Nigeria: Savings platform, Digikolo relaunches app to deepen financial inclusion

One year after its initial launch, Digikolo, a savings platform driven by Digital Space Capital that aims at encouraging a proper savings culture for individuals with financial goals is relaunched its digital application to deepen financial inclusion in Nigeria.

Olubukola Abitoye, CEO, Digikolo, who spoke during the relaunch event in Lagos said the development is important to reawaken the saving culture upheld in the past.

She stated that the platform offers the opportunity to do more with savings through conventional savings, target savings or locking funds for a selected period.

Drawing from memory lane, Abitoye said, “If you can recall, 25 to 30 years ago, the culture of saving was present. When people give us gifts, the next thing that comes to mind is to save it inside the kolo; a muddy or wooden craft where money is accumulated, until festive seasons.

“But all of a sudden, we lost it. If a young kid gets a hold of money today, the next thing is they want to buy [airtime], data to play games.”

Emphasizing the need to imbibe the saving culture, she said there is a need to personally cultivate the habit of saving because if this is not done on an individual level, it will be difficult at a corporate level.

“We came together as a team and said we must give it whatever it takes to make sure that we bring back that old habit of saving. The kolo in the olden days, we are [digitizing] it and that is where we got the word Digikolo”.

Also hinting at the milestone of the fintech in the past year, Abitoye said, “We currently have a download of 3,812 and we have over 80 per cent active users and we didn’t put a rest in our oars because the world is moving and the way the world is going, everybody wants something flexible and seamless.”

Adegoke Adegbami, MD, Mainstreet Microfinance bank while emphasizing the importance of money said how to make, spend and save money, are three key things that need to be well understood in life.

He said, “Everyone has access to money. Even if you don’t have earned income, you have the unearned income but the one that requires conscious decision is the issue of savings.”

“If you earn all the money in this world and you don’t have the habit of saving, you will still end up in poverty so if digikolo is saying they want to bring back the old system, I think they are solving a very big problem in the society and I must add that the problem of saving is both an individual and a national problem because part of our problem in our society today is that even at government level, we don’t save. We only learn to spend. And because we must continue to spend, that’s why we must continue to borrow.”