From Cyriacus Nnaji, Lagos
Moniepoint, one of Africa’s leading fintechs, has convened senior engineering practitioners from across Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem for the inaugural Moniepoint ‘Off the Record Engineering Mixer’.
The event which was held in Victoria Island, Lagos, was part of the company’s ongoing effort to foster deeper technical exchange among engineering leaders in the industry.
According to the company, the Mixer, which brought together senior engineers from leading fintech companies, including Flutterwave, Cowrywise and Nomba, had candid conversations around “Building for Scale, The Trade-offs of Distributed Systems in Fintech” and “Building Distributed Systems for POS at Scale.” Discussions examined the realities of operating financial technology infrastructure at scale, including system failures, network dependencies, architectural trade-offs, observability, security and designing for failure.
The company said convening senior engineering practitioners to examine operational realities reflects its view that the challenges of building at scale in African fintech are shared rather than proprietary, and that the industry improves when the people running these systems compare notes directly.
Moniepoint also used the platform to highlight its approach to building more resilient card payment systems and protecting customers from false debits, guided by a principle that customers should never be left carrying the cost of uncertainty created inside a system they rely on but cannot see into.
Speaking on the engineering philosophy behind this approach, Ayomide Kolawole, Engineering Manager, Card Payments, Moniepoint, said, “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. Our responsibility is to ensure that customers are not left carrying the consequences of uncertainty created within a system they rely on.”
“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,” he added.
