Imagine that you put all your money in one jar, and all your bills in another jar. Chances are that the jar of bills is the one that would never run dry.

Month after month, people spend a huge percentage of their income on living expenses from rent to food, transportation, utilities, and the likes. More often than not, they forget to set aside a little money for themselves. Simply put, they pay everyone else but themselves.

This was the concept around which Piggyvest (formerly Piggybank) was built. Speaking at the Nairametrics Business Half Hour show, Co-founder of Piggyvest, Joshua Chibueze, said that the purpose of Piggyvest was to help people create an automated system, where they could pay themselves first, by setting aside a fixed amount or percentage, before making other expenses.

READ: World’s largest oil company to pay $75 billion annual dividend, despite plunge in profits

Describing the Fintech, Joshua posed a number of questions, “Piggyvest is that place you keep money that is your own money. Beyond having multiple bank accounts, how do you pay yourself? You work month after month, and pay bills, but where do you pay yourself? Where do you keep money that belongs to you and only you? How do you plan towards those heavyweight bills.”

How a piggybank tweet birthed PiggyVest

On the last day of December 2015, a lady posted a tweet that went viral. The tweet detailed how she had saved N365,000 by faithfully setting aside N1000 in a wooden piggy bank every day of the year. According to her, she ensured to pay herself, by setting aside the sum before making any other expense.

As people continued to share the post and comment about how they might not have the discipline to accomplish it, Joshua and his team (Odunayo Eweniyi, Somto Ifezue, and others, who were working on PushCV at the time), decided to find a way to digitize the process, so salary earners and the self-employed could also set aside money for their personal projects and financial goals. They sampled thoughts from some of their PushCV clients and found it was a concept many would really be interested in.

Three weeks later, the first version of Piggybank had been launched, although it took till April 2016, before the fully tested version was ready for use.

“It was not all easy because we were trying to do something no one had done in Nigeria. The other companies doing something similar were outside the country, so all we had to rely on was the customer feedback.”

No member of the team had any banking experience, so building the app was a total reflection of customer feedback and user experience. Notwithstanding, they understood that people were concerned about the security of funds; hence, they gradually progressed to the use of bank-level security to ensure against hacking.

In subsequent years, the team added an extra layer of security with a two-factor authentication preventing transactions, unless the user could provide the password and the answer to the security question.

Other steps include; SMS verification instead of email verification, as e-mails are more susceptible to hacking than mobile numbers.

From 1,000 to over 1 million users

At the outset, the intention was to get to the first 1000 users. “We felt that if we could get to 1000 users, it would be worth it. We ran on our funds and did not make any money in the first year, because we were still trying to understand our users and find our feet,” he said.

After successfully helping users save 21 million in the first year and over 70 million in the second year; the company attracted investors, and by 2018 they had secured a $ 1.1million round in seed funding. This came as a plus, because the business had grown organically at the time, and was already profitable enough to sustain its operations.

Fintech versus Asset managers

Piggybank first partnered with a couple of Microfinance banks, before partnering with a Commercial bank. In 2018, they raised some $1.1million from investors and acquired a microfinance bank license, a money lenders license, and a cooperative license, allowing them to operate a Trustee agreement with an external asset manager.

There are products tailored for different reasons, so people trying to establish their savings culture could go for an option that allows them to save consistently, and withdraw once in a quarter. There are also options that could allow users to steadily build an investment culture, and others meant for people saving towards a project.

In April 2019, the company rebranded and became Piggyvest. It currently serves over a million users, helping them save and invest “billions of Naira every month that they would probably be tempted to badly spend.”

The more interesting part is that there are no fees for the services, but customers get to make some money, as Piggyvest splits the returns with customers; however, users may have to pay a 2.5% charge, when a customer withdraws his funds before the agreed date.

READ: Effective financial planning after taking a pay cut in Nigeria

Breaking the trust challenge

Financial institutions in Nigeria generally have to deal with the challenge of trust deficit among the customers, but this is even more for fintechs like Piggyvest. According to Joshua, despite taking added measures to secure customers’ funds, any delayed transaction tends to breed some distrust among the users, and the company has to deal with this by providing information.

“This is the reason why we don’t do more of marketing but prefer to let people sell us with their testimonies. Customers tend to believe more the testimonials from other satisfied customers, and this how we have gotten over 1.5 million users and improved customer trust,” he explained.

When the economy went into lockdown, the business showed itself to be pandemic proof, as savings improved after the initial shock. The remote working policy was introduced, so that even in the aftermath of the lockdown, operations continued unhindered.

“We are a customer-centric brand, and the feedback from customers is our motivation. We are out to give them the best experience ever,” he concluded.