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In the Q3 2025 edition of Linkage, the magazine of the American Chamber of Commerce of Trinidad and Tobago (AMCHAM T&T), Dawn Nelson set out the lived thinking behind birthing fintech solutions inside of a community rather than trying to push technology into it and how this applied to her own start up – MyCashlessClass.
The article — “Digital Trust, Real Impact: Why Financial Inclusion Must Start With Community-Based FinTech” — reflects on the fact that more than 200,000 adults in Trinidad and Tobago remain unbanked or underbanked, and that the barrier is rarely smartphones or interest. It is trust. For financial technology to deliver on inclusion, she writes, it must be embedded in the social architecture people already rely on — working with community institutions, not around them.
Among the examples she offers is one close to home: the modernization of school transaction management, where in addition to bringing the convenience of accepting digital payments for items carried in the school office and lunches, those everyday interactions can also be used to teach students about financial literacy and digital responsibility – thereby driving greater digital inclusion and producing digitally comfortable citizens . That is the idea MyCashlessClass was built to test — a low-risk first experience of the digital transaction world, inside the trusted, familiar space of the school.
The piece closes on a conviction that runs through everything the platform does: that the future of FinTech in the Caribbean will not come from copying Silicon Valley, but from respecting the region’s own trust networks — and that the earlier children are exposed to digital tools, the more digitally comfortable, and the more open to innovation, they will become.
The article appears in Linkage’s Q3 2025 issue — “Engage. Execute. Evolve.” — alongside contributions from voices across Trinidad and Tobago’s business community. Our thanks to AMCHAM T&T for the platform, and for the work they do convening this conversation.
