Odunayo Eweniyi: Success is financial freedom for majority of people in Nigeria and Africa and to attain that, we need a level of financial education and financial access which is why we are not just trying to build a digital bank, but trying to build a digital ecosystem.

 

David Madden: Silicon Valley likes to say that it's “making the world a better place” - but that's mostly bullshit.

 

The problems that most famous tech companies are solving aren't real problems. But in other countries, developing countries, there are entrepreneurs who are building things that are actually changing people's lives, in very practical ways.

 

That's what this podcast is about. I'm David Madden and this is the Revolution of Necessity.

 

On this podcast, we share the stories of tech entrepreneurs in developing countries. These are people who are innovating in places where technology could genuinely make the world a better place.

 

This podcast is supported by Omidyar Network. Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm set up by the guy who created eBay, Pierre Omidyar, and his wife Pam.

 

If you like this podcast please take a second to rate us and to click subscribe, so you don’t miss any episodes.

 

Financial Technology, or “fintech”, over the last decade it’s been huge. And especially in the developing world, there’s a big focus on “financial inclusion” helping people get access to the financial services they need.

 

Now that’s cool, but access is just one step along the way. What we really care about is financial health, that people have the money they need.

 

Today, I’m talking to a startup that’s working on exactly this problem.  

 

Piggybank is a company that is using technology and lots of smart, behavioral insights to help people in Nigeria save.

 

They like to say “we make you save” and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

 

They’re less than three years old, but already they’ve helped more than 70,000 users save the equivalent of 7.5 million dollars.

 

Piggybank’s users love them and they have a bold vision to be a new kind of digital bank that helps people throughout africa achieve financial freedom.  

 

Odun Eweniyi is Piggybank’s co-founder. Odun, welcome to the Revolution of Necessity.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Thank you for having me.

 

David Madden: Now Odun, I've heard that you were a pretty precocious child. Is it true that you graduated from high school at just 14?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah. It is, it is true. Yeah.

 

David Madden: Woah!

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I, well, I have two lecturers, professors for parents, so my mum is a hard worker and I think as soon as I could walk and talk she was like “Okay, it’s time for school”.  

 

David Madden: What was it like to be graduating from high school at 14?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Pretty normal, I would say. I had some people in highschool who were also 14, same class.

 

David Madden: But did you go to a, like, gifted students high school or something?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: No, my parents wouldn't allow that (laughter).

 

David Madden: Really?

​

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah, they, they actually really felt strongly that I should be around, for lack of a better word, “normal people”. I went to a catholic primary school and a catholic secondary school and it really helped shaped like, what would become my life now and whatever discipline I possess now cause these, the nuns there, well they did not take bullshit. It was, it was a really strict environment. I, I think it was really important to go through that, yeah.

 

David Madden: At just 15 Odun enrolls in a computer engineering course at Nigeria’s Covenant University.

 

Starting school so young is an interesting experience.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I wasn't as refined as some of the other kids. Despite what secondary school had done to instill some discipline, I was still super opinionated and still am, but like in a more adult way now, I think. Then, it was mostly ask the question, if I thought you were wrong, no filters “You're wrong and I think you should be smarter” “Oh, this is stupid” and people don't really respond well to that kind of criticism because they are people who have feelings and, so, it took awhile. The academic aspect was super easy but the people-on-people interaction took some time.

 

David Madden: But ultimately it gives Odun an advantage.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Eventually, what I started to realize, was that because I was so much younger I had time to make, like, mistakes. Our, our environment here doesn't not permit lots of mistakes, so people who graduate from university usually do so at 22, 23, at which people expect your life to start immediately. So I graduated at 19, going on 20, so it was like, you know “I'm allowed to do this, like, I'm young enough, I have some time”. So I was reading books about cryptography, artificial intelligence. In fact, I actually thought, I thought, I thought I was going to become a writer full time even though I was studying computer engineering, I just really picked up on different hobbies, it really shaped me.

 

David Madden: It's one of the few universities in Nigeria that emphasizes tech entrepreneurship. So how did going to Covenant shape your career path?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Covenant University helped me meet the people I work with today, but shaped my career path. Honestly, as I was going through school, I didn't have any thoughts as to being an entrepreneur and that's the pure truth. If anyone had asked me at any point in Covenant University “What are going to do next?” My plans were clear: I'm going to get a masters, I'm going to get a PHD, all preferably in the US and become a professor, like my parents.

