This speech was delivered by Odunayo Eweniyi, Co-founder and COO of Piggyvest, Africa’s leading digital savings and investment platform, at the company’s 10th anniversary gala in April 2026.
“Hi! My name is Odunayo Eweniyi. I’m cofounder and COO of Piggyvest.”
This is how I’ve introduced myself for the past 10 years. To investors, to partners, to our users, to our team, and even to my friends. This sentence is so core to who I am and the work that I do. It’s a very defining 12 words that I take very seriously.
And it all started with a wooden box.
December 31, 2015. A woman in Nigeria had been saving ₦1,000 every single day for an entire year. Not in an app. Not in a bank. In a wooden box. And on the last day of the year, she broke it open. She took photos. She put them on Twitter. And it went everywhere.
My co-founder and our CMO, Joshua, sent it to our WhatsApp group. We were all working together at the time, building a startup called PushCV. And something about that image inspired us. Because what that woman had done, the discipline of it, the physicality of it, the satisfaction of breaking open something she’d been building quietly for 365 days, that was the whole idea. Right there. We just needed to build the environment for it.
That’s how Piggyvest began. In a WhatsApp group, looking at a tweet about a broken wooden box.
Ten years ago, we made a simple bet. Not on a product. Not on a feature. On a belief that Nigerians wanted to save, and that if you built the right environment, they would. That was it. That was the whole thesis.
We didn’t have a lot. We had a small team, a strong conviction, and a very specific frustration with the way things were. The existing options weren’t built for how young people actually lived. Salaries came in, and money left before people meant it to. Investment opportunities were not made for young people. Bank accounts were too transactional. It was not that Nigerians didn’t want to save. Nothing was just making it easy, safe, rewarding, or satisfying enough to try.
So we built something that made it harder to spend money you meant to keep. We took the burden off of you, quite literally. A commitment device. A place you put money and locked it away from yourself.
Nine million customers later, I think the bet paid off. But I’ve also spent a lot of time this year thinking about what we actually built. And I think it was bigger than we knew at the time.
The early years
In the beginning, we spent a lot of time and energy explaining what Piggyvest was. At the time, it was called Piggybank.ng.
A savings app. A fintech. An investment platform. None of those words were wrong. But none of them taken alone fully captured it either.
Then, sometime in mid-2016, we woke up one morning to find someone had written a blog post. A user. Her name is Yewande. I can’t ever forget. She’d saved her first one million Naira on Piggyvest. And she was going to use it to buy a car. She wrote about it like it was a milestone in her life, because it was. And I remember reading it and thinking: there are real people at the end of this. Real lives. Real plans. Real futures being built, quietly, through us.
That changed how I thought about what we were doing.
Because the thing that made it work wasn’t the product. It was the restriction…the constraint. And more than that, it was trust.
Think about what we were asking people to do. Send us your money. Lock it away. Trust that it will be there when you come back for it. In a country where that trust has been broken so many times, by banks, by schemes, by institutions that were supposed to protect people, that was not a small ask.
That trust is not a small thing. Moving money is already hard. But keeping it? That’s a different kind of challenge. And the products people return to when they’re trying to protect their future are the ones built to keep their money.
And people said yes.
They said yes in 2016 when we were unknown. They said yes to 20-something-year-olds. They said yes through a pandemic, devaluations, inflation and the kind of economic turbulence that makes people hold their money tightly. They said yes when the Naira was doing things nobody had a playbook for.
That tells you something. It tells you that the need was real and it was deep. And it tells you that if you show up consistently, if you keep your promises, if you do what you say you’re going to do, people will trust you with the thing they care about most.
We did not take that lightly then. We don’t take it lightly now.
What we learned
There’s a moment I keep coming back to.
Last year, we showed our users a money tree at the Zikoko NairaLife conference. It was an immediate hit.
A visual representation of everything they’d built, their savings, their investments, their returns, rendered as something alive and growing. And the response was overwhelming. Not because it was a new feature. But because it made something invisible, visible.
It showed people that their money was doing something. That all those months of discipline and patience had compounded into something real. That they were building.
We learned something important from that. People don’t just want a balance. They want to understand the shape of their financial life. They want to see it growing. They want to feel like they’re moving toward something.
That insight has shaped everything we’ve been thinking about for the next decade.
Where I come from
Growing up, my parents were university professors. My mother also ran a number of stores, selling gifts and personal goods. And every night, she’d come home, sit down, and count the day’s cash. Literally count it. Then she’d subtract her costs and arrive at the number that was actually hers. Her profit. Night in, night out, that was the ritual.
At some point, my siblings and I started counting with her.
That’s where my relationship with money was formed. Not as an end. As a means. You work, you track, you understand what you actually have, and then you decide what to do with it. My mother didn’t just run a business. She taught us, without ever framing it as a lesson, that money is a tool. And that the people who use it well are the ones who pay attention to it.
