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Has anyone ever told you to “save for a rainy day”?
It’s simple advice: set money aside and when hard times (i.e., the “rains”) come, you'll be glad you did. But what if it never rains?
Traditional savings advice tends to frame saving as a preparation for disaster, a defensive posture against a future that may never arrive. Now, don’t get me wrong, you should absolutely have a fund set aside for emergencies, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re saving for. Because if the rainy day doesn't come, your money could just sit there, disconnected from any vision of the life you're trying to build.
So what if instead, you saved for something specific? Like a new device, your dream vacation, or even Detty December. What if you stopped saving against the worst and started saving toward the best?
That’s the point of Moniepoint's Target Savings product. Since its launch, we’ve helped thousands of Nigerians save for everything from rent to school fees. This is the story of how that came together.
Laying the groundwork
Before Target Savings, there was Locked Savings, a product that let users set aside money for a fixed period. It had a loyal user base, but a look at the data revealed something telling: 70% of those users were saving toward specific goals, even though the product wasn’t built around that.
The data pointed in one direction: if a vast majority of customers were using the product in a certain way, then the product experience needed to reflect that more naturally.
The case for a dedicated Target Savings product was clear, so the team began to build.
The typical approach in product development, especially in fintech, starts with the product and walks backwards towards the customer; a team decides how a product will work, builds and designs it, and then figures out how to “sell” it to customers. It's a logical process, but the catch is that it tends to produce products that are logically coherent but, in practice, feel a little mechanical.
When building Target Savings, though, we made a deliberate shift. We started with discovery: conversations with customers across different regions, age groups, and income brackets. Even though we’d built savings products before, we threw all our preconceived notions out the window and approached our conversations without bias. The trick was to ask non-leading questions and pay close attention to customers’ behaviour, as well as to what they told us, because this is where the most reliable data comes from.
(P.S: If you’re up for some light reading, we used the book The Mom’s Test to guide our discovery process.)
Our discovery process helped us see new perspectives, which informed how we began thinking about the product. If people are saving towards a particular goal, their savings move from being merely a financial instrument to a partner in reaching that goal. Think of it like getting a fitness coach when you’re new to the gym. You know what you want, and your coach, a subject-matter expert, is a partner who guides you on your unique journey.
So we decided to design the Target Savings product as a companion for people chasing their dreams.
Building for people
With a clear picture of how people think about saving, we moved into design, building drafts, developing high-fidelity prototypes, and running design tests to ensure everything aligned with our vision. And the core of our vision was simple: build for people and make the product as intuitive as possible.
One way we did this was to return to the data that set us on this path in the first place. We took the top categories customers had previously given their savings plans — like business, rent, school fees, even Detty December — and turned them into preset categories for users to choose from when building their savings plans.
We also reimagined the product's look, feel and tone of voice to make it distinct from other savings products in our suite. We designed it to be colourful and break down the setup process into bite-sized steps that don’t overwhelm the user. The point was to create a flow that feels more like a conversation than filling out a form, and helps users connect saving with their goals at every step.
Building for people also saw us introduce a feature that’s a little unconventional: allowing users to access up to half of their funds when they need to, without consequences. As we established earlier, we believe customers’ savings should connect to their real lives. When emergencies happen, it’s important that they can access their money without feeling like they’re betraying their goals or losing progress.
Another feature we’ve built with people in mind is “halal savings”, for users who wish to save without earning interest. Understanding that we live in a diverse country, we built our Target Savings product to reflect the full diversity of how Nigerians think about and relate to money.
One thing that was very important to us while building was getting real-time customer feedback to be sure we were on track. So we placed users in mock scenarios of the savings plan setup flow, collected their feedback, and used it to refine as we built.
The reception
We launched Target Savings in late 2025 as an MVP, knowing we would continue to make improvements based on user feedback. But even so, it was an immediate hit with our users. Within the first month, thousands of users had set up savings plans, with a one-in-three completion rate of the setup process, validating how intuitive the product experience is.
The average customer has about two active plans at any given time, reflecting that most people work toward more than one goal at once and need to keep these goals separate rather than lumping savings together.
And if you’re interested in what people are saving for (for research purposes, of course), here’s a sneak peek:
The most popular savings category is Business, which is unsurprising in a country where entrepreneurship accounts for 84% of employment. Rent and school fees are also top categories. People are saving for their birthdays and to buy new devices. Late last year, Detty December was also a top category, proving that the right tools can help people build healthier financial habits in all aspects of their lives.
A partner for life
At Moniepoint, customer obsession is one of our judgment dimensions that helps us stay focused as we create financial happiness. Our Target Savings product is a direct result of this principle.
Designing the Target Savings product required us, first, to listen: to our customers, their goals and aspirations, their needs, and what they truly wanted from a savings product. Building it required us to revisit them again and again to ensure that we were building something they could actually use, a partner that can grow with them (literally and figuratively), as they chase their dreams.
There’s more to come in the Target Savings pipeline; we want to reward people for hitting their milestones and help them start and complete savings journeys together. In all this, creating financial happiness remains our North Star, and every feature and innovation we add takes us further along on that path. We’ll keep building to ensure that, rainy day or not, our customers have the financial tools and solutions they need to achieve their full potential.
We’re always on the lookout for people who are passionate about building people-focused solutions. If this sounds like you, head over to our careers page to see check out our open roles.
