Dickie Shearer, founder of Tintra, is highlighting India's transformation in digital payments as one of the clearest examples of a principle at the heart of his work. Financial systems succeed, he argues, when they are designed around how people already live, rather than adapted from models built for other economies.
Shearer is based in the Middle East and works across Africa, Asia and emerging markets. Much of his life has been spent moving through the Global South, studying how culture shapes the way people earn, spend, save and support one another.
In 2016, India launched the Unified Payments Interface, a system that allows people to send money instantly from one phone to another using little more than a mobile number. Today it handles billions of transactions every month, used by everyone from large retailers to roadside tea stalls with a printed QR code on the counter.
UPI did not succeed by copying a Western card network. It worked because it was designed around how people in India already paid and trusted one another, and because it was built as shared public infrastructure that banks and payment apps could connect to. For Shearer, that is the kind of thinking the rest of the Global South can learn from.
Shearer's central argument is that most global financial systems were designed around assumptions drawn from Western economies, such as formal employment, predictable cash flow and standardised credit records. Where value moves informally, seasonally or through networks of trust, those systems struggle to fit.
Digitising them, he says, does not solve the problem. It simply reproduces the mismatch faster. The alternative is to begin with local behaviour and regional trade realities and design the technology around them, which is exactly what India's experience demonstrates at scale.
Shearer is careful not to suggest that one country's model can simply be copied elsewhere. Asia alone contains enormous variety in language, regulation, culture and the way commerce works. What succeeded in India worked because it fit India.
The lesson he draws is a principle rather than a blueprint. He has written that the world makes far more sense once people “stop viewing it through the framing you inherited,” and he applies the same thinking to finance. Instead of asking how to bring a market into an existing system, the better question is what system that market actually needs.
India is not alone. In Kenya, M-Pesa grew into one of the world's best-known mobile money services by adapting to how customers chose to send money to family. In Brazil, the central bank launched the Pix instant payment system in 2020, and it quickly changed how millions of people pay each day.
Each of these systems was designed at home, for local users, and each succeeded by fitting the habits of the people using it. Together, Shearer argues, they show that the Global South is not simply adopting financial innovation. It is leading it.
Shearer believes the global financial order is becoming more multipolar, with emerging economies increasingly trading and settling directly with one another rather than routing activity through infrastructure built elsewhere.
Early signs of this shift are already visible. In 2023, India linked UPI with Singapore's PayNow, allowing people to send money between the two countries through their everyday payment apps. For Shearer, connections like this point to a future in which the economies of the Global South build and operate more of the financial infrastructure they depend on.
This is the space in which Tintra, the company Shearer founded, is working. Tintra is developing AI-native cross-border financial and settlement systems for emerging markets, built around cultural intelligence, the ability to operate across different regulatory regimes, and trade between economies of the Global South.
The goal is not to export one country's success story. It is to apply the same instinct, understanding people first and building for them, across many markets at once.
India has shown what becomes possible when a financial system is designed for the people who use it. Shearer's view is that this should become the norm rather than the exception, across Asia and throughout the Global South. More about his work is available at tintra.net and dickieshearer.com