The day Carmelle Cadet resigned from IBM to build EMTECH, her co-founder backed out. She had already secured a half-million-dollar contract from a central bank, armed only with mockups and conviction. What she didn’t have: a technical team, a fallback plan, or a clear category. But she moved forward anyway, driven by the belief that if you want to build a more inclusive financial system, you have to start at its root.
Cadet grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in a household where government work and entrepreneurship coexisted. When political instability forced her family to leave, she arrived in the U.S. at 16 and immediately felt the contrast. Credit cards, student loans, even the ability to buy a car with borrowed money—these weren’t just conveniences, they were engines of opportunity. The absence of that infrastructure back home stuck with her.
At IBM, she spent ten years in corporate finance and later helped launch its blockchain division, where she worked on early digital currency pilots with central banks. One project—a cross-border payments initiative with the Central Bank of the Bahamas—was shelved. But the idea that central banks could become platforms for innovation stayed with her.
EMTECH began with that premise. Instead of building fintech solutions that worked around outdated systems, Cadet decided to modernize the systems themselves—starting with the regulators. The company’s first product, a regulatory sandbox for the Bank of Ghana, launched during the pandemic. Her team co-developed the platform entirely over Zoom, running weekly sprints and feedback sessions to bring the solution to life. Designed to help central banks supervise fintech activity through API integrations and real-time data, it gave EMTECH a clear foothold.
Cadet stepped into the solo founder role with no technical team and no margin for error, taking investor calls while assembling a staff across Africa, India, and the U.S. When a competitor poached her CTO mid-fundraise, she kept going. In the early years, she paid her team before paying herself. “My first job,” she tells them, “is making sure we all have a job.”
Today, EMTECH works with four central banks and offers tools for compliance, supervision, and digital currency development. Its small team has members spread across Africa, India, and the U.S., operating with a focus on long-term partnerships rather than fast scaling. And Cadet is clear-eyed about what’s at stake. “Inclusion without resilience,” she says, “is deeper exclusion.”