Teaching people to use money as a means is still the most real thing about what we do at Piggyvest. It’s why we’re still here.
The question we’re sitting with
At ten years, you start to ask yourself bigger questions.
We’ve been asking ourselves: What does a Piggyvest user’s life look like in 2036? Not their phone. Their life. Most of them will be in their 30s and 40s, like myself and my cofounders. They’ll own homes, or be trying to. They’ll have children in school and parents they’re responsible for. They’ll be running businesses, building careers, navigating a Nigerian economy that will look different from this one in ways we can only partially predict.
They’ll need to save, yes. But they’ll also need to invest. To bank. To be protected. To plan for retirement. To participate in markets that have historically been closed to people who look like them and earn what they earn.
The question we’re sitting with is: can Piggyvest be present for all of that?
Not by doing everything. But by being the layer that holds it together. The financial OS of the Nigerian household.
That phrase, financial OS, sounds ambitious. Maybe it is. But let me tell you why I think it’s the right frame.
An operating system doesn’t do everything. It doesn’t write your documents or send your messages. But it makes all of those things possible. It runs underneath. It manages resources. It creates the environment in which everything else works.
That’s what we want to be for the financial lives of the people who trust us. Not every product. The layer that makes everything else possible.
What that looks like
So what does the OS actually do, and where are we going?
The first thing it does is create access to ownership. For too long, participating in wealth creation in Nigeria has been a function of who you knew and how much you already had. Markets, assets, investment products, these were not built for the person saving ₦5,000 a month. We think that’s wrong. And we think we’re in a position to change it. That means building real pathways for our users to put their money to work, not just save it, but own a piece of the economy they live in.
The second thing is collapsing the distance between saving and banking. The line between a savings platform and a bank has always been somewhat artificial. Our users already live financial lives that cross that line every day. The OS doesn’t force them to choose. It (we) meets them where they are and makes the distinction irrelevant. What matters is that the money is safe, it’s working, and it’s accessible when they need it.
The third thing is protection. A financial OS that only grows money is incomplete. Life happens. People get sick. Businesses fail. People retire. The households we want to serve need products that protect their financial lives across a lifetime, not just in the good years. That means insurance. That means retirement. That means showing up for the moments that matter most, not just the ones that are easy.
The fourth thing is reach. The Nigerian household is not only in Nigeria. Our users are in the United Kingdom. In Canada. In Kenya. In Egypt. In South Africa. In cities across the world, sending money home, building wealth abroad, trying to stay connected to the economy they came from while navigating the ones they’re in. We have not fully shown up for those users yet.
That will change.
And the fifth thing, the one I want to spend a moment on, is infrastructure. What we’ve built over ten years is not just a consumer product. It’s a set of capabilities. Systems for saving, investing, moving money, and managing risk. Those capabilities have value beyond our own platform. The infrastructure we built for ourselves is becoming something that others can build on. Something that strengthens the whole ecosystem, not just PiggyVest.
That is a different kind of ambition than where we started. And it’s one we’re ready for.
The harder work
Keeping money requires discipline, which is hard to build and easy to break. It requires consistency, which means showing up for people even when it’s not exciting. And there have been a lot of times when it was not exciting. It requires a long-term relationship with someone’s financial life, not just a transaction.
That’s what we went for ten years ago. The harder work.
And I think that choice, to do the harder thing, to prioritise building that gradual trust, to build something people could actually rely on, is why we’re here today reflecting on the past ten years and talking about the next ten years. Instead of the lessons of a company that didn’t make it.
Nine million people trusted us, over six million on Piggyvest and three million more on PocketApp. They trusted us with their savings goals, their investment hopes and their quiet, private ambitions to be better with money than their parents were.
They trust us now.
The money people keep
Back to the money tree.
I keep coming back to it because I think it’s the most honest image of what we are. Roots that go deep, built over ten years of showing up and doing what we said. Branches that are just beginning to show what’s possible. And growth that compounds quietly, steadily, in ways that aren’t always visible until you step back and look. Like we’re doing today.
If you are one of those nine million people, if you’ve ever locked money away on a Friday so you wouldn’t spend it over the weekend, if you saved your first million and felt something shift in how you saw yourself, if you’re in this room tonight because Piggyvest has been part of your financial life, or you’re here because you’ve taken a bet on us, on me, on our team, I want to say this directly to you:
We owe you the next ten years. Not as a debt. But as a (re)commitment. The same one you made to yourself every time you saved. The same one you made when you spoke up for us when we were not in the room. The same one you made when you wrote us those investment cheques.
We are not done. We are not even close to done. The financial OS of the Nigerian household is not fully built. The users who will need us in 2036 are, some of them, just starting their financial lives right now. The products we haven’t built yet will matter as much as the ones we have. The journey we’re on together is just starting.
That’s Piggyvest at ten. We know where we want to go. We know what we’re building toward. And we know why.
We’re going to keep going.
Thank you so much for the last ten years. And here’s to the next ten.
