Crowdyvest Limited, an impact-driven fintech platform, launched in 2019 by Onyeka Akumah and four other Co-Founders has today announced a big change in its leadership and additional investment in the company, in a bid to scale up as a digital savings company.

Crowdyvest was created to provide all-in-one financial solutions for individuals and businesses to achieve short or long-term goals while facilitating impactful growth in line with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Fintech company went live in beta-stage in August 2019 but launched fully as a crowdfunding platform in January 2020 where its users and sponsors can sponsor high-impact opportunities that yield good benefits through its pooled sponsorships and individual projects.

Today, however, the company announced Onyeka Akumah will officially step down as the CEO of Crowdyvest and Tope Omotolani who is currently the Managing Director and also a co-founder, will become the new Chief Executive Officer of the startup, effective immediately. Notwithstanding this change in leadership, all the management and staff of Crowdyvest will be retained. And as a result of the new investment in Crowdyvest, the fintech startup will completely exit the EMFATO Holdings group and also transition from its previous crowdfunding model to making strides as the go-to digital wealth management and savings platform under Tope’s leadership.

Onyeka Akumah speaking on this development said, “I have taken this decision to step down as the CEO of Crowdyvest as a result of the new investment in the company which gives it good footing for scale. Today, Crowdyvest is exiting fully from EMFATO Holdings and we are very happy about the new investors led by Tope, and excited to see how Tope will lead this business to new heights. I will now focus more on leading Farmcrowdy and Plentywaka as CEO of both companies into new markets in 2021. Tope is a strong and amazing leader and I see her leading Crowdyvest to become one of the leading wealth management companies in Nigeria within the next 3-5 years. I wish her and the team all the best and will continue to advise them on their journey when needed’’.

Tope Omotolani

The new CEO, Tope Omotolani also said, “It’s an honor and a privilege for me to be able to lead the team to the next level and next chapter of the business. Onyeka founded this company on the ethos of integrity and strong customer satisfaction and I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue to lead this technology company into it’s next chapter. Our major goal and focus as Crowdyvest is that we see a lot of people become financially free and we’re able to do this by the products that we create on the platform”.

The emergence of female leaders has become a centrifugal force for good in the world and many organisations. For the first time, we’re seeing examples of female leaders emerging from across the generations to cross-weave their knowledge and drive for change and Crowdyvest is joining the wave of change having a Female Leader and CEO.

Crowdyvest is today launching the Crowdyvest Savings Platform to give savings options to over 10,000 subscribed members on it’s platform. This savings platform will give its members a variety of plans to help build a savings culture based entirely on their pace, so they can reach their life goals faster.

This savings platform has four products that are properly tailored to fit all categories of individuals, including the Millenials, Gen Z, Gen X, and Baby Boomers, and each of these products have their unique features and benefits. They are;

Flex Savings which speaks to our young and trendy Gen Zs and Millenials, gives them the opportunity to save as much as they like with the option of withdrawing their money at any time during the year with a withdrawal fee of 2%. The Flex savers also have the opportunity of 7 official withdrawal days which comes without a withdrawal fee.

Vault Savings here, users have the opportunity to safely deposit money into their vaults and lock it for a period of time (3 months, 6 months, or for years). Funds deposited in the vault will be locked and ineligible for withdrawal throughout the locked period. The vault savings is for long-term savings and is targeted at pensioners, trust funds savings, legacy savings, etc.

Pace Savings, savers have the opportunity to deposit money as they wish for a set target. The pace savings option is recurring starting with the least period of 3 months. The money can be deposited automatically into the plan or manually based on the saver’s preference. The plan is targeted at salary earners, entrepreneurs, etc.

Flex Dollar Savings gives savers the opportunity to save and earn returns in dollars. Crowdyvest Members have the opportunity to grow their savings in a more valuable & stable denomination.

Every saver enjoys the benefits of good interest rates from 12.5% to 15%, zero bank charges, plans tailored for everyone, and effective and prompt customer service. We also have referral opportunities where you can earn as much as NGN 1000 for every person you refer to Crowdyvest. For more information, visit the Crowdyvest website.

Previously as a crowdfunding platform, Crowdyvest was able to create an impact by funding 24 projects across various sectors including Agriculture, Real Estate, Transportation, etc, has worked with 9 project partners, has operated in 17 states with over 10,000+ active sponsors, over 90,000+ total users, and over 8,000 Monthly Active Users. Today, the company is a Digital Savings platform with closed membership, Crowdyvest will provide financial solutions for her community of individuals and organizations that are committed to long-term growth and financial freedom.

