CashBox is redefining digital savings in Nigeria. Owned by CashBox Global Services Limited, Cashbox focuses on making savings a habit.
A lot of people have the desire to save but doing that in traditional banks makes those funds easily accessible and defeats the purpose.
With cashbox, these people can automate the savings process(es) and watch their money grow towards set targets.
In this interview, Sydney Aigbogun, CEO at Cashbox, explains how, in the last five years, CashBox helped 500,000 users save over N50 billion. It is CashBox’s fifth anniversary!
Congratulations to CashBox on your fifth anniversary. What have been the lessons learnt building Cashbox these five years?
One of the most important lessons we have learnt is to try as much as possible to keep everything in-house especially the marketing and tech aspect. Outsourcing to a third party can 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.
How many people are currently using CashBox?
Over 500,000 users currently use CashBox
What is the state of transactions on the platform? What is growth in percentage?
As regards the savings, we currently have over 200,000 successful deposit transactions monthly and grows steadily month on month. Our user base also grows every month.
What is driving adoption on the platform?
Ease of use, customer friendly app and generally a “cool” way to save money which is quite different from traditional banks. Our customers are internet savvy and use social media alot, so we try as much as possible to push marketing in a language they can easily relate with.
How has inflation and the weakening of the naira impacted your business?
A weak Naira means our cost has tremendously increased since most of our expenses are in USD. 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 this cost low while still delivering top notch service.
Who are those saving the most on CashBox?
Few years ago, about 65% of our users were female between the ages of 22-45, but right now, our male customers have increased. As of today, our customer base is quite more diverse having close to 50% / 50% usage by both male & female, ages between 17-57. Majority of our customers reside in Lagos and quite a number are in the Southwest and Northern states as well.
What has been your marketing strategy and how are you planning for 2024?
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 alot of online advertisements and smart offline adverts that will reach a lot of customers.
This smart advertisement strategy has saved us alot 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.
Any expansion plans in 2024?
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.
What is your ambition for the next five years?
These last five years has been amazing, we have done alot 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.
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