Odunayo Eweniyi co-founded PiggyVest on a behavioural insight rather than a product insight: that Nigerians who wanted to save money failed not because they lacked intention but because accessible savings are savings that get spent. The product deliberately makes early withdrawal difficult — not to punish users but to help them keep commitments that willpower alone cannot sustain. The result is a savings platform with some of the highest user retention in Nigerian fintech, one that grew primarily through word-of-mouth from people who found it actually worked.
Quick facts
Full name
Odunayo Eweniyi
Born
26 August 1993
Profession
Tech entrepreneur, fintech executive
Net worth (est.)
$5 million – $15 million
Company
PiggyVest (formerly Piggybank.ng)
Users
Over 4 million Nigerians
Early life and education
Odunayo Eweniyi was born in Nigeria and attended Covenant University in Ota, Ogun State, where she studied Computer Science. Her technical education gave her the software development skills that underpinned PiggyVest’s early product development, while her business instincts guided the commercial positioning of a product that needed to build trust in a market where many Nigerians were sceptical of digital financial services.
She co-founded PiggyVest in 2016 alongside Joshua Chibueze and Somto Ifezue. The company began as Piggybank.ng, a simple digital savings tool that allowed Nigerians to lock money away from their main accounts and save toward specific goals. The concept was straightforward but the execution, building trust, ensuring reliability, and navigating Nigerian financial regulation, was complex.
Building PiggyVest
PiggyVest grew by solving a specific Nigerian financial behaviour problem: the difficulty of saving money when it is easily accessible in the same account used for daily spending. The platform’s product allowed users to set savings targets, lock funds for defined periods, and earn returns on saved balances, introducing millions of Nigerians to structured personal financial management for the first time.
The company expanded from pure savings into investments, adding features that allow users to invest in vetted financial instruments including fixed income, real estate notes, and agriculture through the PiggyVest platform. This expansion transformed a savings app into a personal finance management ecosystem and increased the average revenue per user significantly.
Advocacy and women in tech
Odunayo Eweniyi is one of Nigeria’s most visible women in technology and fintech. She speaks regularly at conferences on entrepreneurship, women in technology, and the African fintech landscape. She co-founded the She Leads Africa initiative, which supports African women entrepreneurs, and has been a vocal advocate for greater gender equity in the African startup ecosystem, where women-led companies receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital.
Net worth and wealth
Odunayo Eweniyi’s net worth is estimated at between $5 million and $15 million, reflecting her equity stake in PiggyVest and any investment portfolio she maintains outside the company. As PiggyVest has grown to serve over four million users, its valuation and the implied worth of founder equity have increased substantially from the company’s early days.
Personal life
Odunayo Eweniyi maintains a relatively private personal life. She is active on social media where she discusses fintech, entrepreneurship, and occasionally personal reflections on career and growth. She is based in Lagos and is recognised within the Nigerian tech community as one of the most competent operators in African fintech.
PiggyVest and the savings behaviour problem
PiggyVest, which began as Piggybank.ng in 2016, was built around a specific behavioural insight: that Nigerians who wanted to save money struggled not because they lacked the intention but because keeping savings accessible created too much temptation to spend them. The product design deliberately makes early withdrawal difficult — savings are locked until a target date — which uses friction productively to help users maintain saving commitments that self-discipline alone cannot reliably sustain. This design approach drew on behavioural economics research more than it drew on conventional banking product logic, which gave PiggyVest a differentiated product experience from the outset.
The timing was commercially fortunate as well as strategically sound. PiggyVest launched at a moment when smartphone penetration among young Nigerian professionals was growing rapidly, mobile banking had established the basic trust infrastructure for financial transactions via phone, but no product had specifically addressed the savings gap with a mobile-first, user-experience-focused approach. PiggyVest captured that market moment and built a user base that grew through word-of-mouth referrals at a rate that few Nigerian fintech companies had previously achieved.