The relationship between brands and consumers in today’s digital world has shifted. In the past, brands could easily define the message and pre-determine the pathway of the customer’s journey. However, with consumers’ embrace of multiple devices (mobile, email, web, POS etc) as interaction points, the journey is now a multi-dimensional, multi-platform customer journey. This means that customers can appear at any time online (on the web) or offline (on mobile via SMS or USSD) – the path to conversion is now completely owned by the customer.

Interestingly, amidst this multiplicity of devices and platforms, the consumer also wants a seamless personalized experience across all platforms and devices. He doesn’t want to interact with an Advert via SMS and still gets bombarded with that same Advert when he logs into his Facebook account on the web. This is where Omnichannel Marketing becomes important.

The use of various channels to create one, unified experience for your customers is what is referred to as Omnichannel Marketing. This includes both traditional and digital channels, point-of-sale, in-store, and online experiences. It involves the creation of a seamless message that adjusts to your customer based on their behaviour through your sales funnel, providing the ultimate personalized customer experience. According to Forbes, “brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience. In fact, 86% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience.”

It is easy to confuse “Omnichannel marketing” with “Multichannel marketing.” While multichannel marketing starts with the company and moves outwards to the different channels, omnichannel marketing starts with the consumer and interacts between channels for a seamless experience. By this simple explanation, the fact that Brands will spend far less and get better performance on their Ad Spends adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy versus a multichannel marketing strategy is evident.

Omnichannel marketing pulls the customer into the centre of the strategy, and the channels that the customer uses to engage with the brand not only have a unified message, but that message adapts to each touchpoint a customer has with the brand. This means that the messages the customer sees, regardless of the channel, will update once the customer has taken the desired action.

For instance, with omnichannel marketing, a bank customer who started an account opening session via his mobile, but drops off and later logs into his Facebook account, should see an ad reminding him to continue with the account opening, from where he stopped rather than being targeted as a new lead. This will guarantee a top-notch customer experience and reduce cost on ad spend.

With the level of personalisation that omnichannel marketing offers, more savvy Brands invest in technology tools and software such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to achieve this. According to a PwC report, the number of companies that invest in omnichannel marketing has jumped from 20% to more than 80% since 2020.

The Terragon Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one of such powerful tools that several multinational FMCG Brands and top tier Banks have invested in to get ahead of the curve in superior omnichannel customer experience. With online (web) and offline (mobile) activation channels, Brands can reach their customers intelligently via email, SMS on their mobile phones to their Facebook via the Facebook Conversions API.-With strategic partnerships with major Telcos, publishers, digital Platforms, Ad exchanges to enable reach via mobile, web, email and most recently a direct Server-to-Server integration to Facebook as the only African-founded CDP partner for the Facebook Conversions API in Africa; the Terragon CDP is uniquely structured to help Brands execute an effective omnichannel marketing strategy and ultimately make better returns on their Ad Spend.

The Terragon CDP also helps Brands to understand their customers by aggregating their customers’ first-party data from various sources, enriching it with data sourced from various third-party data supply-side partners and then giving a 360-degree view of customers. With well-modelled Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, the CDP is able to segment these customers according to various data points (demographic, geographic, behavioural and psychographics etc) and allows Brands to activate campaigns via various channels – mobile (SMS and USSD), email, web and social media (Facebook).

With continuous ingestion of data and Machine learning analytics by the CDP, Brands can tell exactly where each customer is on the sales conversion journey/funnel to allow for tailored adverts specific to each customer, based on their unique journey till they convert. This as well as the feedback loop capability (post-campaign), provides Brands with continuous updates for data enrichment and a better understanding of their customers, in order to know the most effective way to reach them. For instance, a consumer Brand may choose to reach a millennial via social media advert, a middle-aged white-collar worker via email and an artisan via SMS to promote the same stable product. As the Customer continues to evolve over time, these channel preferences may change and these updates can be detected via the CDP.

In today’s world where there’s a lot of attention on data privacy, customers are increasingly wary of how much information brands have about them and how frequently brands are able to reach them. This is a legitimate concern that the Terragon CDP caters to by adopting the strictest of data privacy and governance measures.

Terragon is Africa’s leading enterprise marketing technology company, that employs the use of data and analytics to help companies connect at scale to their customers.

To activate omnichannel marketing, send an email to [email protected]