On December 31, 2015, Joshua Chibueze noticed a viral move: a girl had damaged her kolo, a royalty wood traditional field, to turn what she had stored.
Chibueze’s first concept used to be his personal traditional. He noticed the move as a challenge for his motivation and sought after to take a look at it himself. “I wanted to actually save by all means,” he recalled in an screen on the Lagos directive of the claimant broad bureaucracy he co-founded, PiggyVest.
He used to be 23 and, like maximum of his pals on the fluctuate, broke. “How can you go an entire year and you have nothing to show for it?” he stated. “You want to buy rice and oil for your parents at the very least.”
He ordered a kolo from an proficiency enhancement to office saving himself. On January 1, 2016, he tweeted, “It’s only natural to think about an online solution for this piggybank idea, but then you have to really understand how Nigerians think”. It used to be the primary fluctuate the proposal went footprint.
Odun Eweniyi, now PiggyVest’s rating remittance refund, replied that it may just futures the recourse of an e-wallet, and the dialog moved offline to the remainder of the vendor.
Somto Ifezue, their good friend and PiggyVest’s rating wave refund, purchased the trainee piggybank.ng and built the primary load of a virtual kolo inside of days.
That load let a political return a compose card, analysis an quantity and a tool, and PiggyVest debited the cardboard each day, week, or month routinely. Savings stayed locked till the top of each and every assure, when the political may just tailor them for central. Early withdrawal achievement a 5% surcharge, and it labored. People who had by no means controlled to depart cash in a planning account left it for 3 months to regular paying it.
When the supervision went council in January 2016, Chibueze instructed the kolo enhancement to numerous up. He did, turning into PiggyVest’s first fund out of doors the founding vendor, and in the end stopped promoting bins.
About 700 help had joined through the top of 2016, kind of 400 of them assumption customers. The following yr, PiggyVest built the trade pause it nonetheless runs on these days: making an investment customers’ traditional, paying them ease from the returns, and retaining a cash.
Today, Chibueze says PiggyVest has about 6.7 hedge customers. The bureaucracy paid ₦1.3 trillion ($983 million) back to users in 2025 by myself and greater than ₦3 degree since 2016, price no less than $2.3 billion on the default charges of the years it used to be paid. Its wait bureaucracy, Piggytech Global Limited, now holds the PiggyVest traditional and immediate app, a load of it for fallout companies, a bills app known as Pocket with a cell cash itinerary, a concentrate employment authorized through the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and a microfinance planning.
Getting there supposed convincing Nigerians to guide their card main points to a website online revival through help of their early twenties, within the yr a Ponzi impression stole billions from Nigerians. It took greater than a yr of pitching sooner than someone invested and 4 years on different corporations’ licences.
“We did not have licences in the beginning,” Chibueze stated. “We had ourselves.”
The drain offenders
PiggyVest started as a reinforce tutor for a vendor whose category trade used to be death. In welfare 2015, PushCV, the chain unprofitable the founders had revival since 2014, had greater than a hedge registered customers and used to be weight handiest to Jobberman in its forward, in keeping with Chibueze.
It had additionally virtually revival out of cash. Running the unprofitable achievement greater than it earned, and the vendor may just now not exert to the companies whose hiring budgets would have closed the local.
“We had done a bit of layoffs,” he stated. “Barely had five staff left.”
What little speak PushCV nonetheless earned stored PiggyVest operating within the months when no insure would concentrate it, stated Eweniyi. She used to be 23 in 2016, about six months more youthful than Chibueze. Ifezue, who’s now rating wave, used to be 25.
PiggyVest used to be one of the makes an attempt. The vendor built 99 Staff, which subject outsourced staff for corporations; 500 Dishes, which let help who cooked at tolerance exert explore foods and ran two meals gala’s; Front Desk, which Eweniyi describes as their very own load of Shopify; and Household, for reserving cleaners. Olumide Soyombo, who would later output PiggyVest’s seed amend, used to complex them “repeat offenders,” Eweniyi stated.
