How She Made me Save

The broker said the stock was “poised to move.” Silly me, I thought he meant up.

This is the dilemma of most when it comes to savings and investment. It seemed too complicated to understand and even too stressful to realize.

The banks didn’t seem to help much as what was regarded as the savings account for the masses hardly appreciated.

In addition to this, is the difficulty to get a proper job without the ‘right connection’. The issues surrounding building a future seemed out of reach.

Then came Odunayo Eweniyi.

Odunayo Eweniyi was born 23 December 1993 in Oyo, Nigeria. She is the first of four children. At school, she was the best of her generation in computational engineering. After finishing her studies, she met with two of her friends in the university, and with them, she founded a platform of discount cards for business, then they founded with PushCV, a website that helps job applicants to write their CV, a project that showed great potentials because of their edge to keep innovating to meet the needs of her clientele. It is one of the largest job sites in Africa with the largest database of prescreened candidates. In 2016, they founded the company that would lead them to success: Piggybank.ng.

A 2013 First class graduate of the prestigious Covenant University, Nigeria, Odunayo defied the odds of building a saving system without the hurdles of the banking system. She and her team of 5 started this business because of a tweet that went viral. This 2015 tweet had someone share her testimony of saving 1000 naira daily for a year with the traditional ‘kolo’ (this is a wooden box made locally used to save).

One of her Co founders, Josh Chibueze started looking for a way to digitize the offline process of using wooden boxes to save money on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and what we have now is the result. The idea for the startup came in December 2015.

Odunayo wanted to be a doctor but she felt like there is a certain level of empathy one needed to become a doctor. This made her decide on Computer Engineering instead, which she studied at Covenant University.

Building Piggybank wasn’t easy but by building the product off user-recommendations, Odunayo and her team have seemingly cracked personal savings culture in Nigeria. Piggybank itself has grown off word of mouth, for the most part, and that shows the psychological aspect of the product – users typically have an emotional connection with the product and this only seems to solidify over the years.

Odunayo was named one of Forbes Africa 30 under 30 Technology in 2019 and one of 30 Quartz Africa Innovators 2019. She sits on the advisory board of TrainFuture, an Education Technology company based in Switzerland, as well as the Gender Lens Acceleration Best Practices Initiative, a collaborative effort of Village Capital, US and the International Finance Corporation (IFC)’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (WeFi). In 2019, she was named SME Entrepreneur of the Year West Africa by The Asian Banker’s Wealth and Society and she is the youngest Nigerian on Forbes Africa list of 20 New Wealth Creators in Africa 2019. She is one of Business Day’s Spark 2019 Women to Watch and made the World Women in Fintech Power List for 2017; the YNaija Most Influential People in Technology 2017 and 2018; she is a 2018 Westerwelle Young Entrepreneurs fellow; and she is a recipient of The Future Africa Awards Prize in Technology 2018. In honor of her work, she was named one of 100 most inspiring women in Nigeria 2019 by Leading Ladies Africa, one of 50 most visible women in Tech by Tech Cabal in 2019. She works to support the inclusion of women in technology by working with hubs and female-focused networks, including For Creative Girls, GreenHouse Labs, She Leads Africa, Itanna. She is also the cofounder of the women’s community, Wine and Whine Nigeria.

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