In a duplex in Lagos, Cowrywise is trying to build a cathedral with 11 priests

One afternoon in February 2026, I went to Ikeja GRA, a highbrow neighbourhood in Lagos, to talk to a new crop of executives at Cowrywise, the wealth management fintech that manages money for over two million Nigerians.

Four weeks earlier, at a January retreat held at a business club in Victoria Island, a highbrow area on the southern side of Lagos, Cowrywise had promoted 11 people to the title of associate vice president (AVP), the type of move that earns the rare tag of ‘unprecedented’ in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.

For a company of fewer than 80 people, it meant one in seven employees ended that day as a senior executive.

My visit to Cowrywise’s office was to figure out whether this was a genuine restructuring of a growing financial institution or inflated titles meant to appease employees. What I found was more complex than either explanation.

When a fintech has 10 users, risk is negligible. When it has 2 million, the complexity is systemic. Drag the slider to see why an 80-person company requires 11 Vice Presidents to survive.

I was not alone in finding the promotions unusual. Abiola Sowemimo, a fintech human resources executive renowned for helping build Paystack's HR team and practices, told me her first reaction was caution rather than judgment.

"This is unusual. Not that it is automatically wrong, just very unusual," she said. In a company of about 70 people, promoting 11 to AVP at once "would naturally raise questions."

"It is a leadership promotion, so the concern becomes whether this is a real promotion," she added.

But Sowemimo was equally clear that the nature of Cowrywise's business changes the equation. “It looks like an intentional organisational move rather than business as usual,” she said.

Part of what changes the equation is that Cowrywise is regulated by Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A company licensed to manage other people's money faces scrutiny that an ordinary startup does not, because regulators want decision-making distributed among experienced people across important business units like risk, finance, and compliance.

To understand the promotions, you first have to understand Cowrywise’s business model and how it makes money.

Founded in 2016 by Razaq Ahmed and Edward Popoola, Cowrywise is a wealth-management company. What it does, in the words of Omowonuola Tunde-Bello, the AVP of investment management, is "invest on behalf of our clients and charge management fees."

Customers put their money in wallets via transfer or card payments; Cowrywise's portfolio team allocates it across savings products, mutual funds, fixed-income products like treasury bills and, more recently, equities on the Nigerian Exchange Group, and the company takes a management fee on those assets.

It is the same way a traditional asset-management firm like Chapel Hill Denham makes its money.

Today, to fund a ₦1,000 ($0.70) investment plan, a Cowrywise user will transfer ₦1,015 ($0.70), inclusive of processing fees or set up a direct debit. They can pick from Naira portfolios that have returned between 4.33% and 51.56% so far this year.

When I invested ₦1,000 ($0.73) in the highest-returning option in March, the 29.36% equity portfolio that was significantly weighted towards stocks, only ₦989 ($0.72) was reflected in my balance, indicating an additional ₦11 deduction from the invested amount.

By May, my initial ₦1,000 had grown to ₦1,156, a 16.9% gain in two months. It lost ₦20 in March, gained ₦159 in April, and has added ₦17.34 so far in May.

Cowrywise also partners with older asset management firms, such as Meristem Wealth Management, Afrinvest, ARM Investment Managers, and United Capital Asset Management, serving as a distribution layer and tech infrastructure for their funds.

These relationships help the company’s partners bring regulated products to its customers, while Cowrywise provides the technology and distribution that get those products in front of retail customers through its app. A win-win of sorts for both parties. Cowrywise declined to share how it shares fees with its partners.

Cowrywise sustains its operations by taking a small management fee on your investments. Play with the numbers below to see how fees and returns balance out in real-time.

*Note: This is a simplified calculation for educational purposes, based on a flat 1.5% management fee deduction model.

The startup’s digital-first model traces directly to Ahmed’s time as an investment analyst at firms like Vetiva and Meristem, where he observed that traditional wealth managers catered almost exclusively to high-net-worth clients, leaving the vast majority of Nigerians without access to investment products. In 2025, the director-general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Dr Emomotimi Agama, said that less than 4% of Nigerians invest in the capital market.

That digital path has also allowed Cowrywise to create products like Halal savings for Muslims that don't accrue interest; Stash (a digital wallet for receiving and sending money); Circles (group savings); Triggers (a feature that automatically saves or invests when preset conditions are met, like when your football club scores a goal); and Money Badges (gamified milestones celebrating savings achievements).

It also runs Sprout, a corporate treasury management tool leveraging technology and asset management solutions to help businesses invest idle cash.

Cowrywise's business has also expanded beyond retail distribution. Over the past year, the company has built a proprietary investment capability, deploying capital across public markets and other financial assets with a focus on long-term, risk-adjusted returns and begun portfolio construction for select high-net-worth clients.

Abdulrauf (Rufy) Bello, the AVP for investment management, who joined a year ago specifically to lead that capability, now manages the proprietary book alongside contributing to the firm's broader investment research and financial education output.

This shift is one of the latest in the company’s efforts to move from a savings-focused platform to a full digital wealth platform, where users actively invest across diversified financial assets.

Since its founding, Cowrywise has grown from a few thousand customers to over two million, a figure several employees mentioned to me with the pride of those who built the business from the ground up.

That growth inevitably produces complexity. When a company has ten customers, the risk is negligible, but when it has a million, the risk is systemic and gigantic.

Such a company needs people who think about liquidity ratios, credit exposure and what happens when 10,000 customers all hit the withdrawal button on the same afternoon. It needs someone whose job is managing risk. It needs the SEC to trust that those people exist and that they can do a good job.