‘Savers have been the major marketers of CashBox’

Sydney Aigbogun, the founder and CEO of online savings platform, CashBox, in this interview with BusinessDay’s Frank Eleanya speaks on the growth of the company and how it has built an army of users willing to market it at every given opportunity.

Savings used to be a challenge for many people, particularly with low-income earners, until platforms like yours came along. Tell us about the experience of convincing people that Cashbox is a platform they can trust.

When we launched, we were quite worried about the acceptance, like every new business we weren’t sure if people would welcome the idea and trust us enough to save their money. But within the first 1 week, we already had about 500 registered savers. We found out that many people actually want to save, but they were only used to the traditional wooden/clay box and local savings groups “Ajo/ Esusu”. They could easily break that anytime, and that most people were actually not very good at using those clay box and “Ajo” stories were not encouraging. Trying to convince people to save with CashBox hasn’t really been too difficult, they see that the platform is safe, licensed and we provide 24/7 customer support so that already gives them a level of confidence. The amount you can save in CashBox is limitless, some people save to buy a phone while others can even save to buy a house depending on what your income allows you save. We constantly create awareness so people get to know of CashBox and our users have been our major marketers. They like CashBox and confidently introduce it to their family and friends. And since users can save as low as N100, that already opens the market to almost everybody.

What made you decide to build CashBox?

CashBox was founded because we saw a void in the market. The average individual wants to save but wants to do that easily, safely and without being charged unnecessary maintenance fees and charges. Strangely, it was more of illiterate and semi-literate agents that were involved in this savings market. They were in the form of local contributions, with zero use of technology and little education, so their reach was very limited, hence the reason why we decided to go into this space and help savers achieve more and securely save most importantly. We decided to find a way to get this savings product to almost anybody that has a mobile phone and wants to save money. With the help of technology, we have been able to build CashBox and make it extremely secure since we use Bank Grade security on the platform. With the use of an ATM card or bank transfer, you can easily save in CashBox.

So far you have not announced any fundraise unlike some of your top competitors; is this deliberate?

At the moment, we are concentrating on our customers. We are a customer-centric company and we want to make sure our savers enjoy the best experience first. We haven’t announced any fundraising because we haven’t had need for it yet, but maybe in the future, we would, but for now, we just want to continue providing top-notch services and get as many customers to build a healthy savings culture. Should we have the need to raise funds, we will be open to that, already some potential investors have reached out to us, but we want to be very sure we need the funds before accepting it. Also, we want to keep the mission and vision of the company the same and that is putting customer satisfaction at the peak.

Which category of people saves the most of your platform and why?

Our top savers at the moment are Millennials and mostly between the ages of (19-35) and female gender top the list right now, but the men are not far behind. I think why we have more of this age group is because our major form of marketing has been social media and that is where these Millennials are mostly. But we do have quite a number of savers in their forties and a few fifties.

What exactly would a user have to do to earn as much as 15% on Cashbox?

Lowest interest any saver can earn on CashBox is 7 percent and that is for even the N100 savers. As your balance increases, the interest earned also increases. To earn 15 percent interest on CashBox, a user would have to use our “Locked savings” feature to lock away money for at least 360 days. The 15 percent interest would then be paid to the user upfront. The user can withdraw this upfront interest earned or decide to save it as well.

How do you insure users’ funds and in what instruments do you invest them?

Security of savers funds is our priority at CashBox and we do not take that lightly. We do not invest in any risky investment; we only invest in absolutely risk-free securities like Treasury bills and the likes.

Cashbox started in 2018, what has been the growth story so far?

The growth has been amazing and beyond what we even expected. In the first few months of launching, we already had over 10,000 savers and the number keeps rising every day. We have users in almost every state in Nigeria. We also have a number of users in Ghana, Kenya, UK, US, Germany, Russia and many more. Basically, any country that has a Nigerian who is interested in saving money back home can use CashBox. What we expected to achieve in the first year happened in just the first few months and our reviews online have been very encouraging. Like I previously mentioned, our customers have been our major marketers, seeing that makes us very proud of the company we founded.

Some savings platform now features investment opportunities. Is that an area CashBox is likely to go into?

At the moment, we do not plan on going down that road because of some risky elements in such investments. It would bring more money to the company but at the same time exposing us to more risk which we do not want. Should we decide to invest in anything in the future, the users would be briefed and we would all have to vet that investment together. But right now, we only invest in risk-free securities and intend staying that way for a long time.

Are you planning on going into mobile money services soon?

Fintech space is very wide and our users keep asking us for more services, but safety of our users’ information is key. Right now, we are not in the mobile money space, but we never can tell what the future holds. It all depends on what our many users ask for and if we believe it’s something that will benefit the populace, then we might consider it.

When is your mobile application coming out and what should users expect?

Our users have been patiently waiting for the release of this app. The delay has mainly been because we don’t want to take security for granted. Our Android and iOS apps will be released very soon, most likely within the next one month. And our users can expect the same level of top-notch services they’ve been getting, and they can be assured that all their personal and banking details will be very safe and secure on our apps.