Advocacy for women in African tech
Eweniyi is one of the most prominent voices in Nigerian tech for the specific experiences of women building and working in technology companies. She has spoken and written about hiring practices, investment bias, workplace culture, and the additional operational and social challenges that female founders navigate in an ecosystem where most capital allocators, senior operators, and community gatekeepers are male. Her perspective is grounded in her own experience navigating these dynamics as a co-founder of one of Nigeria’s most prominent fintech companies, which gives her arguments a practical authority that purely advocacy-focused voices without operational experience cannot fully replicate.
The Women in Tech Fund she has been involved with represents an attempt to address the capital access dimension of the gender gap directly — not through advocacy alone but through investment. Female-founded companies in Nigeria receive a disproportionately small share of available venture capital, a pattern that reflects both explicit and implicit bias in how investment decisions are made and who makes them. Directing capital specifically toward companies with female leadership is a market intervention rather than merely a symbolic gesture, and its commercial returns will be one of the evidence bases for whether the bias in conventional investment is justified by performance outcomes.
Financial inclusion and the underserved customer
PiggyVest’s customer base is primarily young, urban, and digitally connected — a segment that is underserved by traditional banking but not entirely excluded from financial services. Eweniyi has spoken about the opportunity and responsibility to serve financial customers who are even further from the conventional banking system — rural customers, women in informal markets, small-scale traders — who represent a larger addressable market but require different product design, distribution strategies, and trust-building approaches. The evolution of PiggyVest’s product strategy, including its investment and group savings features, reflects an ongoing expansion of the financial behaviours the platform is willing to support.
Her thinking about financial inclusion is notably more structural than the typical fintech narrative, which often focuses on the technology as the solution without adequately addressing the underlying economic constraints that limit saving capacity regardless of product design. Her public statements suggest an awareness that building good savings products is necessary but not sufficient for financial inclusion — that income growth, economic stability, and regulatory frameworks that protect rather than restrict low-income financial services users are equally important parts of the picture that technology companies cannot deliver alone.
FAQ
What is PiggyVest?
PiggyVest is a Nigerian personal savings and investment application used by over four million Nigerians. It allows users to set savings goals, lock money away from daily spending accounts, and invest in vetted financial instruments. Originally called Piggybank.ng, it was co-founded in 2016 by Odunayo Eweniyi, Joshua Chibueze, and Somto Ifezue.
How many users does PiggyVest have?
PiggyVest has over four million registered users in Nigeria, making it the most widely adopted personal savings application in the country. Its user base reflects a large and growing segment of Nigerians who have adopted digital tools for personal financial management.
What is Odunayo Eweniyi’s role at PiggyVest?
Odunayo Eweniyi serves as the Chief Operating Officer of PiggyVest. As a co-founder, she has been central to both the product development and the operational scaling of the business since its founding in 2016. Her COO role gives her responsibility for the day-to-day operations that keep a four-million-user financial platform running reliably.
What is She Leads Africa?
She Leads Africa is an initiative that Odunayo Eweniyi co-founded to support African women entrepreneurs. It provides resources, mentorship, and a community platform for women building businesses in Africa, addressing the gender gap in entrepreneurship support that leaves women founders with fewer resources than their male counterparts.
Where did Odunayo Eweniyi study?
Odunayo Eweniyi studied Computer Science at Covenant University in Ota, Ogun State. Her technical background in software development gave her the product skills to help build PiggyVest from the ground up as both a co-founder and an active technical contributor in the company’s early stages.
Sources
Information draws on profiles and interviews published by TechCabal, Techpoint Africa, The Punch, and Guardian Nigeria, as well as PiggyVest company announcements and Odunayo Eweniyi’s own public statements at conferences and on social media.
Max Adeyemi is a Lagos-based writer covering Nigerian and African entertainment, sport, business, and culture. He has spent over a decade tracking the careers, controversies, and quiet achievements of the people who move the culture. He writes all profiles on Nolly.
