Built for Whom, Exactly?
A memory, a vote, and a question fintech hasn't honestly answered yet.
In some hazy, long-suppressed memories, I’m somewhere between eight and twelve years old. Dinner is on the table. My mother has served food to everyone, and what’s left for her is something small. Something basic. A sad, stripped down version of the meal we all enjoyed.
She doesn’t say anything. She never does.
I remember noticing. I remember, with the honest selfishness of a child, thinking: well, why didn’t she just save some for herself before she gave it out?
I didn’t understand then what I understand completely now.
I’m a mother. My son is weeks from turning five. I know, with a certainty that lives in my bones, that I would give him every last thing on my plate before I took a single bite for myself. It wouldn’t be a decision or a sacrifice, it’s just what you do.
What my mother did, without complaint, without ever telling anyone, was absorb scarcity so the rest of us never had to feel it.
In hindsight, it’s heartbreaking what women endure to ensure their families flourish.
This memory surfaced it’s way back up this week, because on Thursday, the House voted 213 to 210 to cut $141 million in food and vegetable benefits from the program that serves nearly 5.4 million pregnant women, postpartum mothers, and young children across this country.
The margin was three votes.
The program is called WIC. If you work in fintech or banking, you may know it as an infrastructure problem: EBT modernization, digital benefit delivery, online grocery acceptance. A compliance consideration? A market segment?
Before it’s any of those things, it’s a mother doing silent math at a dinner table.
It’s $26 a month in fruits and vegetables for a toddler. $48 for a pregnant woman. $52 for a breastfeeding mother. Not lavish, not even remotely generous. Just: enough to mean that the choice between the apple and the bill feels slightly less impossible.
That thin buffer between enough and not enough is exactly where financial fragility lives.
Here’s what I want fintech operators and bank executives to understand, because I don’t think it gets said clearly enough:
Food insecurity and financial instability are not sequential problems. At the kitchen table level, they are completely inseparable. You can't stabilize someone's finances if they can't feed their kids. You can't engage with a savings product if you're deciding between groceries and the electric bill. The "financial wellness" problem and the "food security" problem are just two symptoms of the same underlying condition: not enough margin to absorb life.
When nutritional stability is removed from a household, the financial behavior of everyone in that household changes. The cognitive load of scarcity literally reshapes decision-making.
Research on scarcity psychology tells us that when people are managing deprivation in one domain, their capacity to manage complexity in others narrows. The mental bandwidth that might go toward understanding a loan term, disputing a fee, or building a savings habit gets redirected, necessarily, toward the immediate. Toward the table and the child who needs to eat.
Which means that when a pregnant mother loses $48 a month in food support, she doesn’t just have less food. She has less capacity to navigate everything else, including the financial products we are so proud of.
Your hardship tools, your flexible repayment options, your “financial wellness” features. These all land differently (or don’t land at all) when the person on the other end is running on cognitive empty.
If you’ve ever wondered why financial literacy programs underperform in low-income communities, this is part of the answer. The reality is that understanding requires mental space that scarcity systematically removes.
Here is where I want to say something to my industry.
Fintech was born, at least in its origin story, as a democratizing force. We were going to bank the unbanked. Serve the underserved. Build the products that legacy institutions were too slow, too rigid, too unimaginative to build.
That story is still told in pitch decks. It shows up in mission statements and impact reports and conference keynotes. But look honestly at where the capital actually went. Look at whose problems got solved first.
The average neobank customer skews younger, more educated, more digitally fluent, and significantly higher income than the families being cut from WIC this week. The “underserved” in most fintech investor memos means millennials who find traditional banking annoying.
That’s not an accusation, but something worth us all reflecting on.
The families who needed fintech’s promise most, the ones for whom a $48 swing in a month is genuinely destabilizing, are still largely navigating financial lives built around infrastructure that doesn’t serve them well. Check cashing, predatory short-term credit, benefits systems that are a decade behind in digital delivery, EBT cards that couldn’t be used online until a pandemic forced the issue.
We didn’t really build for them. Not yet.
So, what does fintech’s actual obligation look like in this moment?
Not a press release about “impact.” Not a panel at the next conference about financial inclusion.
Here’s what I think it looks like in practice:
It looks like fintech lenders building real hardship protocols as a core product feature. because the families losing WIC benefits this week are the same families who will feel payment stress in your portfolio in six months. Scenario-test for this. Make the hardship tool easy enough to use when someone is already depleted.
It looks like community banks leaning into their actual community. The banks in our ecosystem serve these towns. They know these families. They have the branch relationships, the local trust, the CRA obligations. This is not the moment to treat that as a cost center. It is a calling.
It looks like the infrastructure builders, the payment rails, the EBT modernization players, the digital benefits delivery companies, accelerating. The tech to make benefits faster, more flexible, and more dignified already exists. The urgency to deploy it just got more acute.
It looks like founders asking a harder question when they’re defining their market: who are we actually building for, and are we willing to follow that answer wherever it leads?
There are 5.4 million women and children in this country who are about to have $141 million less in their kitchens. Some of them have mothers like mine. Some of them are mothers like mine: managing the gap, doing the math, making sure everyone else eats first.
The floor just dropped a little further.
What we build next, and for whom, is a choice we’re making right now, whether we say so out loud or not.
we have yet to make banking better ... for those who need it the most.
Do you know of any fintechs that are solving access to healthy food?