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 ATS, 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. A market analysis revealed Ecobank had significantly lower card issuance than assumed, redirecting prioritisation to Access Bank, UBA, Zenith, and GTBank. When GTBank showed initial resistance to a direct deployment, I brokered a partnership with Habari, GTBank'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, with ATS at 72.3% and Direct Debit at 50.5%. PMs were overloaded managing execution alongside strategy. Critical product knowledge lived in individuals' heads rather than documented systems. The organisation needed a dedicated execution layer without creating a dead-end role.

Action: I designed the Associate Product Manager role with an explicit growth pathway to full PM. APMs accumulated domain knowledge through execution and graduated into product ownership over time. I personally coached each APM in product thinking, Agile methodology, and domain knowledge, while revamping the sprint process end-to-end and building executive-facing MI dashboards.

Result: ATS sprint velocity climbed to approximately 90% and Direct Debit to 85%. Two APMs were formally promoted to Product Manager in January 2026. One now owns the Direct Debit product and 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. PMs had spent years writing specs for Nigeria. Country-specific assumptions were embedded in 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 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 country-agnostic stress test asks whether a spec will work in markets beyond Nigeria. The three-outcome design 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 across the organisation.

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 NGN 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 NGN 1 billion, and implementing two independent layers of prevention. A QA pipeline validation catches debit and credit reversals before any release proceeds. A live reconciliation system continuously verifies that accounting entries balance correctly.

Result: 90% of the NGN 1 billion exposure was recovered. The 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 entire agency banking product.