60% of businesses just gave up halfway through a loan application, which is crazy.

I think that indicates how much of an obstacle the process is in itself, which I think then speaks to a system that is built, probably more for institutions in terms of debt funding, rather than a system that is built to support small businesses.

A digital presence has been enough to get FIs through the past decade, and now we're seeing the transition that's taking place, where now it's going to be digital communication that gets them through the next decade.

Well, let me paint a picture of the banking landscape at that time, the banking landscape in the 90s in Ghana, West Africa, we were just beginning to wake up to the advantages that digitization could bring in terms of transforming from manual processes to technology-based processes. And more of automating the manual process, rather than looking at the processes end-to-end and transforming them. Very, very basic accounting, very basic bookkeeping, and all of that.

And nothing really digital as we know it today, because still if you wanted a banking service, you had to go to the bank physically, all that really had to change was that we're able to do a lot of transactions in a shorter period of time. And our books were more accurate.

But by the mid-1990s, I had started getting a little adventurous with what we could do with the technology stack that we had.