Banking is Like a Box of Chocolates

Having spent much of my life in what we now call the Global South—and being closer than most to the inner workings of finance in these still-developing markets—I’ve come to recognise a truth that remains largely unspoken. The global financial system was, quite obviously, built by the West. But what’s easier to overlook is that it was also built for the West. It is not the system—it is a system. And as such, it continues to carry the assumptions, biases, and blind spots of its original architects.

And that architecture isn’t neutral.

While the language of financial inclusion has gained momentum in recent years, the reality still lags behind—caught in the comfort of its own idealistic narrative. We speak of globalisation, yet what we’ve actually built is a system that enables the seamless flow of capital between a select set of established corridors. If you’re in New York, Frankfurt, or Singapore, transactions clear in seconds. Shift that same activity to Lagos or Karachi, and suddenly the process is riddled with friction, suspicion, delays—or outright denial. Beneath it all lies a subtle yet persistent bias: the unspoken assumption that a Nigerian business or a Surinamese individual is inherently more risky than someone from Connecticut.

Why? Not because of crime, not because of risk — but because of a system built on inherited distrust. Emerging markets are not underbanked because of technical limitations, to a degree this is true domestically but on a more macro view, they are underbanked because the dominant system struggles to understand — and therefore refuses to trust — anything that falls outside its own cultural frame.

I’ve seen this firsthand. I’ve sat across from regulators in Sub-Saharan Africa, from entrepreneurs in South Asia, from families in the Gulf whose entire legitimacy is questioned simply because their infrastructure doesn’t mimic that of London or New York. These are good people from so-called “bad” places. Not because of what they do — but because of where they’re from.

This is where the system breaks.

Banks rely on deeply conservative regulatory protocols — many of them rooted in colonial-era bureaucracies — to determine what constitutes a “valid” client. KYC and AML, though important in principle, are applied in ways that are blind to context. Proof of address? Try getting that in a country where utilities are paid in cash and homes pass through generations informally. Tax residency forms? Try explaining that to someone operating across tribal borders that predate nation-states.

The result is not just exclusion — it’s humiliation. It’s the systemic invalidation of billions of people simply because their lives don’t map neatly onto Western spreadsheets.

But what if the fault isn’t with them?

What if the real flaw is a system that was never designed to accommodate cultural variance? A system that defaults to suspicion instead of understanding?

This is the question I’ve been asking for years. And it’s what’s driven my work — not just to build better tools, but to challenge the philosophical premise on which the global banking order is built. We don’t need to westernise the Global South to make it bankable. We need to build systems that are sophisticated enough to understand the Global South on its own terms.

That means infrastructure built with cultural fluency. It means compliance models that can interpret nuance instead of rejecting it. It means AI that doesn’t inherit prejudice, but learns to read trust through behaviour, not passports.

The tragedy isn’t just exclusion. It’s the opportunity cost. The $6.4 trillion that struggles to move each year from emerging markets isn’t just lost capital — it’s lost progress. It’s healthcare, education, innovation that never gets funded.

The bias isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. Which means inclusion won’t come from upgrades. It will come from revolution. If we’re serious about building a more equitable world, we need to start by rebuilding the system that determines who gets to participate in it.

And I, for one, am committed to that revolution.

The writing on this website forms a small part of my wider journey — a lifelong fascination with understanding and exploring how culture, technology, and consciousness shape the world we live in, and a search for evidence that far more connects us than separates us.

Through my work at Tintra Group and The Tintra Foundation, incredible teams are turning that exploration into practice — reimagining finance and development for a multipolar world.