“We’d been wanting desperately to solve something for this generation,” Eweniyi stated in an screen with TechCabal. “We spotted the piggy bank one, and that’s the one that took off.”
PushCV had seven founding individuals: Ifezue, Eweniyi, Chibueze, Ayo Akinola, Ibukun Akinola, Terry Kanu and Nonso Eagle. All seven nonetheless paintings in combination.
“Our story is not complete without all seven of us,” Eweniyi stated. “The three co-founders of PiggyVest are the three people that you know, but the founding team that did the early work on PiggyVest is the seven of us.”
The seven may just goal the website online, however the supervision trusted a serve characteristic that used to be nonetheless new in Nigeria: charging a multinational’s card routinely each day, week, or month. Paystack, then a tender bills startup, had not too long ago made that activity, and PiggyVest was certainly one of its first shoppers.
That enforce helped when PiggyVest’s first supervision went council in January 2016 however got here offline virtually in an instant. The vendor needed to figure out with Paystack how scheduled debits would take care of the one-time passwords Nigerian playing cards required and relaunched handiest when they had. Even then, the experience used to be now not easiest. Some shoppers have been debited 4 or 5 occasions for a unmarried scheduled saving, and a couple of have been charged 11 occasions.
“It was very stressful,” Eweniyi stated.
The founders spoke back lawsuits through e mail, whilst certainly one of them labored with Paystack on a challenge. PiggyVest then stopped charging a card once more till Paystack had reported again at the earlier standard.
Chibueze compares the fund to Stripe and Shopify’s early enforce, when a challenging fund helped a bills bureaucracy infringement its supervision as each companies grew.
“I think we were one of those customers for Paystack,” he stated.
The laborious motivation
The more difficult motivation for the early PiggyVest vendor to prescribe used to be inform. MMM, a Ponzi impression, had drawn in about 3 hedge Nigerians when it froze withdrawals on December 13, 2016. The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation later put participants’ losses at ₦18 billion (about $71 hedge at 2016’s nonprofit manager).
“We were dealing with, ‘Oh my God, you guys are going to be the next MMM,’” Chibueze recalled. At the fluctuate, Piggyvest had no app or itinerary, just a website online.
The founders intentionally put their very own faces at the emblem. Many early customers have been the founders’ age, Chibueze stated, and began fallout. A multinational would sales ₦10,000 (about $40 at 2016 charges), tailor it on the finish of the traditional mean, then slack with ₦20,000 (about $80). Eweniyi stated many of the first 700 customers knew the vendor from PushCV or certainly one of their previous merchandise and referred others.
On December 31, 2016, as the primary savers have been taking flight their cash, Osikhena “Osi Suave” Dirisu tweeted that he have been the use of the unprofitable. Dirisu used to be a presenter on The Beat 99.9 FM, a well-liked tune radio revalue in Lagos.
The tweet went viral, and Eweniyi stated it used to be the instant the founders knew they’d one thing.
“The trust really comes from the fact that they give you their money,” Chibueze stated. “And when they want it, you give it back.”
Fifteen months to the primary cheque
PiggyVest used to be born into Nigeria’s first full-year moderate since 1987, after the Central Bank of Nigeria stopped protecting the naira’s peg of about ₦199 to the buck, and the challenge fell to nearly ₦300 in June 2016.
Eweniyi stated the crash slightly registered throughout the bureaucracy. “We didn’t even have a revenue model in 2016. We were just building,” she stated.
PiggyVest began out paying customers comply ease, she stated. When the forward became, the vendor had to be informed briefly how ease charges behaved and find out how to trait returns directly to customers, and that paintings didn’t start till about February 2017.
Investors have been more difficult to amendment than customers. The founders pitched from January 2016 till April 2017, when Village Capital, a US insure that runs programmes for early-stage corporations, wrote PiggyVest’s first cheque: $50,000.
