Consider a developing country with five million adults outside the formal financial system, each earning the equivalent of one hundred dollars a month. That amounts to six billion dollars a year moving through an economy without appearing on a national balance sheet in the same way it would in the US or EU. In turn, that money is underutilized, undertaxed and having less impact on lives than it should.
The money is not deliberately hidden. It is earned, saved, lent and repaid, circulating through businesses, families and communities. Yet much of it remains invisible to the formal financial system. The outcome is that many countries look capital-poor when, in reality, there is substantial capital already moving through their economies.
Dickie Shearer often returns to this calculation. For him, it captures a larger problem with how the global financial system sees emerging economies and its broader misunderstanding of the Global South.
“What is interpreted as a lack of wealth is often a lack of systemic visibility,” he says, estimating that more than three billion people remain outside formal financial systems, concentrated largely across Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America.
He believes the enormous economic engine represented by these populations is routinely underestimated because the financial institutions in place were designed elsewhere, for different types of economies and, indeed, different societies.
The result is a persistent limitation on opportunity and economic mobility. If an economic system cannot see someone, it cannot assess them. If it cannot assess them, it cannot price their risk. And if it cannot price their risk, it generally becomes much less useful to individuals, businesses and the country at large.
This was a realization Shearer reached after many years working across the Global South: that the constraint in many emerging markets was not a shortage of ambition or economic activity, but inadequate financial infrastructure. For Shearer, the problem is becoming more consequential as the economic order itself changes.
For decades, participation in global finance meant connecting to infrastructure concentrated elsewhere — correspondent banks, international card networks and settlement centres in London or New York. The arrangement gave emerging markets access to global capital, but participation and ownership are not the same thing.
The world Shearer sees emerging is more multipolar. Governments and regulators want greater control over their financial data, technological infrastructure and the systems through which domestic economic activity connects with the rest of the world. That raises a more fundamental question: What would financial infrastructure look like if it had been designed for those economies in the first place?
Tintra OS, Shearer’s Qatar-based company, is attempting to answer that question. It is rebuilding that infrastructure from scratch, reflecting local cultural, economic and regulatory contexts through a new framework.
Shearer pushes back on the conventional language of bank versus fintech, arguing that for too long much of the industry has focused on building applications on top of legacy infrastructure. In his view, those innovations can be valuable social additions, but ultimately remain workarounds. Tintra, by comparison, is building the foundation layer — collapsing fintech, banking, artificial intelligence and cloud systems into infrastructure built inside each country that will use it, and then connecting those systems together.
This distinction matters. Many financial technology companies already exist that seek to solve for financial inclusion, but almost all still depend on underlying banking and settlement infrastructure they do not control.
Redefining Trust
Rebuilding this foundational layer starts with what a bank believes about the person in front of it. A bank does not lend to people; it lends to records. The problem is that the definition of a useful record was largely established in mature banking markets — usually a salary paid into an account, a credit score, a mortgage history or years of tax filings.
Across much of the Global South, these records look different. According to Shearer, a person’s standing may come from lineage, years of dealing with the same suppliers, positions held within a community or obligations nobody has formally written down. There are documents too, such as a trade licence or telecoms account, that would not typically be recognized by a financial institution sitting thousands of miles away.
This makes financial inclusion as much an anthropological problem as a purely financial one. Before a system can decide whether someone is trustworthy, it has to understand how that society establishes trust. Tintra is perhaps unusual among financial technology companies in employing anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers alongside its engineers to better understand the markets it is targeting.
Tintra’s artificial intelligence system is designed to allow a customer to access financial services and begin producing a financial record through use of the account itself: payments made, debts repaid and counterparties dealt with. Each rung unlocks more of the bank, with the account serving as the beginning of what Shearer calls an “economic biography.” Over time, a customer with little conventional documentation can establish a history that a lender understands.
The commercial consequence is the one that matters. A borrower who can be read can be priced, and a borrower who can be priced can be lent to. Compounded at scale, those changes can help emerging economies develop deeper and more mature financial systems. The human effect is more immediate: a usable financial record can help someone borrow, build a business and plan over a longer period.
Development to Deployment
Scaling such bespoke financial infrastructure is expensive, and what works in one jurisdiction may not translate easily to the next. Shearer argues that artificial intelligence makes context affordable at scale. A system can now respect a country’s laws, language and customs without giving up the economics of standardization.
Tintra has developed an analytical layer it calls TIDE, intended to interpret local cultural contexts so that risk can be understood on the ground rather than parsed solely through a Western lens. Tintra Cloud, meanwhile, is built to keep data and computing inside the country that produces it. Underneath both sits a core banking system built from scratch with the economics of these markets in mind. Tintra says the infrastructure is designed to be replicable in new territories in days rather than years.
After several years of developing its technology and relationships largely out of sight, the company is now ready to move to activation.
Proving Ground
Tintra is now preparing to roll out across the Global South. Shearer’s thinking treats development and profit as elements that should work together rather than apart, as is often the case today. This is reflected in Tintra’s approach of delivering its system through public-private partnerships. Under its model, the host state retains majority ownership of the local infrastructure entity, while Tintra funds, builds and operates it. The structure reflects the way governments increasingly think about financial data: as national infrastructure with both economic and political value.
Rwanda is intended to be Tintra’s first launch, with the company currently working with regulators there. Its intention is to launch in as many as twelve territories over the next 18 months.
Rwanda appears a logical proving ground for a company built around this thesis. The country has spent years pursuing its own ambitions in technology and financial services. There, Tintra will face the ordinary demands of a regulated financial institution: deposits, complaints, fraud and scrutiny from a central bank — but with innovations intended to allow it to onboard customers for as little as $1. The process will also establish how much of the model can travel and how much must be built around the particular conditions of each country.
For Shearer, a firm that scales across the Global South “while building no local capacity, training no local engineers and leaving no local institutional residue has built nothing durable. It has been extractive.”
On the ground, the proposition will look deliberately unglamorous. An account opened. A payment settled. A business understood well enough to be trusted with credit. Do that a few hundred million times and the map of how the world operates could change radically.
After a prolonged period of development and relationship building, Tintra is now moving fully into deployment, supported by a current capital raise of up to one billion dollars. Shearer’s thesis is compelling: he has written extensively about how understanding culture can contribute to better economic systems. But whether that thesis can be industrialized — bringing hundreds of millions of people from informal economic activity into a financial system capable of recognizing and serving them — remains to be seen.
With a multi-year head start, its technology built and what appears to be a growing network of government relationships, Tintra is approaching the point at which its ideas will be tested in practice. The question now is whether Shearer’s vision — and the infrastructure Tintra has spent years constructing — can succeed at a scale others have so far struggled to reach.
TIME Africa staff were not involved in the creation of this content.