My name is Rushd Averroes. I am the founder of BABB and this is the second chapter of the BABB story. It’s about how the seed of an idea led me to a plan to empower millions of people across the world.

This journey started with the idea that anyone in the world should be able to open a UK bank account using only their smartphone. Having been excluded from, and treated badly by the UK banking system (details in Chapter One) I knew I wanted to create a new financial system that is inclusive, fair and globally connected.

My first instinct was to find an existing project doing the work I was interested in doing, but my research didn’t get me very far. I could only seem to find existing banks attempting to jump on the financial inclusion bandwagon, or fintech startups addressing one small element of the problem. There is nothing wrong with either of these approaches, per se, but neither demonstrated the scope or the ambition that I could plainly see was needed to address this massive problem.

I came to the conclusion that, if I couldn’t find a team to join, I would have to create my own. Having founded an online money transfer business previously, I was no stranger to building a business from scratch. The idea was in need of serious development — at that point all I had was some basic principles. There was no proposition, no technological rationale and no business plan, so I set to work refining my vision.

I find that in the early stages of an idea, you may not necessarily know what you want but you can almost always point to what you don’t want. I spent a lot of time reading whitepapers and pointing to things I didn’t want.

During my search, I found almost no evidence of companies building full-stack solutions independent of legacy systems. So-called challenger banks in the UK build into legacy payment systems and end up simply re-creating a banking business model. The only difference is a nifty smartphone app with a beautiful user interface. Those things are nice to have, of course, but I had clarified my thinking enough by that point to know that I had ambitions beyond plastering a pretty new facade onto crumbling old infrastructure.

It also felt reductive to design a solution specifically for developing countries with many unbanked citizens. If you want to empower people the world over, I reasoned, surely you have to connect everyone to everyone else.

I found myself becoming frustrated by the term ‘financial inclusion’ and even more frustrated by its proponents. I felt instinctively that I wanted to go beyond inclusion. I wanted to leapfrog the current system and create something new, rather than connecting more people to something so fundamentally flawed. I didn’t think it was enough for people with a mobile phone to gain the ability to make payments. It became clear to me that my goal should be economic empowerment for all — including the ability to generate income, improve financial resilience and pursue entrepreneurial ambitions.

Once I struck upon the concept of economic empowerment, my plans for BABB began to take shape. I wanted a full-stack bank, connecting everyone to everyone else, that went far beyond financial inclusion. Following this epiphany, a lot of other things started to fall into place… but that’s a story for another day.