 

David Madden: Odun gets into two Ivy league masters programs in the US, but instead she finds something more exciting to do.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: After I graduated, I went home for two weeks and then I told my dad “I’m going back to Lagos to find a job.” I got an interview with a publication.

 

David Madden: A publication job wasn’t on the cards for Odun, either. Instead, an old school friend sees her wandering around Lagos.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I was just walking and wondering if I was going to take the job and someone leaned out of a window, and, his name is Somto, he just leaned out and like “Odun, yo, come inside” I, I entered and like “You live here?” He said "Yes, and I also work here this is my office and this is my house” like, you know? And then I was like "What are you doing here?" and he tells me he's running this start up and that do I want to work with him.

 

David Madden: Somto was a star engineer at Covenant so Odun says:

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: “Sure!”. I don't remember thinking about it for more than like a second. My dad always told me “You want people to remember your name. You want people to feel like you helped them”. So my parents really cultivated the culture of helping people and, so while I was in university, while I was in high school, I used to take tutorials, I used to feel good at knowing I made a difference in this person's grade. If I didn't help this person, this person may have not passed this well. There was a certain joy to just helping people understand something that they didn't understand before.

 

David Madden: Just like that, Odun starts working with Somto. Somto is building a discount platform, a sort of loyalty card program. Though that might not seem like the most altruistic goal, saving money can go along way in a place like Nigeria.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: This discount helps people save. And, I’ve, quality of life is something that I've always been conscious of, and known that like it's really low here. So if you can do something to help people save money, to spend less on something they want, that's not a bad deal. So I was willing to take that step, take that risk and just move forward with it.

 

David Madden: The market isn’t really ready for this discount platform and it doesn't work out. While Odun is looking for a new job, she gets an idea for another platform that she and Somto could build.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I did well in the interview. The interviewer actually told me so, but I didn't get the job and I when I asked the person why, he said because the, one of the people that came for the job interview knew someone at the company. So, uhm, some kind of nepotism went on and I didn't get the job. So I told Somto about it and he started to think about it. This shouldn't happen. People should get jobs on merits and so we started like trouble-shooting why. During our conversation we realized that while my CV might have been well written, lots of candidates might have been disqualified because of their CVs. So the first platform that he built, that we built, was CV Flash. People would submit their old CVs, we would polish the content and then generate a new CV for them. And then we started to get feedback from people, like “If you can write my CV for me, why can't you send it to an employer for me? You should be able to figure out who's hiring and who fits my qualifications.” So we started to build what became PushCV.

 

David Madden: In response to the demand from your customers, right?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Exactly, yeah, so, it's one of the lessons we learned from early on: the customers always shaped the product. Initially, it was just I and Somto working on it, he with the coding, I with, like, the everything else. And then we started to increase, organically we actually grew to about 10,000 users.

 

David Madden: How did you go from this recruitment business to Piggybank?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So in 2015, we started to get that traction and then we realized, when you get people jobs, being your customer kind of comes to an end, right? You are not really involved in the process any more so we decided, like “How can you further help people who are already in jobs?” So this was something we were ruminating on towards the end of 2015, like, really finding ways to retain people on the platform.

 

David Madden: Again, inspiration comes from an unlikely place.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: On Twitter someone broke a wooden box and told like Twitter that she saved 365,000 from putting 1,000 in the box every day.

 

David Madden: Why did people go so crazy about this social media post?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So saving is a big thing in Nigeria, you have to save up for everything. And for, like, foreign people is, the concept of having to save up for everything is a little strange cause if you wanted to rent an apartment for instance, you have first month’s rent and last month's rent, you're pretty good to go. Here, you're not. You have to pay a year or two in advance and usually, if you are living on the mainland is $2,000, $3,000, right? And it, it, it's a lot of money because the average income here is about $200 to $500 a month, right? so people having to save that amount of money for just a house, just one part of their needs, is really difficult.

