Discover MoneyMatix, a new fintech with a social purpose

Who is behind MoneyMatix?

I am Tynah Matembe, Co-founder of MoneyMatix, and a director for the high impact Scottish Charity, Passion4Fusion. I am an entrepreneur who believes that by earnestly seeking excellence, the world will be made a better place reaching heights unimagined.

Both ventures are due to my love for community, wealth and family. I am a Saltire fellow, a chartered banker and a lawyer by training, I have extensive corporate experience in financial services, and internationally working for organisations such as the United Nations. I have 2 beautiful children and a doting husband. I love traveling and own a scratch map which I intend to have scratched off a bit of each continent by the time I am grey.

Helene Rodger, my co-founder @MoneyMatiX is also a Saltire fellow and director at Passion4Fusion her background is in Project Management and Mental Health. She has worked with young people most of her life and her passion to see them succeed keeps her committed and inspired to make a difference. She is also a doting wife & mum to three beautiful children. She loves traveling, networking, dancing and listening to motivational audios.

With our combined experience we set out to create a children’s buddy that would help young people visualize the cause and effect of the choices they make with money.

Why did you decide to launch your own fintech?

Through our personal family lives and our work with Passion4fusion, we identified a gap in financial capability and enterprise education among people migrating to Scotland. We were especially concerned by the lack of good financial role models in these communities and we were already seeing patterns of how a lack of financial guidance was distorting young peoples assumptions about money and aspiration.

We are blessed with a proactive team @passion4fusion so when we shared our observations it became inevitable that we solve the problem. We created a project under passion4fusion which was the birth of MoneyMatiX.

When we created MoneyMatiX, our intention was to empower our immigrant community by raising a generation of children who would be mentored to become financially stable and independent. We quickly realized that financial illiteracy is a universal problem not unique to immigrants and with this, our vision for MoneyMatiX changed to create a sustainable & universal business solution that will impact global households and nurture generations of financially stable and responsible individuals.

Could you explain what you mean by financial illiteracy and how it's a universal issue?

I and Helene are both originally from Uganda but met in Scotland a place that has become more than home to us.
Being from Uganda and moving to Scotland has given us a 2-sided view and perception of money. In Uganda, we were raised albeit in different households within an entrepreneurial and cash-driven environment. If you needed anything you had to have physical cash. So, you planned ahead and laid strategies for how to acquire money. It was a "CASH 1ST BUY AFTER" mindset.

To build our Family home my parents planned a phased build where they allocated and linked funds from specific business ventures towards the home building phases. The same happened with tuition & basic needs, my parents had a business whose profits were directly allocated to our school fees and needs. You can imagine the culture shock when I migrated to Scotland and received the 1st of hundreds of letters saying we could buy Sofas on credit. I thought it was a prank. And they didn’t stop coming, “YOU QUALIFY FOR A LOAN”, “BUY NOW, PAY LATER” and on and on.

So, when my then 7-year-old daughter Kaylah started asking to buy stuff, I knew I needed to do something about her mindset. Kaylah is a beautiful eloquent girl who believes her daddy is a Demi-God that can fail at nothing, (probably true if I am being honest, he is a fabulous guy) But our next issue arose therein, Kaylah’s daddy had this magic card that provided anything and everything from flights to any place in the world, to restaurant visits on a whim, daddy’s magic card was so special it bowed at daddy’s command. So, work and money in Kaylah’s mind were secondary in nature for people sired by ordinary men. In her case “luckily” they were under her daddy’s reign and she, therefore, would never have the need to plan for them.

To put this in perspective, ask yourself this, would you trust 2.7 billion pounds with someone who did not know what they were doing? According to the global service & finance review, Children in the UK receive 2.7 billion pounds in pocket money without financial guidance. This is the tip of the scale of the problem of financial illiteracy and how it becomes ingrained in young people. The money Advise Service reports that most financial habits are formed by the age of 7 years.

So what is MoneyMatiX?

MoneyMatiX is an integrated set of financial capability tools designed to teach young people the value of money and entrepreneurship. MoneyMatiX products enable communities to raise young people mentored to become financially stable and independent.

Via a Social Gaming platform, MoneyMatiX teaches young people key financial and entrepreneurial concepts and empowers them from key stages to take control of their character and money sense.

The platform applies gamification to decision making by mimicking real-life scenarios to teach children how the financial decisions they take would play out in the real world enabling them to understand financial choices with ease and confidence.

Further to this, we run MoneyMatiX kidpreneur hackathons. These are challenge competitions which give young people an opportunity to work collaboratively in small teams to identify and consider entrepreneurial solutions to current social and economic problems.

The programme draws on the latest research from the University of Edinburgh and is underpinned by MoneyMatix. The events are designed to provide a practical application for financial literacy and business skills and together with our mentors, we give young people an opportunity to meet role models they can aspire to.

We are intentional about where we run the hackathons and whom we partner with because for us everything about these events should be a wow example for children can take away and conceptualize for their future.
We believe that every child has a right to a secure financial future so our mission is to make financial security a reality for the next generation.