ABA Editorial · Jan 11, 2026 · 12 min read
PiggyVest has over 7 million users saving an average of NGN 25,000 every second as of 2024. Bamboo has over 500,000 investor accounts. Risevest has processed USD 42 million in investor payouts and operates across five African countries. Cowrywise opened stock trading access to over 800,000 users in March 2025 and saw 12,000 new signups in one week. Inside the retail investing boom, the regulatory shift, and why Gen Z Nigerian retail trading jumped 88 percent month-on-month in July 2025.
If you wanted to understand how African attitudes toward personal finance are changing, the fastest place to look would be Nigeria's retail investment platforms. Ten years ago, the idea of a working-class Lagos resident holding fractional shares of Amazon through a smartphone app was absurd. In 2026 it is ordinary. PiggyVest has over 7 million users. Cowrywise has more than 800,000. Bamboo processes retail investor orders for Nigerian and US stocks from over 500,000 users. Risevest operates across five African countries after acquiring Kenyan investment startup Hisa. The wealthtech category has become one of the most successful African fintech verticals, and the combination of economic pressure and mobile technology has drawn Gen Z into retail investing in numbers that would be remarkable anywhere. This is a market report on African wealthtech in 2026, what each player does, and why the category has grown even during a period of severe naira volatility.
The primary driver of African wealthtech adoption is currency protection. Nigerians, Kenyans, Egyptians, and Ghanaians watching their local currencies depreciate against the US dollar have been looking for practical ways to hold value in hard currency. Before wealthtech platforms existed, the options were narrow: offshore bank accounts that required documentation most working-class citizens could not provide, real estate investments that required lump sums most could not afford, or physical cash held at home. Wealthtech platforms solved this by offering dollar-denominated mutual funds, US stock exposure, and fractional investment products that let a user put USD 10 into an S&P 500 index fund from a smartphone app.
The economics of this shift are now visible in aggregate Nigerian capital market statistics. According to reporting by African Business in November 2025, retail trading on the Nigerian Exchange jumped 88 percent month-on-month in July 2025 to NGN 516.5 billion (approximately USD 351 million), nearly a third of the NGN 1.8 trillion in total trade recorded that month. Out of 151,749 brokerage accounts registered with the Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) between January and June 2025, 70 percent (105,442) were opened by digital-based brokers such as Cowrywise, Bamboo, and Chaka rather than by traditional full-service brokers. The Nigerian Exchange All-Share Index rose 37.7 percent in 2024 and was up 38.7 percent in the nine months to September 2025, driven largely by domestic investors.
PiggyVest was founded in 2016 by Somto Ifezue, Odunayo Eweniyi, and Joshua Chibueze, originally as Piggybank.ng. The company started with a simple automated savings product: users could lock funds into savings goals, set automated deposit rules, and earn interest rates meaningfully above commercial bank accounts. The simplicity was the point. PiggyVest is not trying to be a full financial services platform. It is trying to be the place where a Nigerian twentysomething deposits their first serious savings and develops the habit of saving at all.
The scale is impressive. According to figures cited by TechCabal in September 2025, PiggyVest has over 7 million users, and as of 2024 each user was saving an average of NGN 25,000 every second (a metric that refers to platform-wide aggregate deposit flow rather than per-user cadence). The company partners with AIICO Capital for the asset management layer behind its savings products and has expanded into investment opportunities as its customer base has matured. PiggyVest's investors include VFD Group and Flutterwave.
Cowrywise was founded in 2017 by Razaq Ahmed and Edward Popoola. Ahmed, a CFA holder with a background at Vetiva Capital Management, and Popoola, formerly at Interswitch Group, built Cowrywise as a wealth management platform focused on mutual funds, savings plans, and financial education. The platform is licensed by Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission and offers naira and dollar-denominated mutual funds with historical annual returns in the 10 to 22 percent range depending on fund selection.
Cowrywise's most interesting moment in 2025 came with Nigeria's Investment and Securities Act reforms, which opened direct stock trading access to retail platforms. Cowrywise launched stock trading for its more than 800,000 users in March 2025, and according to African Business reporting, more than 12,000 new accounts were opened in one week immediately following the launch. The company's investor base includes Quona Capital, Kairoos Ventures, Catalyst Fund, and the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. Cowrywise's distinctive feature is its "investment circles," which let users pool savings with friends and family, which is a digital evolution of the traditional esusu or ajo informal savings groups familiar to many Nigerians.