 

David Madden: Because you’ve gotta pay all this money upfront?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, you pay and then well you don't, you don’t just pay for the house, you pay 10% of the full fee for agency, for legal, for all of this trumped up cost that you really are not prepared for.  

 

David Madden: So 1,000 NR a day is about, is about $3 a day.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, exactly.

 

David Madden: You got $3 a day, so this, this woman saves a bit over $1,000 in a year, right?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: $1,000 yes! Exactly! Yeah. People were impressed.

 

Discipline is really hard here, like, she's was able to, in spite of everything she must of had to do with money, cause e... even with the discipline there's so many things to do. Putting in 1,000 NR every day, even though you need to pay for your electricity bill, you need to buy cooking gas into the house and everything is really expensive. If you break a 1,000 NR note in Nigeria they would say it's gone. Like once you break it into change, it no longer exists. There's like a million things to spend it on. So that discipline is not a thing that many Nigerians have.

 

David Madden: This savings effort was especially impressive because 2015 is a tough year for the Nigerian economy. The currency falls and things get super expensive.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So impressive! Like, cause everything had doubled in price. I'd been buying eggs for 25 NR for as long as I can remember and now one is 50 NR, and that's saying something because even when it gets better, all of these things don't go back, they never do, so it just stays difficult, and, as Nigerians, we're so resilient that we find ways to keep moving forward and this woman's wooden box was like, was symbolic of that. She found a way to put money aside despite the fact that there was really no money to put aside and people were like “Oh, if she can do it, I can”

 

David Madden: Twitter’s a buzz and people get inspired.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: People started to sell wooden boxes on the platform, on Twitter, right? Like "I make wooden boxes" I, we call it in Nigeria it's called "kolo" and it’s like, it's unsustainable, right? like, it's wood, you can break that anytime. It requires like superhuman dedication to not break a wooden box that's just under your bed.

 

David Madden: All this excitement about saving gets the PushCV team thinking. Co-founder Joshua Chibueze has an idea.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So Joshua is like " Uhm, this might be the way we are able to retain people. They are not going to be on PushCV but they will be within our ecosystem. You can help them save the money they make from their jobs because people really need to save" I have to confess, I was really skeptical, like “why? why should people not use their banks?” And so he's like “We’ll figure that part out”.

 

David Madden: Odun and her colleagues are a bunch of engineers so, of course, they know there must be a better way.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I thought “Okay, I want to do this but I will not order a wooden box, it's too simplistic, it's too easy to break.”

 

David Madden: Their idea: create a digital version of that kolo, that locked wooden box. An online savings account that includes barriers to accessing the money.

They hack together a beta version. It automatically takes a specified amount of money from a debit account and puts it in a savings account.

 

They test it with a couple of hundreds users for a few months and then make some important improvements.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: At some point we had to do, like, when people started to, like adapt to it, we had to take it offline, for about a month for security purposes, like, and perfect the security cause, again, we're in Nigeria, super smart people, we always find a way around it so like “Okay, this has to be super secure so that nothing ever happens to people’s money.”

 

David Madden: After making sure it’s really secure, they’re ready to share it with the world.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I remember the first tweet we sent out about it, went so wide!

 

David Madden: What did that first tweet say?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: It just said “Do you want to save?” right? “Then use Piggybank, save automatically from your debit card, daily, weekly, or monthly, until you reach your target” and people started retweeting and people were asking “What is Piggybank? I want more details” The DMs were flooded. It was like “Okay, so this might be something!”

 

David Madden: Social media is pretty big in Nigeria, maybe you can just explain that.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah, well, yeah, it is, we, we love Twitter, like, we, we really do love Twitter and you, you can make or break a product on Twitter, and that’s the truth.

 

David Madden: And it's not just the tech community that likes Twitter, right?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: No, everybody, everybody. Social media is like our window to the rest of the world and we really leveraged it to really promote cause I, it is kind of a unifying entity, I don’t really know how to explain it, like, if you make a mistake on social media, it could kill your product. And you know the way people suffer backlashes abroad and PR still solves it, it doesn't fix it here. Once you're done, you're done.  

 

David Madden: Though social media is buzzing with excitement for Piggybank, there’s two big barriers: building trust, both with customers and the country’s central bank.

