When Ifill founded Guava she saw the exponential growth of Black entrepreneurs as a tremendous opportunity to reach a thriving base. According to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau, Black-owned businesses garnered $141.1 billion in income last year.

Despite this continued growth, Kelly Ifill recognizes that Black entrepreneurs are disproportionately denied financial products, whether a line of credit or a traditional small or medium-size business (SMB) loan. “Historically, the banking system in the U.S. hasn’t seen the correct value in Black businesses,” Ifill says. “Guava is serving as an alternative to potential predatory service providers for entrepreneurs who have not had the best access to secure banks.”

What separates the app from similar resources is its community-first focus that seamlessly allows entrepreneurs across industries the opportunity to connect and collaborate. It’s built on an open forum, similar to the interface of Facebook or LinkedIn, which supports easy resource sharing across the platform. “Nine times out of 10, Black entrepreneurs are sole proprietors and owner-operators,” says Ifill. “It’s important they have the social fabric needed to sustain their businesses and be successful.”

As a member of the Start Path program, Ifill checks in with her Mastercard mentors on a biweekly basis to discuss new product ideas and opportunities for long-term growth. With each expansion, Guava is intentionally centering Black business owners overlooked by traditional bank institutions.

An inclusive financial landscape will require constructing new banking models, and this is part of Fonta Gilliam’s mission. She spent a decade working as a U.S. diplomat in East Asia and Africa, during which she met hundreds of people of various financial means. In her first year, she traveled to South Korea to conduct an immigration interview with a woman who owned a street food stand. During the session, Gilliam learned that the woman had amassed more than $100,000 USD through her participation in a community practice known as gaedon—an informal lending system particularly popular among women in South Korea.

For a set time, people in the woman’s community came together to pool cash resources, and every year the charitable pot would rotate, landing on a different person each time. Whoever received the pot would collect the funds raised, and then the process continued. That year, it was Gilliam’s interviewee’s turn, and with the money collected, she planned to move to the United States and start a business.

The next 10 years passed with Gilliam researching how people save and build wealth in emerging markets, outside of the traditional banking system. Although she worked as a diplomat and management consultant, Gilliam struggled to make ends meet as a single mother in the pricey Washington, D.C., area. Recalling the gaedon, Gilliam joined a susu with college friends. Similar in concept, a susu is a saving practice popular in African and Caribbean cultures, in which people in the group help one another reach financial goals.

When Gilliam received the rotating pot, she used the money to put a down payment on a home in D.C. “Peer accountability, FOMO, even reputational risks make people keep their financial commitments to a group,” Gilliam says. “You’re 95 percent more likely to achieve your goals if you have a gym buddy or accountability partner, and the same is true for finances.”

Aiming to mirror the concept of a susu, Wellthi is Gilliam’s approach to modernize the concept of social banking. Wellthi has a built-in relationship with banks, as it plugs directly into each bank’s mobile app, offering customers the opportunity to receive personalized financial advice, unlock new capital, and have a private banking experience, without ever leaving their homes. Similar to Zelle, it can be connected to any account or card, allowing users to structure their financial goals with friends, save, fundraise, spend, and network with others.

Since launching Wellthi in 2020 and joining Start Path, Gilliam’s venture has gone from early-stage technology to a successful company . “It’s expensive to build things in-house,” Gilliam shares. “Without Start Path’s partnership and co-innovation support, I would never be able to provide the technology solutions that I can provide to my partner banks now.”

Like Gilliam, Dionne Gumbs is creating technology solutions for financial providers that enable them to better serve business models often pushed to the margins. After two decades working in upper management at a bevy of traditional financial institutions, including J.P. Morgan, Gumbs knew that a one-size-fits-all approach to banking left a wide gap of SMB customers underserved.

In 2018, she was accepted into Presidential Leadership Scholars, a six-month program that brings together 60 leaders across the nonprofit, military, public, and private sectors to critically engage with societal challenges and share solutions. GenEQTY was born during Gumbs’s time in the program. Now financial institutions and other fintechs are her clients.

GenEQTY offers a modern, flexible platform that fintechs and financial institutions can use to convert raw data into meaningful insights. Its actionable intelligence tools help analyze key aspects of a customer’s profile, empowering providers with crucial information they need for better decision-making in underwriting or developing new products and services.

“We make raw business data usable so banks can be better financial partners to their SMB clients,” Gumbs says.

As she grows GenEQTY, Gumbs splits her time between New York, where she has an established network in finance, and the Twin Cities, where she’s building new relationships in the entrepreneurial and tech community.

The mother of two took the entrepreneurial plunge while pregnant with her second child, and four years later, the company is exceeding even her most hopeful predictions.

Mastercard and the Start Path program helped Gumbs shape her company’s vision and direction. “Our affiliation with Mastercard’s Start Path program allowed us to develop enterprise-ready solutions and go to market in a hyper-focused way,” she says. Gumbs envisions changing the ways financial institutions distribute capital, advice, and financial products to the SMB market. “Our goal is to be the connective data piping that sits between the massive SMB market and the providers that want to give them the service they deserve,” she continues.