By Nnamdi Okike
You have likely never heard of Tosin Eniolorunda. You should have.
Over the past decade, Tosin and his team built Moniepoint into the operating system for more than 6 million Nigerian businesses, processing over $300 billion a year, or 39% of Nigeria’s digital payments volume and 8 out of every 10 in-person payments.
As a Nigerian American, I’ve witnessed my father make trips to Western Union to send money back home for decades, and I experienced Nigeria’s fee-laden payment system when visiting the country. Moniepoint is transforming that system.
Moniepoint is not alone. Sea Limited, Grab, Kaspi, Yassir, Nubank 1 — these are companies most Americans have never heard of, despite them being worth several tens or hundreds of billions, following the trail blazed by Tencent, Alibaba and MercadoLibre.
These are super apps that bundle banking, commerce, ride-hailing and bill pay into one trusted application. The idea never took hold in the U.S. for one reason: trust is cheap here. With 96% of households already banked, a specialist app inherits the credibility of the financial system. Where trust is cheap, there is no need for a super app.
Build trust first
In emerging markets, trust is the whole problem. Four conditions tend to precede a super app: High mobile penetration, which makes distribution cheap; weak incumbent competition; poor existing financial services; and the condition most investors screen past, a financial crisis severe enough to strip incumbents of legitimacy. These populations are not merely underbanked. They were harmed, and the institutions that harmed them still hold the market.
Brazil froze roughly 80% of bank deposits and financial investments for 18 months in 1990 in an effort to break hyperinflation. The banking consolidation that followed left five banks holding about 80% of banking assets and charging card rates north of 300%. That was the void Nubank was born into.
Kazakhstan went through it twice: savings erased by inflation in the thousands of percent when the ruble zone collapsed in 1993, then a 2007–09 banking crisis in which the country’s largest bank, BTA, holding roughly a quarter of the system’s assets, was nationalized and defaulted amid allegations of multibillion-dollar fraud. Kaspi grew into that void.
Southeast Asia’s 1997 crisis was harsher still. Indonesia closed 16 banks in a single announcement, the rupiah lost about 85% of its value, and output fell 13%. Two decades later roughly half of Indonesian adults still had no bank account, which enabled Sea to build Shopee and SeaMoney into that gap.
Kaspi also answers the objection I hear most from American investors, which is that these markets are too small to produce large exits. Kazakhstan has only 20 million people, and according to company filings, around 14 million — nearly 70% of its population — use Kaspi. The average user transacts roughly 77 times a month. It earns $9 billion of revenue at 56% EBITDA margins, and its enterprise value is over $17 billion. Depth of spend, not population, sets the ceiling.
Compare Nubank to Chime. Nubank has 14x the customers, 127 million to Chime’s 9.5 million, about 7x the revenue and a market capitalization more than 6x larger. Nubank has brought over 31 million previously unbanked Brazilians into the financial system. A technology applied in an overlooked market with a large unaddressed pain point can build a bigger and more defensible company than the same technology applied in a rich one.
Screen for the four conditions and a few markets stand out as places where the next super app could emerge:
One boundary condition: The crisis must be severe enough to delegitimize incumbents but contained enough that the currency and payment rails still work.
The first generation of super apps created enormous value for the investors who backed them early. In 2001, the South African media company Naspers paid roughly $34 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent, a stake later worth more than $100 billion and one of the best tech investments ever made. Sequoia Capital’s investment in Nubank’s $2 million seed round, combined with its lead Series A investment, was worth $7 billion at the company’s IPO.
The second generation is scaling now. The third will be built on stablecoins and AI technologies, in Abidjan, Buenos Aires, Karachi and Lagos, by founders like Tosin Eniolorunda who will play an increasingly important role in the growth of emerging market economies.
Nnamdi Okike is co-founder and managing partner of 645 Ventures, where he oversees the firm’s investing strategy, governance and compliance, with a focus on fintech and enterprise technology. Since co-founding 645 Ventures in 2014, he has invested in and partnered with companies including RentSpree, Setpoint, Sequence, Solidus Labs, Order and Uptiq. Previously, he was an investor at Insight Partners, where he invested in 19 companies and had nine exits representing more than $9 billion in exit value.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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