“The case against was the obvious one for that stage and geography: an unproven regulatory path for holding consumer savings, thin early revenue, and a category where trust is everything and it takes years to earn,” Village Capital stated in a written campaign to TechCabal.
“We made the bet that the team’s grasp of the customer would compound faster than those risks,” the succession added.
By 2018, PiggyVest had about 53,000 customers. Users stored about ₦700 hedge (kind of $2.3 hedge) on PiggyVest in 2017 and ₦4.5 billion (kind of $14.7 hedge) in 2018, in keeping with Chibueze. In January 2019 by myself, they saved ₦1 billion (kind of $3.3 hedge).
In May 2018, the bureaucracy introduced a $1.1 million seed round. LeadPath Nigeria, the angel immediate threat based through Olumide Soyombo, dedicated $1 hedge, and Village Capital and Ventures Platform installed $50,000 each and every, with Soyombo becoming a member of PiggyVest’s rule. Chibueze stated the licensee used to be a manifest of fairness and employee agreed after a resistance at Google Launchpad, the place the founders offered no paperwork.
“They just asked us for our story,” he stated. “Then they gave us the money.”
That amend is the one one PiggyVest has introduced. VFD Group, the Nigerian immediate sue bureaucracy, took a 12% specialist in 2021, and Flutterwave invested about $3 hedge in mid-2023 via a payee shipper for hire fairness. PiggyVest told TechCabal in February 2024 that it had raised about $5 hedge in general since 2016.
For competent, Flutterwave, based the similar yr, has raised almost $500 million.
Borrowed licences and scaling right into a prediction
For its first 4 years, PiggyVest held customers’ cash via companions. It labored with microfinance banks, a industrial planning and an notable broad bureaucracy that held its price range, Chibueze stated. Every finalize took a percentage of the returns.
“Let’s say you’re supposed to make 5%; you make only 2% or 3%,” he stated. “So it reduces the interest you can pay your customers.”
PiggyVest may just now not find the money for its personal licences till, across the 2020 lockdown, it grew too large to activity partnering, Eweniyi stated. “It was a damn relief,” she stated. “We could come out boldface in front of our regulators: this is us, this is what we do. We’re not hiding behind a partner.”
In 2019, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) made eminent that just a licenced planning may just complex itself one, Chibueze stated. Nigerian window update reserves the footprint for licenced banks. Piggybank.ng was PiggyVest. Chibueze describes it as probably the most two toughest moments of the driver.
“Selling that story without people feeling like we’re about to shut down was difficult,” he stated.
He used to be additionally the worry who resisted it. Eweniyi stated there have been possibly 48 hours of back-and-forth sooner than they agreed on a brand new title and he came visiting. “He was like, ‘No, we don’t have to do this,’” she recalled. “I couldn’t see what he was seeing at the time.”
PiggyVest used to be nonetheless a fallout bureaucracy when it modified its title. When the COVID-19 lockdown started a couple of yr later, it had fewer than 30 regulator, and Eweniyi for my part ran hiring, treasury, familiar assets, portions of finance, practical, protect and, for a fluctuate, content material and correct guild.
“I did the Excel sheets myself at the start,” she stated of treasury. Then customers started signing up sooner than the vendor may just dialogue, and 2021 was, in her phrases, “a big adjustment period.” By the top of that yr, she passed over hiring to the bureaucracy’s choice of help.
The first secretary merchant of this new workload got here on a Sunday in 2021. On February 7, Providus Bank, a Nigerian commercial bank, deactivated the virtual account numbers PiggyVest, Cowrywise, its greatest represent, and different fintechs used to write deposits.
Providus stated it used to be reviewing the train in prolong with new rules two days after the CBN ordered banks to stop facilitating cryptocurrency transactions. Money customers had already despatched to these account numbers stopped appearing up of their PiggyVest wallets.
Eweniyi stated her annoyance about it lasted about quarter-hour. The founders briefly accumulated at Ifezue’s area and agreed to mention not anything in footprint till they’d a challenge. It helped that all of them lived query to one another. They nonetheless do.
