Odunayo Eweniyi wears many hats; tweeting unremittingly about Lewis Hamilton and F1, funding innovative women-led projects, actively seeking to reconfigure the African podcasting scene, and being an all-round top-tier humour babe. Yet what has been her grandest hat in nearly a decade, is running a multimillion-dollar company—Nigeria’s largest savings platform and top 250 Fintechs in the world according to CNBC—Piggyvest.
The company is named after piggy boxes, the usually fun-sized, funny-looking pig-shaped containers created to inspire kids to save. However, the story around its founding is more intense and even somewhat unbelievable. In 2015, a woman posted on Twitter (now X) about how her breaking her Kolo (the Nigerian variation of a piggy box, not so fun-sized or fun-looking) at the end of the year to find hundreds of thousands of her saved Nigeria naira in it that financially set her up for the next year. At the time, that tweet pushed the boundaries of social media, but especially so for Odun (short for Odunayo and her preferred name) and her co-founder’s thoughts about the future of financial security.
Very few companies conceptualize product rollouts from one viral social media post. Even fewer can measure success from it. Yet PiggyVest sprouted, grew quickly into a “sprawling community of millions of people” as Odun puts it, and is now leading conversations about finance, savings, and investing in Nigeria. It’s an insane feat for anyone, but even more so for a computer engineering graduate whose knowledge about the African tech scene and tiny portfolio of fragile startups was nearly not enough for such undertaking.
So far, Odun’s portfolio online reads: Founder/Co-founder FirstCheck Africa, Feminist Coalition (Nigeria’s largest coalition of feminists), GetPocket app (acquired by Piggyvest), Carousel Network, Wine and Whine NG, Patronize, (and probably many more that we just haven’t seen).
We caught up with her last month to learn more about the art of running a business, proffering a dire solution, and managing a humongous community.
Missing Perspectives: We know the story of the viral tweet, but what key problem did you identify from it and want to solve with Piggyvest?
Odun Eweniyi: Nigeria’s lack of a credit culture. Nigeria runs a bank-led system, and this means people need to constantly save to fulfill any need. If you need to buy a car you need to pay in cash, in bulk, upfront. If you need to rent a house, you need to pay for one year’s rent in bulk, in cash, upfront. Saving is a constant and genuine need for Nigerians. We built on that and included an added benefit of annual interest on savings. We make it clear on our website that it’s dependent on market behavior, but it’s still able to incentivize them to save.
How did you raise funding, and do you still raise?
When we started in 2016, we bootstrapped— which is kind of using our funds to grow the company. We had some money from our previous venture [Push CV] and it helped drive the initial run before we could show enough growth to convince investors that this was a venture worth giving their money to.
In 2018, we raised 1.1M USD as our seed round from venture capitalists. And it was a long time coming seeing that this was two whole years after we started running the company. Now, we still raise funding, we’re just not huge on publicly announcing rounds [According to Crunchbase, Piggyvest has now raised a total of $4.2M USD over three rounds].
Piggyvest is the first-ever online savings platform in Nigeria. How did you convince people that you would be better than the already existing structure they were familiar with for decades—banks?
It was tough, but let me tell you a story. In the first year—from launch in April to December—we got only 700 users. Just part of this 700, about 400, were actively using the platform to save, and we helped them save 21 million naira (about 82,000 USD) that year.
One of our features is called free withdrawal days, which they get every quarter. The last free withdrawal day of the year is December 31. What happened that day was, as people withdrew and got their cash and the interest, they immediately took to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to talk about PiggyVest. The early adopters who had just gotten their promises kept, helped us do the convincing, while we focused on giving them great experiences and building on the services that they needed. We expanded from 700 users to 2,000 just from online conversations and trust from our users.
Is there anything in particular that you did to drive your user base from 53,000 in 2018 to over 4 million in 2022? Four years doesn’t look like a lot in business time but the growth was tremendous. How did this happen, what was the process like, who were your Avengers?
The PiggyVest team is a very heads-down, get-to-work kind of team. We started based on a tweet and have always kind of leveraged social media and offline chatter to grow the platform. What we realized along the way, and this insight just kept getting proven to us over and again, is that if you provide good, consistent, fair services to people, they’ll talk about you.
First, we made our customer service excellent. We ensure that every word on our website as a promise to users is true. Now, digital generation users are very likely to refer you to closed ones when they have a good experience, took another step, and built a reward system around referrals. If you have a good experience on Piggyvest, then proceed to teach your friend how to use the platform and take them through a specific number of steps, we reward you.
We also made it that these referrals weren’t just sign-ups based. There are a set of steps that you need to help them follow through to get familiarized with the platform. We wanted everyone to be extra invested in not just getting the best experience from the platform but also getting their loved ones to share the experience. This generated a ripple effect. The Avengers in this case were our users. Till today, they carry the platform in their heads. It’s like a large sprawling community of millions of people who are very invested in the growth of this company and this platform that they love, which is very, very motivating.