 

Odun, I want to ask you about putting this first version of the product together. To make this work, you had to get a partner, right? Uhm, who’s going to hold the money for you.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: As tech people, typically we didn't think through that until our investor was telling me and he was like “You guys know that the CBN will come after you for taking money from people?” and like “Oh!”

 

David Madden: And the CBN is the Central Bank of Nigeria, right?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, exactly. Central Bank of…. So we were like “Oh!”

 

David Madden: And it's pretty strict?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah, they're, uhm, they’re not very friendly with tech, mostly because they don't understand it yet. So it's like you need to cover your bases. So, he actually took the lead on introducing us to the microfinance bank we started to work with, cause we didn't know many.

 

David Madden: Why did you choose a microfinance bank, rather than a regular bank?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy.

 

David Madden: Okay, you thought they'd be easier to work with?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, Bureaucracy in that, the approval process, we needed to launch the product quickly, would be shorter with the microfinance bank than with the big bank and we were not wrong. We did show it around to other commercial banks where it was going to take a while so we started with the microfinance bank first, that we could roll it out.

 

David Madden: So, you called the service Piggybank, but you weren't a bank. And how did you get your users, all these people on Twitter who were interested in you, how did you get them to trust you?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So, we kind of kept it low key, just word of mouth spreading, no push, no, we didn't put money behind marketing. We also thought that like, uhm, mouth to mouth was the best kind of marketing for, initially for this kind of product because you can only convince people to put their money somewhere when someone they know has successfully put their money there. Like the big marketing comes after you've established a base, like I said, customers build your product, like, they are the people you serve so they are really important to the business. So, throughout that year it was really slow growth but we were also collecting data, studying consumer behavior, uhm, how people withdraw their moneys, how much they save, why somebody would suddenly increase how much they save, which meant, like, what did we do different to make you trust us just a little more, to give us more of your money? So even though the growth was slow, the information was so much and so interesting!

 

David Madden: So this is super organic, right? You're, you’re not putting any marketing dollars behind it.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: We, we really didn’t have marketing dollars, we’d wind up like disgrace us, so it was really slow, really steady, really people talking on Twitter or retweeting the good tweets, really fixing the bad customer service complaints we had.

 

David Madden: Piggybank is already pretty compelling: it’s offering a better interest rate than the banks and it includes some features that really help users save. For example, it only lets customers withdraw their money for free four times a year.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Outside of those days, if you try to withdraw we'll charge you 5% of the amount you're trying to take out.

 

David Madden: Piggybank’s been up and running for almost a year now. Gaining users mostly from word of mouth. A pivotal moment comes on December 31st, when majority of users will want to withdraw their hard earned savings.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Most people when they save, culturally, is like “I'm saving for a year to get it at the end of the year” right? so we knew that December 31st was going to be a defining moment, right? everybody had to get their money and everybody had to get their money on time. No mistakes. So what we did, it was people requested for their money and they got it immediately, immediately, immediately, and they took social media; it was like an outpouring: “Piggybank is the best” “Piggybank is the biggest” “Piggybank is the best” So we grew between December and January, we added so many new users.  

 

David Madden: In this one month, Piggybank grows from just over 400 users to thousands of users.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: The thing about it, it’s mostly about the platform doing exactly what it promises the way it promises. And that was it. People started to push the platform and the thing that we noticed is they started to own it, like, if you asked “What is Piggybang?” a user will answer you, before we even do, like, they're so fast! I couldn't be more proud cause of like, you hardly do something that affects people so much. We didn't have a lot of money, I couldn’t say it, like, it’s not, not really about how much you've raised or… it’s, it’s the good will that comes with doing something, solving a problem for people.   

 

David Madden: Now throughout 2016 Piggybank has been a side project for the PushCV team, but it now looks like it’s got real potential. Odun and her co-founders decide to they should give Piggybank a serious go.

 

Was that a hard decision to make?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes! It was hard. I, I feel very strongly attached to anything I work on. But it's like, thinking about growth, thinking about impact, the finance had the potential to give a lot more people financial freedom, which is the goal we're heading for, and recruitment and jobs is, has like a limited impact to literate people.

