Fintech cannot build inclusive products without inclusive thinking warns Sophie Njagi Fintech and Payment expert

For an industry built on challenging the status quo, fintech can sometimes fall into surprisingly traditional ways of thinking.  There is a great deal of discussion about innovation, as an industry we celebrate faster payments, embedded finance, artificial intelligence and the next generation of financial infrastructure. But we spend far less time asking a simpler question in terms of who is shaping these products in the first place?

Too often, conversations around diversity become conversations about representation. How many women sit on the board? How many founders come from underrepresented backgrounds? Those are important questions, but they miss a more fundamental point which is whether the people designing financial products bring enough different perspectives to understand the customers they are building for.

Financial services touch every stage of life. Customers are entrepreneurs managing cash flow, parents balancing household finances, migrants sending money home, freelancers with unpredictable income and businesses navigating increasingly complex cross-border payments. Their experiences are incredibly varied, yet products are still too often designed around a narrow set of assumptions.

I was reminded of this while attending a major fintech event recently. Between discussions on AI, payments and regulation, I noticed founders and executives moving between meetings with prams, laptops and childcare in tow. They were contributing to some of the industry's biggest conversations, but they were also adapting to environments that clearly hadn't been designed with them in mind.

It struck me that inclusion isn't just about recruitment or company culture. It influences the questions we ask, the problems we choose to solve and ultimately the products we build.

Throughout my career, working across Kenya, Cyprus and the UK, I've seen how people's relationship with money changes depending on where they live and the systems available to them. Growing up during Kenya's M-Pesa revolution taught me that financial innovation isn't about creating more features. It's about removing barriers. Today, working in regulated payments, I see the same principle apply at a different scale. Technology succeeds when it reflects the realities of the people using it. That requires intellectual diversity, lived experience and teams that are comfortable challenging each other's assumptions.

As fintech continues to evolve, much of the conversation will rightly focus on AI, regulation and infrastructure. But the industry's next competitive advantage will come from building products that better reflect the complexity of the people they are designed to serve. The ones that understand their customers most deeply and that starts with building teams capable of seeing the world through more than one lens.