Track 2: Fintech Gurus | The Miseducation of Financial Technology

Casey Ariel Thobias
Sep 8
2 min read

A fintech education mixtape.

🎶 Track 2: Fintech Gurus

Black and Brown communities are not fintech outsiders. They’re the original innovators.

Nearly 50% of Black investors are between the ages of 18–34 — the highest proportion of any racial group in the U.S. By contrast, just 21% of white investors fall in that age bracket.

This shatters the myth often repeated by “financial inclusion” advocates and legacy institutions: that historically excluded communities must be convinced to care about finance or upskilled into the basics of value creation, accumulation, and exchange.

The reality?

These communities are already power users of PayPal, Chime, Robinhood, CashApp, Venmo, Square, and GoFundMe.

They know what works.

They know what fails.

They live at the edge of financial innovation every single day.

They are the experts.

Beyond Usage → Into Creation

The challenge isn’t adoption.

It’s creation.

Black and Brown entrepreneurs and innovators must be empowered to design and launch the next generation of fintech solutions. Not just as users. Not just as employees. But as builders of regenerative systems of ownership and trust.

For too long, the industry has wasted energy persuading a handful of dominant institutions to “care” about overlooked communities. That same energy could be invested in building new systems that flatten the learning curve and unlock pent-up demand.

🌍 Lessons from Kenya: M-PESA

When M-PESA launched in Kenya, skeptics scoffed:

“No one will trust putting their money into a phone.”

They were wrong.

Within three years, 90% of Kenyan adults were using M-PESA, moving the equivalent of 35% of GDP through mobile transfers.

By 2023, it had evolved into a super app before the term existed — offering bill pay, savings and loans (M-Shwari), overdrafts (Fuliza), remittances, and merchant payments. The annual value of transactions hit 7.2 trillion shillings (55% of GDP).

The most valuable innovation wasn’t technology.

It was trust.

M-PESA trained people to believe in digital finance long before the rest of the world caught up.

The U.S. Context

At Alabama A&M University, we’re not asking students, “How do we get people to use fintech?”

We’re asking:

➡️ What fintech solutions will you create?

➡️ What problems in your communities need solving?

➡️ What systems can you build that banks have ignored?

In our fintech foundations course, the room buzzed with joy as students:

Critiqued tradeoffs between relationships and convenience.
Deconstructed the business models of Apple Pay, Chime, and TurboTax.
Imagined new solutions for short-term lending, mobile money, and real estate access.

The brilliance is already there. They don’t need convincing.

They need platforms and capital to scale their ideas.