Moniepoint processes 20m card transactions daily

Moniepoint’s card payments infrastructure processes more than 20 million transactions a day, with the fintech using real-time monitoring and automated routing controls to limit payment failures and protect customers from the consequences of uncertain transactions.

The company disclosed the figure at its inaugural Off-the-Record Engineering Mixer in Lagos, where senior engineers from Moniepoint, Flutterwave, Cowrywise and Nomba discussed the challenges of running financial technology infrastructure at scale.

The volume highlights the growing demands on payment systems as digital transactions become more deeply embedded in Nigeria’s financial system. Moniepoint said its infrastructure is designed not only to process transactions at speed but also to determine what happens when banks, processors or network connections fail.

Its card payments system distinguishes between transactions that are unlikely to succeed and those whose outcome remains uncertain. Where the system is sufficiently certain that a transaction will fail, it fails fast, while transactions with an unclear outcome are subjected to further checks before a definitive response is presented to the customer.

The approach is intended to reduce cases in which customers are debited even though a transaction has not completed, an issue that can leave users waiting for reversals or refunds.

“Building reliable payment infrastructure is about understanding every point at which a transaction can fail, determining what the system knows at each stage and designing the right response when things go wrong,” Engineering Manager, Card Payments at Moniepoint, Ayomide Kolawole, said.

“Our responsibility is to ensure that customers are not left carrying the consequences of uncertainty created within a system they rely on,” he added.

A component of the infrastructure continuously monitors the health of individual issuing banks across different payment processors, tracking transaction success rates and response times in real time.

When a destination crosses a configured threshold, the system automatically stops routing transactions to it, reducing prolonged waits and limiting the accumulation of failed or delayed transactions, the company said.

“For us, the goal is not simply to process transactions quickly, but to make sure that when something goes wrong, the customer experience does not become the cost of that failure,” Kolawole said.

The disclosure comes as fintech companies increasingly rely on distributed systems, asynchronous processing and multiple external dependencies to handle large transaction volumes. Engineers at the Lagos forum examined the trade-offs involved in scaling such systems, including system failures, network dependencies, observability, security and service decomposition.

Participants also discussed the challenges of building distributed systems for point-of-sale payments, where a transaction may depend on several components before its final status can be established.

Moniepoint’s broader payments infrastructure operates at significant scale. The company says its technology processes more than $250bn in digital payment transaction value annually and that it is Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, powering a large share of the country’s point-of-sale transactions. ([Moniepoint][1])

The fintech previously reported that its platform processed more than 5.2 billion transactions in 2023, including 3.3 billion transactions on its terminals, underscoring the expansion of digital payment infrastructure in the Nigerian market. ([Moniepoint][2])

The engineering discussions at the Lagos forum centred on the idea that reliability extends beyond keeping systems operational. Companies must also anticipate failures, understand the state of a transaction when different parts of the infrastructure provide conflicting signals, and prevent those uncertainties from being transferred to customers.

For Moniepoint, that means designing payment infrastructure around the possibility of failure rather than treating failures as exceptional events.