9 people, 20+ years of fintech between them.
Product designers and engineers across backend, frontend and mobile. The same people build for clients and run the studio’s products, led day to day by Nelson Atuonwu.
6
engineers across backend, frontend and mobile
2
product designers
9
banks and fintechs built for
4
studio products shipped
Who does the work
| Role | People |
|---|---|
| Founder and CEO | 1 |
| Product designers | 2 |
| Backend engineers | 2 |
| Frontend engineers | 3 |
| Mobile engineer | 1 |
| Total | 9 |
Nelson Atuonwu
Founder & CEO
Nelson has spent nine years in payments as an engineer, product leader and founder. He grew Moniebook at Moniepoint to 50,000+ businesses, took Nomba’s cross-border fiat and crypto product live in four months, and co-founded Grip, which ran profitably and successfully until 2024. At Consonant he writes the specs and stays on every project through launch.
B.Sc. Computer Science, Salem University, Nigeria
Career
Moniepoint (Moniebook)
Director of Product Management
Owned Moniebook and grew it from zero to 50,000+ businesses and about $2M in revenue on a subscription model. Lifted activation from roughly 10% to over 50% by building a nationwide implementation network of 1,000+ engineers, turned inbound into an acquisition channel, and designed a real-time commission engine.
Nomba (Northstar)
Product Lead
Took a cross-border fiat and crypto payments product from concept to live in four months: multi-currency wallets, USDC and USDT across Stellar, Solana and Polygon via Circle CCTP, and on- and off-ramps across corridors, with the regulatory work run in parallel.
Grip
Co-founder
Co-founded Grip, which put Nigeria’s scattered fintech accounts behind a single card with automatic fallback, pooling, cross-account limits and spending in 200+ countries, and gave partner fintechs a card program out of the box. It ran profitably and successfully until 2024.
Interswitch · 21Shares / 21.co
Engineering
Built USSD middleware in Java EE that carried hundreds of thousands of offline transactions for First Bank Nigeria, and real-time WebSocket infrastructure for a betting platform.
Specialist knowledge
- Card issuing: BIN routing, Interswitch, Verve, NIP and NIBSS
- ISO 8583 and POS transaction parsing
- Commission-engine architecture
- IMTO licensing and regulatory certification
- Native crypto: chain-agnostic stablecoin rails and token issuance
- Nigerian regulation: CBN, PenCom, NDPA
How we work
AI runs through how we scope, build and check our work, and through the products themselves.
AI through the whole build
Specs are written in-house, then built with AI coding tools: Claude as the main build engine, Gemini for structured and canonical data mapping. We use it for research, scoping and prototyping too, and ship AI features inside the products.
Every feature has one metric
Each feature ships with the number it is meant to move, and is judged on it through PostHog funnels, session recordings and A/B tests.
The risky part is built first
Each build starts with the assumption most likely to sink it, proven end to end, so real cost, latency and feasibility are known before the budget is committed.
Regulated, undocumented, event-driven
Card programs, licensing, settlement and integrations where the documentation runs out: the work that has to pass a regulator and still hold up in production.