About
Founder-led, engineering-first.
Consonant is led by an engineer who writes the technical specs, sets product direction and owns outcomes — with an in-house team of designers and engineers behind him.
Nelson Atuonwu
Founder & CEO
Nine years in Nigerian fintech and payments — as an engineer, product leader and founder — building card programs, cross-border rails and products used by tens of thousands of businesses. At Consonant he leads hands-on, from the first spec to launch.
B.Sc. Computer Science, Salem University, Nigeria
Deep domain expertise
- Card issuing — BIN routing, Interswitch, Verve, NIP / NIBSS
- ISO 8583 / POS transaction parsing
- Commission-engine architecture
- IMTO licensing knowledge
- Cross-border stablecoin rails — Stellar, Solana, CCTP
- Nigerian regulatory frameworks — CBN, PenCom, NDPA
Career highlights
Director of Product Management
Moniepoint (Moniebook)
Owned Moniebook end-to-end, growing it from zero to 50,000+ businesses and ~$2M revenue on a subscription model; lifted subscribed-to-active activation from ~10% to 50%+ by building a 1,000+ engineer nationwide implementation network; productised inbound as an acquisition channel and architected a real-time commission incentive program.
Product Lead
Nomba (Northstar)
Took a cross-border fiat-and-crypto payments product from concept to live in four months — virtual multi-currency wallets, multi-chain stablecoin support (USDC / USDT across Stellar, Solana and Polygon via Circle CCTP), on/off-ramps across corridors, with a regulatory workstream run in parallel.
Co-founder
Grip
A financial-interoperability company that consolidated Nigeria’s fragmented fintech accounts behind a single card — automatic fallback across linked cards, cross-account budgeting, FX payments in 200+ countries — and gave partner fintechs a card program out of the box. Acquired 2025.
Earlier
Interswitch · 21Shares / 21.co
Earlier engineering roles including USSD middleware (Java EE) powering hundreds of thousands of offline transactions for First Bank Nigeria, and real-time WebSocket infrastructure for a betting platform.
How we work
AI-native, end to end.
AI runs through how we scope, build, validate and ship — and through the products themselves.
AI-native, end-to-end
Specs written in-house, then built leaning heavily on AI coding tools — Claude as the primary build engine, Gemini for structured and canonical data mapping. AI runs through research, synthesis, scoping, prototyping and the AI-powered features themselves.
Validation over guesswork
Real usage data drives decisions — PostHog funnels and session recordings, A/B tests held to the specific metric a feature was meant to move.
Build as validation
We sequence builds around the single make-or-break assumption and prove it end-to-end before scaling — which surfaces the real cost, latency and feasibility numbers before serious money is spent.
Comfortable in the hard parts
Complex integrations where the documentation ends, event-driven architecture, and delivery inside regulated environments — the work most teams route around.
The team
Small, senior, in-house.
Design and engineering under one roof, led day-to-day by the founder.
2
Product designers
2
Backend engineers
2
Frontend engineers
1
Mobile engineer
Have something to build?
Whether you need payment infrastructure scoped and shipped, or early access to one of our products — get in touch.