When you think about how you handle your money, what first comes to mind? If you’re old school, you probably remember painful queues in banks that required endless filling out of forms and furtive stuffing of cash into secret pockets. Then you remember the arrival of the ATM and its almost magical ability to spit money into your hands without the tedium of paperwork, but queues followed them too. Now, you can scan QR codes and make instant payments, action digital payments standing on the side of the road, and lend someone money without having to get blood tests and visit 12 police stations. This is the future of financial technology.

Into this world of accessibility and speed steps SmartMali, a digital payment and peer-to-peer loan platform created by SmartHome Connect, an all-black female-owned company that’s creating as many solutions as it can to fit as many gaps as it can find.