Idris AliyuProduct Operations Leader

Situation: Every card payment at a Moniepoint terminal had to travel through multiple intermediary hops — from the terminal to NIBSS, then through a third-party processor like Interswitch, before finally reaching the issuing bank. Each hop added latency, failure risk, and cost. Transaction success rates were suffering and Moniepoint's ability to scale depended on fixing this at the infrastructure level.

Action: I led the delivery of DCIR — building instances of Moniepoint's Aptent switching platform and deploying them physically inside individual bank environments, connecting directly to each bank's Front-End Processor. Each bank required a bespoke integration. I ran a market analysis that revealed Ecobank had significantly lower card issuance than assumed, redirecting our prioritisation to Access Bank, UBA, Zenith, and Fidelity. When Fidelity resisted a direct deployment, I brokered a partnership with Habari — Fidelity's own fintech subsidiary — to unlock the integration through an indirect route.

Result: 99%+ transaction success rate. 80% POS market share. 40% reduction in Moniepoint's transaction processing costs within two years. 11 banks live including all Big Five Nigerian commercial banks.

Situation: Sprint delivery was critically underperforming across three product teams — ATS at 72.3%, Direct Debit at 50.5%. PMs were overloaded managing execution alongside strategy. Critical product knowledge lived in individuals' heads, not documented systems. The organisation needed a dedicated execution layer without creating a dead-end role.

Action: I designed the Associate Product Manager role — coordinators whose primary function was execution ownership and documentation, with an explicit growth pathway to full PM. APMs accumulated domain knowledge through execution, then graduated into product ownership. I personally coached each APM in product thinking, Agile methodology, and domain knowledge. I revamped the sprint process end-to-end and built executive-facing MI dashboards giving senior leadership real-time visibility.

Result: ATS sprint velocity climbed to ~90%, Direct Debit to 85%. Two APMs formally promoted to Product Manager in January 2026 — one now owns the Direct Debit product, another owns Value-Added Services.

Situation: Project Phoenix is Moniepoint's company-wide platformization programme — migrating from country-specific product processes to a model where features are built once and deployed across multiple markets. The core problem: PMs had spent years writing specs for Nigeria. Country-specific assumptions were baked into their thinking. A mandate without structural enforcement would produce inconsistent results.

Action: I self-initiated the design and implementation of a pre-merge gate for the TSP product requirements workflow. The gate screens every spec and epic against defined criteria before it can enter the backlog, returning Pass, Conditional Pass, or Fail. The most critical criterion is a country-agnostic stress test — an automated validation that challenges every spec against the question "will this work in markets beyond Nigeria?" The three-outcome design was deliberate: the Conditional Pass coaches PMs toward compliance rather than simply blocking them.

Result: Widely accepted by the team and endorsed by Frank (Head of Platform), Ravi (CPO), and Romulo. The gate became the first structural enforcement point of Moniepoint's platformization mandate and directly strengthened the AI-driven PM process.

Situation: A bug in Moniepoint's agency banking platform reversed the accounting logic for deposit transactions. Instead of debiting the agent's wallet and crediting the trust account, the system was crediting agent wallets — creating a double-credit error on every affected transaction. The bug ran in production for approximately three hours before detection, generating approximately ₦1 billion in financial exposure.

Action: Led the QA-side response across three parallel tracks: scoping the full exposure by mapping every affected transaction, coordinating the corrective entry process to recover 90% of the ₦1 billion, and implementing two independent layers of prevention. In the QA pipeline: an automated accounting logic validation that catches debit/credit reversals before any release can proceed. In production: a live reconciliation system continuously verifying that accounting entries balance correctly.

Result: 90% of the ₦1 billion exposure recovered. Dual-layer fix closed both the pre-release and post-release detection gaps. No accounting reversal error of this type has recurred since. The incident established a new quality standard for accounting logic validation across the agency banking product.