Bamboo and Risevest represent the distinctively African wealthtech category of retail US stock access. Bamboo, with over 500,000 users and over 1 million cumulative downloads, offers fractional US stock investing alongside Nigerian stock exposure. Bamboo has raised USD 15 million across its funding rounds.
Risevest, founded in February 2020 by Eke Urum and Bosun Olanrewaju (an Andela alumnus) and now led by Tony Odiba, focuses specifically on dollar-denominated global assets. Risevest offers three primary product lines: US stocks (with historical annual returns of approximately 14 percent), US real estate (approximately 15 percent), and fixed income (approximately 10 percent). As of late 2024, Risevest had processed over USD 42 million in payouts to its users and operated in five countries, including Nigeria and Kenya. Risevest entered Kenya in September 2024 by acquiring Hisa, a Kenyan investment startup, after approval from Kenya's Capital Markets Authority.
The Risevest model is significant because it treats dollar-denominated investing as a cross-border service. A user in Lagos, Accra, or Nairobi can use the same Risevest app to invest in the same underlying US assets, with the platform handling the regulatory and operational complexity of moving naira, cedi, or shilling into USD-denominated positions. This is wealthtech as naira-hedge infrastructure, and it is one of the clearest product-market fits in African fintech.
Egypt has its own parallel wealthtech ecosystem, largely disconnected from the Nigerian and Kenyan stories. Thndr is the leading Egyptian retail investment platform, regulated by Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), and offers access to Egyptian stocks, mutual funds, and increasingly international assets. Dash operates in a similar category. Both platforms benefit from Egypt's more mature stock market infrastructure and Gulf-adjacent investor base, but both face similar dynamics to Nigerian platforms: currency depreciation concerns driving users toward dollar exposure, and a young educated population eager to build wealth through means other than traditional banking.
The Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission has shown unusual flexibility in adapting to wealthtech. The SEC established "FinPort," a regulatory portal for engaging with fintech companies on compliance matters. The Investment and Securities Act reforms of 2025 opened retail stock trading access that was previously restricted to commercial brokerage channels. The SEC has publicly stated that it welcomes "tools and platforms that broaden participation, increase liquidity and deepen the capital market's reach," which is about as pro-innovation a posture as any African securities regulator has taken.
The counterpart to this openness is genuine consumer protection concern. The SEC's approach has included monitoring emerging financial innovations, building assessment capacity, and developing adaptive regulatory responses rather than issuing blanket rules. Cowrywise, Bamboo, Chaka, and Trove Finance all hold appropriate SEC licenses, which is the thing that separates legitimate wealthtech from consumer-facing crypto platforms or unregulated investment schemes.
Three things. First, whether wealthtech platforms maintain their growth during periods of naira stability. Much of the 2024-2025 growth was driven by currency anxiety. If the naira strengthens, does the urgency of dollar diversification remain? Second, whether platform consolidation accelerates. With seven or eight significant Nigerian wealthtech players competing for overlapping customer bases, some combination of mergers and shutdowns is inevitable. Third, whether wealthtech operators begin offering products beyond investing (pensions, insurance, retirement planning) that would move them toward becoming full financial planning platforms. Cowrywise's investment circles and PiggyVest's savings-first framing both suggest the broader ambition is already there.
The longer-term observation is that African wealthtech has done something that African traditional asset management never managed to do: convince millions of ordinary citizens that they are investors. That cultural shift is, in the long run, worth more than any specific regulatory win or product launch.
This report draws on TechCabal's September 2025 feature "Technology will not replace Africa's financial advisors"; African Business magazine's November 2025 analysis "Nigerian fintechs lure Gen Z retail investors to financial markets"; The Condia's 2023 and updated 2025 investment app comparisons; Aproko247 reporting on Risevest's Kenya acquisition; BankiBusiness and NairaCompare wealthtech platform comparisons; and the Nigerian SEC and Central Securities Clearing System public data on retail brokerage accounts.