How would you quantify your size so far? How much have you been able to save for people, where are you now in numbers?
We’ve saved over 1.8trn naira (about 1B USD) for PiggyVest users and have 5.2 million people currently using the platform as well. It’s a fast-growing community of people. I’m very, very proud of that.
What feature has been your best selling point? And what was the process of its conception and execution?
PiggyVest has many features and different users use those features in different ways. But I think that I would just say my favourite feature is called the Safe Lock and is our interesting twist on treasury bills. People can lock an amount of money for a particular period, then get their interest upfront and the capital returns at the end of that period. It’s very simple but it’s also really interesting. Most people really love it.
The idea behind it is us just thinking about how we can make treasury bills more accessible and feasible to people. The difference between Piggyvest’s Safe Lock and a standard Treasury Bill is that with Safe Lock, you can save as low as 1000 Naira (70 cents) daily for as short as 10 days. Unlike the treasury bills whose minimum is, I think, is about 30 days. We try to make affordability, ease and seamlessness the centre of our work. So we break most of our features down to the least complex way so that the average person can use it.
In 2022, you acquired another Fintech platform, Get Pocket, which kind of serves a far different need than yours— quick transactions. How would it fit into Piggyvest’s vision?
Our mission here is to essentially give people the power to manage their finances. And we’re doing that by building a digital financial warehouse. Finance is not just saving, it’s not just investing, it’s also spending.
When we acquired Pocket, the idea was this would be a small enough product that could form the baseline for the spending arm of our company. That’s why we acquired it. I think it blends perfectly, but we’re constantly tweaking and making changes. So I would say, like, the result that we’re all looking for is a work in progress, but it definitely fits into where we are going in the future.
We love The Piggyvest Report a lot. It has been able to help us understand how people save, but also the savings gap that Nigerian women lead widely. What impact has it made for you?
Honestly, I think it just kind of helps us lead the conversation around savings, which is really good for us. We have all this data, and officially presenting it to the world makes a big statement, apart from the nuance it provides about saving behaviours in Nigeria. We’ve had research papers and events now reference the savings report and data from it, which is what the goal was really.
In 2021, the Nigerian government clampdown on Fintech startups was a big crisis, especially among worrying users. Piggyvest was seemingly unaffected. How did you maneuver that and manage the overwhelming skepticism from users?
I always say that, like, as a Nigerian entrepreneur, always expecting the worst is part of the job description. So you have plan A, but also plan B, C, D, E, just in case. When the government started the virtual account number clampdown in February 2021, we didn’t even see it was coming. However, in 2020, we had already made internal plans to build in redundancy and have multiple virtual account number systems. And so we did. Making that switch in that period was very easy because it was a conversation that we already had. It’s always smart to lean into having alternative plans, but even better, surround yourself with the right team. Ours is always super conscious.
For users, they’ll always talk online. But I think it’s more from an angle of looking for reassurance than anything else. Piggyvest moved swiftly to reassure them in 2021, as that has always worked in lessening the effects of any crisis on our platform.
So there wasn’t any internal panic within your team?
We really don’t panic. By then, we were already five years old. All the panic used to be pre-2020. After you go through Covid and experience all of the shocks to your system at once, you just learn to have your two feet planted on the ground and just work.
Does PiggyVest have plans to expand in the future?
PiggyVest is definitely going to expand. But we’re only going to be targeting countries whose macroeconomics fit those that our business needs to thrive. It’s not obligatory for a company in Nigeria to expand to Ghana just because they’re both in West Africa and share cultures. If the macroeconomics of Thailand fits better for your business because Thailand’s an emerging economy, then why not go there?
We’re looking at countries that have similar macros as Nigeria: bank-led, have a large millennial population, etc. It’s a medium term plan for us. In the short term, around the next one year, I think, we’re still going to focus on solidifying our foundation here in Nigeria. But beyond that, we’re definitely looking to international markets. It’s just probably not going to be conventional expansion plans, but we’re definitely doing it.
You’re an unapologetic feminist. It’s everywhere in your social media posts, podcast conversations, etc. How do your values and beliefs reflect in your work as a founder?
So in 2021, I started First Check Africa, and it’s a pre-seed fund that invests in high-growth tech startups with at least one female co-founder. We have invested in about 15 startups now and counting.
First Check was created to level the playing field for women in terms of investment and we have a very feminist ethic. I mean, I’ll invest in men, but I want women present. In the same way, the only thing that has mattered to me in PiggyVest is building out a company that I, a feminist, would want to work at — a fair, just, and equitable workplace where anybody can thrive. So, yes, I am influenced a lot by the values that I hold and they reflect in my work.
So last question! Have you been able to pursue your other ideas that came before PiggyVest?
Nah, they died. They died for good reason and we have used the lessons to build out PiggyVest better.
