Moni rebrands as Rank, acquires AjoMoney and Zazzau MFB to scale community finance
Quidah is an online platform that connects investors with curated opportunities and expert insights on Africa’s emerging markets, while offering businesses promotional services, partnership facilitation, and market intelligence to attract capital and grow their operations.
Industries
Nigeria’s community finance startup Moni has rebranded as Rank and acquired group-savings platform AjoMoney alongside Zazzau Microfinance Bank, signaling a shift toward a broader, regulated suite of deposit and savings products. The move positions Rank to convert community trust networks into formal financial services while deepening access to savings, payments, and credit for underserved users.
Rank is repositioning from a single-purpose lending model to a multi-product “money app” enabling individuals and businesses to spend, save, invest, and manage funds in one place, with a mission to translate social capital into financial capital at scale.
The acquisitions add core capabilities: AjoMoney brings digital rotating savings and group finance infrastructure, while Zazzau MFB (to be renamed Rank Microfinance Bank) provides a licensed banking base for deposits, NIBSS connectivity, and a fuller product set.
- Initial rollout is focused on Nigeria, with plans to extend a community-powered ecosystem across African markets.
- The first product is a high-yield group-savings solution designed for trusted networks such as traders’ associations, market unions, and neighborhood cooperatives.
- In a pilot with 10,000 users, participants contributed from NGN150,000 (about US$100), with pooled funds invested in treasury bills and money markets to deliver returns of up to 23 percent.
- The pilot generated NGN16 billion (about US$11.25 million) in total payouts, indicating demand for structured, higher-yield group savings.
- Rank will supplement the product with access to wealth advisors to guide users through savings and investment decisions.
Company leadership frames the rebrand and acquisitions as building on Africa’s tradition of community savings (ROSCAs) while embedding regulatory foundations to expand services. AjoMoney’s leadership describes the handover as a scale-up path for a digitized community savings model, and Zazzau MFB’s board signals alignment with a community-first financial access strategy.
By buying a licensed microfinance bank, Rank gains regulatory permissions critical for deposit-taking, payments interoperability, and product expansion, reducing reliance on third-party rails and improving control over compliance and risk. This aligns with a broader consolidation trend in African fintech where scale and licensing underpin durable unit economics and resilience to policy shifts.
Group savings anchored in formal money markets ties user returns to prevailing interest rates, which can be attractive in high-rate environments but introduces reinvestment and rate-cycle risk if yields fall. The model’s sustainability will depend on prudent asset-liability management, liquidity buffers for withdrawals, and transparent fee and risk disclosures to sustain trust in community pools.
Distribution via pre-existing trust networks can lower acquisition costs and defaults while improving retention, but scaling beyond initial communities requires robust onboarding, fraud controls, and localized compliance across markets. If executed well, Rank could compete with neobanks and MFIs by offering regulated, yield-bearing group products with embedded advisory, while positioning for cross-border use cases that would necessitate additional licenses and partnerships.
Rank’s rebrand and dual acquisitions consolidate community-savings technology with regulatory infrastructure, enabling a regulated, higher-yield product set aimed at underserved users and SMEs. Execution on risk controls, licensing, and distribution will determine whether the community-powered model can scale sustainably across markets and rate cycles.