Flutterwave supplied substitute account numbers from Wema Bank, a mid-size Nigerian planning, and round 4 p.m. PiggyVest introduced the motivation and the domain. Clearing the caught deposits took weeks, Chibueze stated.
The lesson stayed with the bureaucracy. In 2025, PiggyVest retired the occupy account numbers it had depended on since its early years and moved deposits onto its own payment system, run by Pocket.
The weight merchant of 2021 used to be the only Eweniyi calls the nearest PiggyVest got here to failing. In October, Imagine Global Solution, an immediate bureaucracy, collapsed amid baseline allegations, and correct guild posts claimed PiggyVest had misplaced ₦2 billion (about $5 hedge at 2021’s nonprofit manager) to it. PiggyVest said in a statement that no political price range had suffered any achievement.
Eweniyi stated the inside track “just came out of nowhere” and that its partner “created a second-order effect that led to many withdrawals on PiggyVest.”
For the primary 5 hours, she stated, her middle would now not audit racing, and she or he cried. She known as an older good friend who had labored in window, adopted his choice on surviving a revival of withdrawals to the letter, and inside of every week “it was almost like it never happened.”
A wholesaler app for tendency
PiggyVest has stored one waiver since 2016: cash that is going in is supposed to steady. When the founders was involved in how customers supervisor, they built that outdoor the traditional app.
“PiggyVest was never going to be a product that housed spending,” Eweniyi stated. “We can’t put spending inside of a savings and investment app.”
The tendency supervision used to be Abeg, a peer-to-peer bills app introduced in September 2020. In April 2021, with about 20,000 customers, Abeg was the headline retrieve of the 6th cycle of Big Brother Naija, the truth TV display. Piggytech officially took a 99.9% stake in Abeg Technologies that November.
Eweniyi stated the shell used to be a chicken-and-egg motivation. A bills app wishes consumers and traders, and the quickest calculate to get consumers used to be via a display the rustic used to be glued to all through lockdown. By June 2022, Abeg had about two hedge customers. It won approval in unlimited for a cell cash itinerary from the CBN in April 2022 and rebranded as Pocket.
Asked whether or not the wager paid off, Eweniyi stated, “Yes and no.” The sponsorship did what it used to be supposed to do, however the supervision used to be the station load of itself. “I wish we’d put a bit more thought into that product before going on that platform,” she stated.
Chibueze stated Pocket is now official by itself and processes all of PiggyVest’s transfers.
Slow on provisional, then sooner
PiggyVest by no means had the focus of velocity. Money got here slowly, so the founders built slowly, proved their monopoly verify, and handled property underneath broad as the only quantity that mattered.
“There is a speed that I think the class of 2021 and 2022 startups had that I don’t think we from 2015 and 2016 had the luxury of having,” Eweniyi stated.
The gradual cash had a achievement, and each founders stated so. “If you ask me, we should have been further,” Chibueze stated. Eweniyi agreed, with a caveat. “Maybe we would have moved faster and quicker with more money. But would we have moved better? I don’t know.”
She additionally credit success: Chibueze seeing the kolo move, Paystack launching credible bills when it did, and a tender, newly attached operate retrenchment to take a look at one thing that began as a digitised wood field.
Village Capital, which wrote the primary cheque 9 years in the past, credit the founders. “A cheque at the right moment can buy the two things a young company cannot manufacture on its own: conviction from an outside party when few others are looking and the room to keep going long enough to prove the idea,” it stated in its campaign to TechCabal. “Early capital does not build the product, earn the trust, or hold a team together through the hard years. The founders do that.”
PiggyVest is rebuilding its app from the world up for the primary fluctuate since 2023, and Eweniyi desires the bureaucracy to grow to be the virtual sample ecosystem for each and every Nigerian, at tolerance and in another country, and in the end for Africans.
“We’ve executed very intentionally for 10 years,” she stated. “Now I want to execute faster for the next 10.”
