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Savings on CashBox’s platform hit N50b

A fintech company, CashBox, said over the last five years, its platform has helped its users to save about N50billion which the owners would have probably spent wastefully.

Its Founder/CEO, Sydney Aigbogun, who fielded questions on the sideline of the fifth year anniversary of the company in Lagos, also said the weak Naira has also increased the company’s business cost.

He said: “These last five years has been amazing, we have done a lot more than we thought. We have helped over 500,000 users save over N50 billion they would ordinarily spent. In the month of December 2023, we paid out over N4 billion in withdrawals to our customers in that single month. So the next five years is very promising, we are a company that keeps researching and making quick changes with time. We never want to be an obsolete app or company, so we will keep doing what we are doing and employ smarter ways to do it. Five years from now, we should have at least 5million customers using CashBox, that is the goal and we believe it is very achievable considering where we are coming from.”

He said most of the company’s expenses are in USD, adding that “What used to cost $1- N360 now costs over N1,000. That has impacted our cost greatly, but it has also made us become more ingenious about finding ways to keep these cost low while still delivering top notch service”. Aigbogun said one of the most important lessons the company has learnt over the past five years was to try as much as possible to keep everything in-house especially the marketing and tech aspect, adding that outsourcing to a third party could be very expensive and not as effective as in-house would be. “We have also learnt that when investing, doing proper due diligence is very important. No matter how good an investment looks, it is extremely important to dig deep and be sure funds invested will be very very secure,” he said.

According to him, over 500,000 users currently use CashBox stressing that on savings side, there are over 200,000 successful deposit transactions monthly which grows steadily month on month.

According to him, the driving force for the platform are ease of use, customer friendly platform and generally a "cool" way to save money which is quite different from traditional banks. “Our customers are internet savvy and use social media a lot, so we try as much as possible to push marketing in a language they can easily relate with,” he added.

Speaking on the savings demography, he said few years ago, about 65per cent of users were female between the ages of 22 and 45, but right now, the male customers have increased. “As of today, our customer base is quite more diverse having close to 50per cent / 50per cent usage by both male and female, ages between 17 and 57. Majority of our customers reside in Lagos and quite a number are in the Southwest and Northern states as well,” he explained.

On the company’s strategy going forward, the CEO said: “At CashBox, we try to keep our cost and expenses to the barest minimum. What other companies will spend millions on Naira to achieve, we make sure we spend less than N500,000 to achieve the same result. We keep reminding ourselves that we haven't raised any funds from investors, so we do not have room for trial and errors. Any error we make loses money which we do not want. So our marketing strategy has been a lot of online advertisements and smart offline adverts that will reach a lot of customers. This smart advertisement strategy has saved us a lot of money while still reaching the goal other companies would spend way more money on. In 2024, we plan to keep doing the same and look for even smarter ways to reach more potential customers.

“In 2024, we plan to reach more users in other states of Nigeria. We are already quite popular in Lagos state so we feel it is time we spread the word of CashBox to many more states. This we plan on doing using smart strategies and having the right people on our team.”