The Piggyvest at 10 Gala was a night to remember. The night was a celebration of a decade of trust, discipline, and financial growth; an opportunity to look back at how far we’ve come, and ahead to what’s to come.
What the Night Was All About
Ten years ago, Piggyvest was an idea sparked by a tweet. A woman had saved ₦1,000 every day for a year in a wooden kolo box and shared the results on Twitter. A small team of twenty-somethings saw that tweet and thought: what if we could build the digital environment for that kind of discipline?
On Thursday, April 2, 2026, that small team—now leading a platform that serves over six million users and has disbursed over ₦3 trillion—hosted the Piggyvest at 10 Anniversary Gala at Victoria Island, Lagos. The room was filled with co-founders, investors, regulatory partners, ecosystem leaders, current and past staff, customers, and media representatives. It was a night built around one question: what does a decade of asking Nigerians to trust you with their money actually look like?
The evening was structured as a three-act narrative: reflection, trust, and vision, and hosted by media personality Oscar Oyinsan and host of the viral show Is This Seat Taken, Chinasa Anukam.
The Nigerian Saving Culture Before Piggyvest
The gala opened with a snippet from a short film by Piggyvest that took the room back to what money management looked like for Nigerians before 2016 (wooden kolo boxes, ajo contributions, shady investment schemes, and people stowing cash away under their beds). It was a contemplative and familiar portrait of a country where saving money often meant physically hiding it from yourself.
From there, Ace Orchestra took the stage for a live performance that set the tone for everything that followed.
The Behavioural Portrait: A Decade in Data
Joshua Chibueze, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, followed with a presentation he titled, “The Behavioural Portrait”. Here, he walked the room through key data points on how money has moved through Piggyvest over the past ten years.
The numbers were striking. Piggyvest now processes over ₦61,000 in savings every second, up from ₦49,000 the previous year. Users save toward goals ranging from rent and vacations to business investments and gadgets. Chibueze pointed to one user who had saved every single day for 522 consecutive days as evidence of the culture of discipline Piggyvest has helped build.
“When you step back,” Chibueze said, “this is what you’re really looking at: millions of people choosing discipline over and over again.”
Trust Is Built Together
Ayo Akinola, CEO of PocketApp, took the stage next for a presentation titled “Trust Is Built Together”. This presentation acknowledged the role of regulatory partners in Piggyvest’s journey. He recognised the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as partners whose oversight has shaped Piggyvest’s growth.
“Some of our toughest moments came from being held to higher standards,” Akinola said. “Moments that slowed us down, moments that forced us to rethink. But those moments made us better. They made us stronger, they made us worthy of the trust people place in us today.”
“We Owe You The Next 10 Years”
The centrepiece of the Piggyvest at 10 gala was the keynote address delivered by Odunayo Eweniyi, Co-founder and Chief Operations Officer. Eweniyi traced the company’s origin back to that December 2015 tweet. “That was the whole idea. Right there. We just needed to build the environment for it,” she said.
She reflected on what it meant to ask Nigerians to trust a group of twenty-somethings with their money, in a country where that trust had been repeatedly broken by banks, schemes, and institutions meant to protect people. “They said yes in 2016 when we were unknown. They said yes through a pandemic, devaluations, inflation, and the kind of economic turbulence that makes people hold their money tightly.”
Then she looked ahead. Eweniyi stated that Piggyvest’s ambition for the next decade is to become what she described as “the financial operating system of the Nigerian household.”
She outlined five pillars of this vision:
- Access to ownership
- The convergence of saving and banking
- Financial protection through insurance and retirement products
- Expanded reach to serve Nigerian households abroad
- Infrastructure that others in the ecosystem can build on.
“An operating system doesn’t do everything,” Eweniyi explained. “It doesn’t write your documents or send your messages. But it makes all of those things possible. That’s what we want to be for the financial lives of the people who trust us.”
Other Moments That Mattered
Snippets of an upcoming Piggyvest documentary on modern Nigerian money culture played at intervals throughout the evening, threading the night’s conversations together. But two moments on stage gave the gala its most personal texture.
In a moderated conversation led by Chinasa Anukam, co-founders Somto Ifezue (CEO), Odunayo Eweniyi (COO), and Joshua Chibueze (CMO) offered a rare public look at the dynamic between the three people behind one of Nigeria’s most recognised financial brands—how they make decisions, how they disagree, and what keeps them building together after a decade. Later, a panel moderated by Oscar Oyinsan brought together Piggyvest alumni to reflect on the company’s culture and the people who helped build it. Titled “The Last Decade (In People),” it was less about product milestones, more about the humans behind the platform.e about how they make decisions, how they disagree, and what keeps them building together after a decade.
Somto Ifezue, Cofounder and CEO, Piggyvest.
A Toast to the Next Ten Years
Somto Ifezue, Co-founder and CEO, delivered the closing address. After his remarks, all seven co-founders were joined on stage by early investors and ecosystem mentors—Co-founder of Bluechip Technologies and Founder of Voltron Capital, Olumide Soyombo, and Founding Partner of Ventures Platform, Kola Aina—for a ceremonial toast.
The evening closed with a musical performance by Chike. And an afterparty that was one for the books.