 

David Madden: Also significant, around this time, in early 2017, Piggybank gets accepted into a fintech accelerator run by Village Capital: a well known US venture capital firm. It’s a chance to get some expert help to really advance the business.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: It goes over three months. January to...actually four, January, February, March, April. Holds in Kenya, Ghana and Lagos here.

 

David Madden: What was the most important thing you got out of the Village Capital accelerator program, Odun?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Narrative, narrative for me. Like, before then, I'd go out to talk about Piggybank and just to ramble on. Putting all you sell in one sentence, Village Capital actually was when I crafted the: “Piggybank is a platform that helps Africans save automatically daily, weekly, or monthly, till they reach a specific target” As, that sentence is simple, but it took so long to get it together, right? we saw so many people test run it, change it around and eventually arrived there. Like, the problems you are solving are real but your audience may not always think so. They really drill down into understanding the audience, uhm, knowing what to eliminate. If I'm talking to Nigerians, I don't need to really have to explain to them about the hardships of Nigeria, they get it, so spend time on the product. When you're talking to people outside of Nigeria, you need to explain the landscape, you need to draw them in, make them feel like they're in Nigeria first before you then tell them the problem you're solving.

 

David Madden: Village Capital is offering $50k to the two most promising startups in the accelerator. The only catch: the startups in the program have to decide who should get the money.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Peer selection. And I’m like “wow” cause like the thought of having to pander to people like is really exhausting. But, but they made it clear that, uh, we were all supposed to put aside our biases, it’s not about who deserves the money, it's about what product meets some criteria that they set out and what products make the most improvements in that time.

 

Quite luckily, by the end of April, by the end of program, we were one of the two startups that got investment money, so.

 

David Madden: Armed with $50,000 from Village Capital, the Piggybank team does some important product development.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: The first thing we did was to start building the apps “Where's your mobile app, where's your mobile app?” So, I was like, “Okay!” These apps are super important so we first banged out the android and apple, uhm, apps first of all, and the reception was crazy, and then we now launched a new feature, the safe lock feature, which helped us, for lack of a better word, retain more money on the platform.

 

David Madden: Tell us how the safe lock feature works.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So, the safe lock works like a fixed deposit. In the safe lock of Piggybank for instance, let me use an example, you saved a million NR, alright? but out of that million NR, on, on July 25th, you need to use 500k NR out of that million NR for something specific. Even though your money is in Piggybank, you still can, you can withdrawal, just pay 5%. But like this 500k is important that you don't touch it. So you then decide Piggybank safe lock this 500k NR till July 25th.

 

David Madden: Where did the idea for safe lock come from?

​

Odunayo Eweniyi: The customers!

 

David Madden: Again.

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Odunayo Eweniyi: The customers again. So the people keep asking “Look, I know my money's in Piggybank, but if I, if I consider the 5% penalty low enough, I'll just take it out, right? so I don't want to touch this money. Can I put aside where I cannot touch it?”

 

David Madden: So Odun, it seems like your strategy for figuring out how to help people save.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Is listening to them.

 

David Madden: Is just listening to them.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I firmly believe that if you listen hard enough, you figure out what people need, and you can just give it to them, alright? You don't build products in isolation.

 

David Madden: Piggybank’s customers have been central to its marketing. The team developed a really strong word-of-mouth strategy.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: We call it Piggybank Stories. So when you've saved up a particular amount, you're allowed to tell you story on the platform. Where we feature you, your picture, your name and your Piggybank story. So after you write that story, a referral link is generated and people can then sign up on Piggybank.

 

David Madden: Do the person who tells the story, do they get any incentive?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, they, they get 500 NR per person who signs up and 500 NR into their Piggybank per person who signs up using their link.

​

David Madden: Okay.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: But the most important part of that is that, people do not just want “Here’s your referral link”. There’s a personal touch there, you need to make your referral seem like genuine and from the heart. So people read the person's words, and then at the end of it when you, if you're impressed by the story, you click on their link and sign up. And it doesn't really feel like someone just pitched the product, it feels like someone just told you their experience. So that’s how we do, that’s how we work with referrals. And that was an in-house development.

 

David Madden: And the testimonials section, of the, of the Piggybank site, it's, it’s bananas! like...

