PiggyVest at 3: The Startup’s Amazing Journey So Far

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Nigerian digital savings platform, PiggyVest (formerly piggybank.ng), is celebrating its 3rd year of operation. This a huge occasion for the Fintech startup which has gone on to establish itself as the most popular savings platform amongst Nigerians.

Launched in 2016 by three young entrepreneurs – Somto Ifezue, Joshua Chibueze and Odunayo Eweniyi, the startup is aimed at offering an online savings platform (like the traditional piggybank) to help users become better at saving their money. This is a difficult task considering the financial constrictions and spending nature of many Nigerians, but the startup uses disciplined measures to go about it.

Using a simple saving process, the startup makes periodic deductions (as stipulated by the user – daily, weekly and monthly), from the customer’s bank account and saves it on behalf of the customer. This deducted fund is stored in a digital wallet at an interest of 10% per annum.

And to ensure that the main goal of disciplined savings is fulfilled, the customer is only allowed to withdraw their funds four times in a year. And should a customer withdraw on other days save the set withdrawal days, they face a penalty of 5% deduction.

The startup runs a Safelock feature that gets customers to save a fixed sum of money and can only access it on a particular date. It also allows users to convert their PiggyPoints to cash and paid into their flex accounts which can be accessed without any charge.

Currently, the startup boasts of over 230,000 users on its platform and helped its customers save over N1 billion in January 2019 alone. This is pretty massive for the 3 year old startup.

Recently the startup announced a restructuring which included a change of name from Piggybank to PiggyVest. This pivoted the startup from a savings platform to a more “robust financial platform.” This the startup said would help it offer investment products to users.

Interestingly, the startup has not only earned the trust of its thousands users, but also that of investors who are betting on it to keep disrupting the Nigerian financial industry. In June 2018, the startup raised about N397m ($1.1m) from a group of investors led by Olumide Soyombo, Founder of LeadPath Nigeria.

The startup also won the SME100 Awards for Fintech Contributions in 2017 and was nominated for Apps Africa, Best Fintech Solution in Africa in the same year. In 2018, the startup won the ‘Brand Brilliance’ award in the 2018 Business Brilliance Awards.

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