Published July 5, 2026

The Promise of Technology

I’ve been reflecting on why I like working on financial products, and it reminds me of when I was 20 and starting to build my credit. I was a college student without steady income and a murky residency status in the US. After doing some research, I learned about secured credit cards and applied for a few. However, due to said murky status, I wasn’t approved. However for some reason, Capital One approved me for their student branded card at the time with a $300 limit. That access has compounded into the financial success and stability I have today; my credit score allowed me to get a car loan, empowered me to rent my apartment without a cosigner, and attracted a swarm of % APR offers to mail my box every quarter. Nowadays, these credit checks control even smaller purchases. Even something as simple as getting Xfinity wifi for your apartment requires passing a financial background check. And yet, according to the FDIC, 19.2 million American households can only dream of this because they are underbanked.

That means they have no accounts with banks or credit unions. For credit, they rely on payday loans. The name brand cellular carriers like TMobile and Verizon may reject you because of the lack of credit history. For money storage, they default to cash or online banking products like Chime, CashApp, or Paypal. The promise of technology is democratizing access. It’s no surprise that the people left out of the normal banking system turn to these more flexible alternatives.

If you can dream it, you can build it. Identity Verification and KYC Compliance used to require you visiting your bank’s location in person to open your account, or mailing in documents that went through manual review. Now, we upload a selfie to a person from the comfort of our couches. Understanding your personal finance data used to require scraping your bank’s website or parsing piles of monthly statements. Now, we have several aggregators that fetch data so we can reconcile our personal budgets from anywhere. Sending money cross country to a family member used to entail visiting a physical WesternUnion and waiting days for it to arrive. Now, not only can we do it on our phones, it can also arrive instantly because of stablecoins, using financial rails that didn’t exist even five years ago.

The promise of access to the lives people dream of, and access to products that makes accessing their money easier, feels very fulfilling to me.