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: It is, yeah, it’s like, it’s funny, we have like a thousand stories on there, like, there’s so many.

 

David Madden: Yeah, more I think.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah, we, we clocked 1,000 in, in January…

 

David Madden: Piggybank’s customer-driven product and marketing strategy has resulted in very strong growth.

 

The company has grown enormously: from just a few thousands users at the beginning of 2017, Piggybank now, in September 2018, has 72,000 users. And those users have saved 2.7 billion naira, or about 7.5 million dollars.

 

Piggybank’s goal is clear: they want to be a new kind of bank, a digital bank, but not just for those who are lucky enough to already have a bank account.

 

To fast track this goal they recently acquired a microfinance bank.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: So it's like just getting a jump start on building our own kind of digital bank. So they would be like the back end operations for Piggybank. It gives micro finance a chance to have banked customers and also a chance to break into the unbanked market.

 

David Madden: This is important because in Nigeria there’s about 46 million adults without banks accounts.

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: There's a whole agency in adult aspect that we still have to explore, that microfinance banks will give us a jump start on. Eventually the path to becoming a commercial bank in Nigeria is a very difficult one, and you need experience and maintaining the digital aspect, you need tech. So we would marry the own financial experience, our own tech experience and kind of try to create a new digital micro finance bank that hopefully grows into a digital commercial bank.

 

David Madden: To achieve their vision, Piggybank needs to grow and, to do that, they’ve just raised $1.1m, mostly from local investors led by Nigerian seed capital fund LeadPath. The plan?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: All about marketing and expansion. Like we've largely operated in Lagos but it's time to start bringing in people from all over Nigeria.

 

David Madden: What’s your vision for, for Piggybank? What does success look like?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Success is financial freedom for majority of people in Nigeria and Africa and to attain that, we need a level of financial education and financial access which is why we are not just trying to build a digital bank, but trying to build a digital ecosystem, not just banking, just every financial thing, cause the, the mission we have is to allow people attain financial freedom through financial discipline. Piggybank has started that and we think that all the other add on products will set people on the path of financial freedom cause it’s just not about the savings, it’s not just about the investments, it’s a healthy mix of everything. So, that, that would be success for us.

 

David Madden: Do you want to go beyond Nigeria?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yes, yes! Uhm, our expansion plan starts from Ghana and then entering to South Africa.

 

David Madden: Why Ghana?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Ghana because is exactly like Nigeria just like, there’s no more difference, you know, except the accent I think. (laughter)

 

David Madden: Is that what the Ghanaians would say too?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: I, I don’t think they would agree. We have, we have an unhealthy rivalry but at the heart of it, it’s mostly the same, and then South Africa because they also operate a bank led system like Nigeria where and then from there, after establishing well in those 3 countries, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, we then begin to explore other models like Kenia where it’s a mobile led system. It would be interesting to see how we can fit Piggybank to that kind of system, then into the Francophone Africa because people don’t build for Francophone Africa a lot yet and we will want to be one of the pioneers for that.

 

David Madden: Odun, it’s been a great pleasure talking to you today, uhm, I wish you and the Piggybank team all the best and uhm, good luck shooting for financial freedom!

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Thank you so much! Thank you.

 

David Madden: Thanks for listening to the Revolution of Necessity.  

 

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This episode was produced by Julia Alsop with production assistance from Ellie Lightfoot and Naomi Gingold and editing help from Sarah Barrett. Our engineer is William Smith. Music by Coyote Mustache.

 

Special thanks to ARL studios in Lagos and Clean Cuts Studios in DC.

 

We’ll have another episode for you very soon.

 

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Does Piggybank have an anthem?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: It’s just the song of the moment or whatever song that is most popular at that time.

 

David Madden: You don’t have a special song that like gets you through the tough times? What about you personally?

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Oh, me personally! I have, I have! Uhm, it’s, it's a song from Sia, it's called Birds Set Free.

 

David Madden: Birds Set Free…

 

Odunayo Eweniyi: Yeah, and the secondary one is Andra Day’s Rise Up. So those two songs they actual... I play them every day actually because they actually wake me up in the morning. I’m a horrible morning person just feel that “oh, what is this day?” So you listen to them on a loop and just kind of makes everything seem a little better.