By Nnamdi Okike
You have likely never heard of Tosin Eniolorunda. You certainly should have. Over the past decade, Eniolorunda and his dedicated team have systematically built Moniepoint into the critical financial operating system for more than 6 million Nigerian businesses. Today, the company processes over $300 billion a year, accounting for an astounding 39% of Nigeria’s total digital payments volume and powering eight out of every ten in-person transactions across the country.
As a Nigerian-American, this economic transformation hits close to home. For decades, I watched my father make routine trips to Western Union just to send money back home to relatives, and I experienced firsthand the friction and fee-laden nature of legacy payment systems when visiting the country. What Moniepoint and similar companies are achieving is nothing short of a complete structural overhaul of financial infrastructure in regions previously neglected by traditional banking institutions.
Yet, Moniepoint is hardly an isolated phenomenon. Across the globe, category-defining enterprises like Sea Limited, Grab, Kaspi, Yassir, and Nubank have achieved massive scale and valuations reaching tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. These companies follow the foundational trails blazed by early Asian and Latin American giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, and MercadoLibre. Together, they represent a distinct breed of enterprise: the super app, a platform that seamlessly bundles banking, everyday commerce, ride-hailing, messaging, and utility bill payments into a single, highly trusted digital application.
The curious reality is that the super app model never truly took hold in the United States or Western Europe. The primary reason for this divergence comes down to a fundamental economic asset: trust. In developed economies, institutional trust is remarkably cheap. With approximately 96% of U.S. households already securely banked according to federal surveys, any specialist financial app immediately inherits the deep-seated credibility of an established, centuries-old financial system. Where institutional trust is abundant and inexpensive to acquire, consumers have little need for an all-encompassing super app to manage their daily financial lives.
Build Trust First
In emerging markets, by contrast, trust is the central problem that must be solved before any commerce can occur. Historically, four distinct macroeconomic conditions tend to precede the rise of a dominant super app.
The first is high mobile phone penetration, which dramatically reduces the cost of customer acquisition and digital distribution. The second is weak incumbent competition among legacy financial institutions. The third is a landscape of poor, expensive, and unreliable existing financial services. Finally, there is a fourth condition that many international investors routinely screen past or misunderstand: a financial crisis severe enough to entirely strip legacy institutions of their regulatory and social legitimacy. In these regions, populations are not merely underbanked; they were historically harmed or abandoned by formal institutions, yet the institutions that caused the harm often still hold dominant market share until a challenger arrives.
Consider the historical context of Brazil. In 1990, the Brazilian government froze roughly 80% of all bank deposits and financial investments for an agonizing 18-month period in a desperate bid to break runaway hyperinflation. The massive banking consolidation that inevitably followed left just five major commercial institutions holding approximately 80% of the nation’s banking assets, while routinely charging revolving credit card interest rates north of 300%. That institutional void was the exact environment into which Nubank was born, providing a transparent, digital-first alternative to an alienated populace.
Kazakhstan experienced similar systemic shocks twice in modern history. First, citizens saw their life savings entirely erased by inflation reaching the thousands of percent when the Soviet ruble zone collapsed in 1993. This was followed by the devastating 2007–2009 global banking crisis, during which the country’s largest lender, BTA Bank—holding roughly a quarter of the entire financial system’s assets—was nationalized and defaulted amid widespread allegations of multibillion-dollar corporate fraud. Kaspi grew directly out of that profound institutional void, steadily earning public trust through superior digital execution.
Southeast Asia’s 1997 financial crisis was harsher still. Indonesia famously closed 16 commercial banks in a single harrowing announcement; the national rupiah lost about 85% of its foreign exchange value, and national economic output plunged by 13%. Two decades later, roughly half of all Indonesian adults still lacked a formal bank account. That persistent gap enabled Sea to build Shopee and SeaMoney into massive regional ecosystems, bridging the divide between unbanked consumers and the digital economy.
The incredible trajectory of Kaspi also directly answers the objection I most frequently hear from American and European investors: the assumption that emerging markets are simply too small to produce venture-scale or public market exits of consequence. Kazakhstan has a population of only 20 million people. Yet, according to official company filings, approximately 14 million citizens—nearly 70% of the entire national population—actively use Kaspi’s ecosystem. The average user transacts across the platform roughly 77 times a month. Today, Kaspi generates roughly $9 billion in revenue with healthy 56% EBITDA margins, commanding an enterprise value exceeding $17 billion. Ultimately, depth of consumer spend and frequency of engagement, rather than raw population size, set the ultimate ceiling for these enterprises.
To understand the sheer magnitude of these international players, one can compare Nubank directly with Chime, a prominent U.S. digital banking provider. Nubank serves roughly 127 million customers, dwarfing Chime’s 9.5 million. Nubank boasts about seven times the revenue and a market capitalization more than six times larger. Crucially, Nubank has successfully brought over 31 million previously unbanked Brazilians directly into the formal financial system. This dynamic demonstrates that applying modern technology to an overlooked market with acute, unaddressed pain points can build a vastly bigger, more resilient, and more defensible business than deploying the exact same technology within an already saturated wealthy market.
When investors screen for these structural conditions, several emerging markets consistently stand out as fertile ground where the next generation of category-defining super apps is poised to emerge. The vital boundary condition remains clear: any preceding crisis must be severe enough to delegitimize sluggish incumbents, yet sufficiently contained so that the underlying national currency, legal frameworks, and payment rails continue to function.
The financial rewards for early backers of these structural shifts have historically been historic. In 2001, South African media conglomerate Naspers made a calculated gamble, paying roughly $34 million for a 46.5% stake in a fledgling Chinese startup named Tencent. That single corporate stake would later soar in value to more than $100 billion, cementing its status as one of the greatest venture investments ever executed in financial history. Similarly, Sequoia Capital’s early participation in Nubank’s $2 million seed round, combined with its leadership in the Series A financing, translated into a stake worth $7 billion by the time the company completed its public market debut.
Today, a second generation of global super apps is actively scaling across continents. Meanwhile, a third generation is already being forged on the back of stablecoins, advanced artificial intelligence, and localized infrastructure in dynamic urban centers like Abidjan, Buenos Aires, Karachi, and Lagos. Founders like Tosin Eniolorunda are proving that local innovation can solve complex structural challenges, playing an increasingly indispensable role in driving the long-term growth and resilience of emerging market economies worldwide.
Nnamdi Okike is co-founder and managing partner of 645 Ventures, where he oversees the firm’s investing strategy, governance, and compliance, with a specialized focus on fintech and enterprise technology. Since co-founding 645 Ventures in 2014, he has invested in and partnered with numerous high-growth companies. Previously, he was an investor at Insight Partners, where he backed 19 companies and achieved nine successful exits representing more than $9 billion in total exit value.
