Meet Oluwatosin, Founder Of Money Africa That Won $100,000 NSIA Prize For Innovation

Oluwatosin Olaseinde founded Money Africa in 2018 with the inspiration of turning passion into reality.

“Financial literacy and investments are at the core of my passion as we create a tool to democratize access and means of wealth building for Millenials and Gen Z in the long term,” Olaseinde wrote on her LinkedIn bio.

Money Africa is a financial literacy and investment platform which she founded in Lagos.

In 2009 when the techpreneur was around 21, she worked as an auditor at Crowe Horwath International – Global Corporate Advisors (GCA) where she earned a fat salary.

At that time, being a graduate of accounting from the University of Johannesburg was not enough to save her from her early life mistakes.

She had poor saving culture and no investment plan. “Interestingly, over the years as I got an increase in salary, the same pattern occurred, I acquired a new taste and my expenses grew at the same pace as my income,” she had said.

The Money Africa boss later moved on to work with several multinationals like Bloomberg TV, CNBC Africa, BAT and as the Commercial Finance Manager (West Africa Markets) for British American Tobacco in 2017, a year before she founded Money Africa.

In 2020, She Co-Founder Ladda.ng, a financial technology platform that enables retail investors to compound wealth.

Since she found MoneyAfrica, her firm has over 500,000 people across social media that she educates on financial litaracy and over 1000 people on their mailing list.

Her start-up emerged winner of the 2022 Capital Market Content Creator of the Year award organised by the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) in Lagos.

In the maiden edition of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Fund Prize for Innovation, Olaseinde excited the panel of judges comprising Juliet Ehimuan (Google, Nigeria), Olatunbuson Tijani (CCHub), Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (Future Africa, Andela & Flutterwave) and Amal Hassan (Outsource Global Technologies).

“We want to conquer Nigeria; we want to expand it to different African countries. We want to have financial literacy in different languages. We want to cover a wider spectrum. We want to be the leading financial literacy platform.

“We noticed that 93 per cent of the working adults do not have a pension plan, 87 per cent of the adults do not have emergency savings and only 3 per cent of the population actually buy insurance and this is the place we come in. We want to educate people about money because it is not just about having the money but having the knowledge,” she told the panel at the Demo Day.

She gave instances of MoneyAfrica’s case scenario. She said, “In 2021, I fell sick. I was in the hospital for 8 months. I spent over N10m and not one kobo came out of my pocket because I had a comprehensive insurance plan.

“Another case-use scenario was when MTN launched its IPO, Money Africa played a critical role. We had over one million reaches. We saw first-time investors of young Nigeria and that is the job we want to solve.”

She also flaunted her company’s partnership with the United Nations to teach women with low income about how money works and how to make the most of it.

She told the judges how MoneyAfrica makes money through subscription services which have N10,000 ($16) for six months subscription for children. They charge adults $33 or N20,000 for the annual plan.

She said in 2021, Money Africa made $500,000. “The lifetime value of each user is $52 and it cost us only $3 to acquire each of these users. We are looking at 72 million users across Africa. This is very conservative. In 2020, the household spending on education was $16.9bn that is what we are looking at like in terms of education going after the children,” she said.

She finally won the grand prize of $75,000 equity contribution by the NSIA and $25,000 in cash.