The Human
ATM

I'm not telling these stories because I have all the answers. I'm telling them because I've been living inside the question most of my life. I grew up in Memphis inside the fee economy — check-cashing counters, bank fees that punished you for being short of money, payday loans that solved one emergency by creating the next — and no manual for capital, ownership, or assets. Financial systems were personal to me long before they were technical.

Decades in technology later, I can see more of the machinery: the rails, incentives, and protocols hiding under an ordinary transaction. So when a stranger at a folding table in Lagos hands over final cash against a promise that hasn't settled, I don't see something exotic — I see machinery I recognize. But culture keeps pulling me past the diagram: why did one community build this answer while another built something entirely different for the same human need? What did the culture already understand before the technology arrived — and once it took hold, how did it begin reshaping the culture around it?

That's why I go into the field. Not searching for exotic answers — trying to understand how other people have answered the questions I grew up with, and what their answers reveal about the systems we've accepted at home.