Why African Startups Don’t Always Need to Expand Across the Continent

PiggyVest co-founder Odunayo Eweniyi says fintech products aren’t necessarily replicable in other African countries.Odunayo Eweniyi is the co-founder and chief operating officer of PiggyVest, a Nigerian startup that operates as a digital wealth-management platform. 

The 8-year-old company has over 4.5 million users, and is one of Nigeria’s biggest fintech startups.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PiggyVest has operated in Nigeria for more than seven years. Are you considering expanding into other markets?

When you think of expansion as a Nigerian company, you think of [moving into] Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. But besides the similarities in macroeconomics, you’ll realize that products aren’t necessarily replicable in African countries. 

For instance, product adoption is slower in countries like Ghana, and scaling a digital savings product in Kenya will be a huge challenge. For a country like Egypt, you can’t exactly take a product called PiggyVest and expect adoption.

We spent the first four or five years building a solid foundation in Nigeria. So, considering the conditions that made us successful here, our next market could be Thailand, Brazil, or Mexico. It could even be Ethiopia or South Africa.

How do you measure growth without expanding to more markets for more users?

Our product offerings continue to expand. We have grown from serving just young people to other demographics that need to do more with their money, other than saving.

We enable our users to invest their funds. We are taking lessons from global companies to continue to layer more offerings on our product to provide more value to our customers. The reliability of our product and the accessibility of our team have helped in building trust over the years.

Which global fintech firms do you learn from?

We take bits and pieces from many companies — like Ant Group, after which we loosely modeled bits of the PiggyVest ecosystem. We’ve exchanged ideas with the CEO of Wealthsimple, a Canadian company. A new feature we are launching soon is a product of those exchanges. There’s also Onyx in America. 

We’ve learned from these companies how to diversify our product, build a strong ecosystem network, and create great user experiences and financial education. 

Source: https://restofworld.org/2024/3-minutes-with-odun-eweniyi/