Trust Is the Feature: How Piggyvest Built Nigeria’s Saving Culture at Scale

When Piggyvest launched in 2016, the idea was deceptively simple: make saving as easy as setting money aside in a “kolo”, the traditional wooden piggy bank used across Nigerian households.

Today, Piggyvest is Nigeria’s leading digital savings and investment platform. 

As an Endeavor Entrepreneur, Joshua Chibueze now plays an active role in shaping the next generation of high-impact founders. In this conversation, we discuss scaling from emerging markets, building teams that can go global, and the shared lessons from their scaling journey.

He explains how Piggyvest turned the “kolo” habit into automated, community-driven saving, uses the product to teach financial literacy, scaled through key milestones (₦1B month, treasury and payments rails), and now targets embedded finance across everyday consumer apps.

How did you manage to turn a cultural symbol like the “kolo” into a growth strategy for your company?

On December 31, 2015, a post went viral: someone broke open a wooden savings box, the kolo, after saving daily for a year. People were still buying wooden boxes even though they had bank accounts, because they needed a way to save. That told us there was demand for an alternative account focused on saving.

Before we started, banks were giving debit cards for savings accounts, which encouraged people to spend. Then they’d offer you a loan on the same account. Nothing in that flow helped people save or plan. 

We saw the opportunity and decided to digitize the entire process of putting money in a box every single day. We did it very quickly, because we had experience: in the past, we had tried five, six times and had failed. This one worked, we had caught the momentum. 

You also built a sense of community into the product. How?

We really saw a need to carry the community along, and to serve the people in a personal way. 

Banks were too big to care about individuals; they cared more about corporations, government, but the average retail user was not very interested in a bank. So we focused on that. And we stay accessible. If someone DMs us on social media, they know they get a real and immediate response. People feel close to us and are part of building the product.

Our product already had a community-type feature, because there were specific days every year where everyone could withdraw their money for free. Outside those days, if you tried to withdraw your money, we would charge you a penalty. It was this build-up of people collectively waiting for the next free withdrawal date that felt like something everybody was doing together.

As the community grew, users asked for more: a wallet they couldn’t touch, a wallet they could access anytime. A lot of our features came directly from those requests.

We also run town halls. This year we did five across major Nigerian cities. We listen, share what’s coming, and sometimes shape features in the room. The loop is simple: honest listening, clear communication, and service that matches the actual needs of our customers. 

Let’s talk about the importance of financial literacy. In emerging markets, people are not very financially literate; in low-trust environments, people are skeptical when it comes to investing their money. How do you tackle that?

The product itself is the teacher. Every wallet shows the interest you earned that day, so users see outcomes immediately: “If I put in ₦20,000 (€12), I get this amount.” We lowered the barrier to entry so you people start with as little as ₦100 (€0.06) and grow their investment as their income increases. 

We have a product we call Safelock, it’s very descriptive: you lock funds for a period and earn more as time goes by. Naming and framing matter. Safelock is actually a cover for Treasury bills, but people don’t care about that, they want simple tools that work and which they can visualize.

What were your biggest inflection points, when you first saw that you can scale?

The first one was in 2018, when we hit ₦1 billion (€595K) saved in a single month, after reaching ₦700 million (€416K) the entire prior year. That felt like serious business. 

Another point was COVID. When we started, the market didn’t really trust us and what we were doing, but COVID brought about a new demand for digital solutions to banking, because you could no longer go to the bank. All the banks were trying to improve their own digital alternatives, and Piggyvest had already been doing this for a couple of years. So, people were open to checking it out.

Another point for us was when we acquired our licenses to finally be able to operate our own treasury. Initially, we operated via partnerships, but now we own our own Treasury department, and we’re able to make those decisions on our own and make more margins.

And the final one, which happened recently, was when we decided to own our own payments infrastructure. We acquired a bank and became our own bank. It’s true that the process of finally doing all the necessary integrations took us about two years to complete. But now, that’s complete. 

We now have our own account numbers; our customers can fund their wallets from their Piggyvest accounts. All of that third-party payment processing cost, we can avoid it. Those are the moments where you say, “this changes everything.” Even with all of the other new products we’re trying to set up, every single thing will be hinged on our own financial infrastructure.

What about your leadership style? Did it have to change along the way? Did you have to scale yourself in the process?

The biggest point is talent. As a founder you own the mission, the vision and the DNA; your job at this level is to identify the right talent that can take you to where that vision is supposed to be.

We promote from within. Our Product Marketing lead started as a social media intern. Our Head of Customer Success started as a customer service intern. Treat people like owners, trust them, ask for their ideas. We loop them in, then we refine together. It’s important to learn to not just instruct people on what to do, but to let them feel like they are part of making these things work. 

What advice do you have for first-time founders who want to scale a big idea?

Start local. You don’t yet know if your idea is global. Understand why people use you and what makes it work. Ship small, learn fast. The market will tell you what’s real if you listen. Keep your mission intact while you iterate. Money is an outcome; impact is the compass.

You started so young, you were only 23. What early influences mattered for you?

I had a fear of staying average. That pushed me. My parents are Christian, and I learned right and wrong early from them. University is where I found my path through tech. Friends mattered, a very ambitious circle raised our ceiling. Covenant University also shaped us. They repeated that we’re the “new generation of leaders.” Hearing that often changes you, it makes you start to envision yourself as a potential leader. 

Even Steve Jobs said that everything you see in the world today was made by humans, and we rarely think about it. The world is as we see it because of people, people like you and me, who had a vision, wanted to see the world in a specific way, then went and did something about it. 

You reference Steve Jobs. How did Apple influence Piggyvest?

We’ve had some inspiration along the way. Apple taught us to lead with the “why” and care about details that build trust. We also think in ecosystems, one core product with complementary ones around it. From Amazon we learned infrastructure thinking. We’re building Piggyvest Business APIs to power others, the way AWS powers a lot of the internet.

Then there’s the attention to detail: Steve Jobs went to calligraphy class and was obsessed with fonts and things looking perfect. Those are things we’ve had to pick up. Details must look good. 

Back to storytelling: one year, a man bought his wife a car with the savings. We carried our camera crew, and followed him to church. When they came out of the church, he handed her the keys; the wife was very happy. The video went viral. We’re not saying “save and invest”, we’re showing you“this man bought a car for his wife by using our app”, there’s a tangible output. 

What’s it like to be the mastermind behind the brand?

I’m in control of how the brand is perceived, that’s my role. We can think together, but the execution is what I focus on, making it happen and translating it into the brand. You must understand how people think, but also how Nigerians are. 

I’m always social listening, I check constantly what customers are saying, I’m keeping up with trends, you can’t afford not to. When there’s a relevant trend going on, we simply have to plug our product into it to stay relevant. 

 

How has Endeavor helped?

The network is very valuable, especially as we consider other markets. When we’re ready to expand a product, connecting with high-growth founders globally is useful. Coming from Nigeria, getting access and connections to the top, it meant a lot. Endeavor gives you that sense of belonging and it makes you feel like you can access whomever it is that you want to reach. 

Our last funding came from an Endeavor Entrepreneur, which also shows the kind of access they enable.

What’s the next big shift in Nigeria?

Definitely embedded finance. Savings, payments, and lending have clear winners. The next step is integrating finance into everyday apps. A popular food app with a wallet already has users parking money there. We can power better wallets, goal-based, yield-bearing, across food, grocery, mobility, retail. The question is how to embed finance into lifestyle so money management happens where life happens.