The idea came from a tweet about a wooden piggy bank. Someone described the childhood kolo — the box you drop coins into and cannot open without breaking it — and a group of friends in Lagos read it and recognised a product.
Their insight was precise. Young Nigerians were not undisciplined about money. They lacked a structure that made saving automatic and withdrawal mildly inconvenient. Everything PiggyVest became follows from that single observation.
The engineer
Odunayo Eweniyi trained as a computer engineer and co-founded PiggyVest with Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze. She is the company’s chief operating officer — the role that gets the least attention and determines whether a fintech survives.
That distinction matters in a country where trust in financial institutions is hard-won. PiggyVest asks Nigerians to lock away their own money with a startup. Every operational failure, every delayed withdrawal, is existential. Eweniyi’s job has been to make the boring part boring.
Scale
By mid-2025 PiggyVest had grown past seven million users, processed ₦2.6 trillion in payouts, and was recording savings at a rate of roughly ₦47,000 every second.
The more consequential development was structural. Pocket, originally a supporting wallet feature, was elevated into the company’s core financial backbone, allowing PiggyVest to bring key banking rails in-house and reduce its dependence on traditional banks as a single point of failure. That is an unglamorous engineering decision with an enormous risk implication, and it is the kind of move a COO drives.
Four companies, one thesis
Eweniyi co-founded FirstCheck Africa, an early-stage fund backing companies with at least one female founder — a direct response to how little capital reaches women on the continent. She co-founded Carousel Network, the media company behind I Said What I Said, now one of Africa’s most listened-to podcasts, which has run a sold-out tour across three continents. She co-founded Plur Africa, an electronic music and events company. She also co-founded the Feminist Coalition.
Four ventures across fintech, venture capital, media and events looks scattered until you notice they share a method: build an institution people trust enough to return to, then let the returning compound.
What founders should take from it
The best products formalise something people already do. Nigerians were already saving in kolos and informal ajo groups. PiggyVest digitised a behaviour rather than inventing one.
In financial services, operations are the product. The app is the surface. What users are buying is the confidence that the money comes back.
Remove your single points of failure before they fail. Internalising banking rails cost time and money at a moment when nothing was broken. That is exactly when it should be done.
Capital access is a problem you can build your way out of. Rather than only talking about how little funding reaches women founders, she started a fund and began writing cheques.
A tweet about a wooden box became seven million savers. The idea was never the hard part. Making millions of people believe their money is safe — every single day, without a single bad week — is.
