The people who call the shots at Piggytech

In six years, customers withdrew ₦1.1 trillion from Piggytech, a Nigerian fintech app. Here are the executives who powered the company’s growth.

Piggytech, the parent company of Piggyvest, Pocket, and Patronize, has grown from a savings platform in 2016 to a diversified financial services company with multiple licences today with over 170 staff. Powering this remarkable growth has been the same set of cofounders and executives who were students together at Covenant University.

Founded in 2016 by Somto Ifezue (CEO), Odunayo Eweniyi (COO), and Joshua Chibueze (CMO), the company operates a hierarchical structure where the co-founders and the founding team—Nonso Eagle (chief creative officer), Terry Kanu (chief partnerships), Ibukun Akinola (head of customer finance), and Ayo Akinola, who now works on the Pocket product—report directly to Ifezue.

All seven were part of the founding team at PushCV, a recruitment company founded two years before Piggytech. That the team has remained together for so long is rare in Nigeria’s fintech space, where churn is quite common and cofounders often leave companies. “We are friends and have been through it all together. It’s like having your own accountability group. We know our strengths and weaknesses and have been able to complement each other,” Chibueze told TechCabal on how the founding team has been able to stay together.

The stability also flows to middle management, where the company prefers to promote internally rather than bring in new hires. According to a source at the company, Piggytech rarely breaks this tradition and the few instances that it was broken were when a new department was created.

“When we started to expand into what we are today, it was very clear that we should promote the people from the beginning, and they have over the years improved themselves. The people who are in top positions today are mostly people who understand the core values and DNA of the company,” Chibueze said.

High-profile leadership changes include the recent hire of Sayo BiluBaje from Stanbic IBTC Stockbrokers as Senior Compliance Officer in 2022, Daniel Orubo from Zikoko as Head of Content and Content Strategy in 2021 (the department covers social media, brand design, and marketing), the rehiring of Karen Onigbide as Senior Product Manager (Onigbide had previously worked at PushCV and Piggyvest as product manager and product specialist) in 2021, and the promotion of Ojimaojo Udale-Ameh to Head of Engineering, who has been with the company since 2019.

The engineering team reports to Ifezue, the company’s first engineering lead. The legal, business development and operations teams report to Eweniyi, while the entire marketing, content and customer success teams report to Chibueze, who leads the largest team.

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