Odunwayo Eweniyi, Demystifying the Savings Perception

Odunayo Eweniyi has stood out to become a dominant force in Nigeria’s FinTech industry. Having started off by developing entrepreneurial concepts while at the tertiary institution with two of her friends, they came back together after graduation and founded a number of startups including PushCV – one of the largest employment platforms in Nigeria today, as well as other business. But after journeying for nearly a in the financial and tech circles for nearly a decade, they successfully launched Piggybank.ng (now PiggyVest), an automated savings platform which has blossomed to having over 1 million active users. In this interview with Business Elites Africa, Odunayo sheds light on her entrepreneurial voyage including her challenges and triumphs. Enjoy the read:

Describe your company, services/products and any other information you would like to provide.

PiggyVest (formerly Piggybank.ng) is an automated savings platform that helps people manage their finances by making the process more transparent. Our platform helps Africans save and invest automatically. We are focused on low to middle income-earners who are struggling to meet up with their responsibilities and payments because they have no way of saving up. The current African banking system as it is, is heavily transactional. We automatically deduct fixed amounts of money from our users’ accounts periodically, according to their instructions, towards a target.

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Tell us about your background, what did you venture into before starting up in this sector?

Before we started PiggyVest we had been working on a number of other startups. We founded PushCV, one of the largest employment platforms in Nigeria. We also had a bunch of ventures that didn’t pan out, like 500dishes.com, 99staff.com. The founding team went to the same university, and we have worked together for nearly a decade and previously launched a successful startup with over 1 million users and 600K monthly active users. We started PiggyVest in January 2016 and have been on it ever since.

How has your company fared from the very start?

We launched in 2016, and in that yea, we saved 21 million naira. But we invested heavily in customer service and product development and we saw that pay off because by the end of 2017 we had experienced a 3000% growth across board.

And we kept on iterating, with our users’ needs and feedback in mind helping us grow into the robust platform that we are now. Today, PiggyVest is the largest online savings & investment platform in Nigeria, with almost 200,000 users who have saved over $15 Million (~7 Billion Naira) so far. In January 2019, our users saved over N1 Billion naira! In May 2018, we closed $1.1M in seed funding, and we have had the privilege of winning some awards along the way like The Future Awards Africa Prize for Technology and The Africa Fintech Summit Tech for Good award. We were also one of Business Day’s top 100 SMEs 2018.

Today, PiggyVest is the largest online savings & investment platform in Nigeria, with almost 200,000 users who have saved over $15 Million (7 Billion Naira) so far.

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