems.
According to him, Nigeria’s expanding digital payments infrastructure already provides a foundation of trust and visibility, which can be used to bridge long-standing financing gaps for small enterprises across the country.
