For Georgina Merhom, Founder of SOLO, the journey from cybersecurity researcher to fintech founder wasn’t a straight line—it was a series of observations about how trust, data, and relationships were breaking down in digital finance, and how rebuilding them required something radically different.

From Cybersecurity to Fintech

Before founding SOLO, Georgina was a data scientist in cybersecurity, trained to find signals in complex systems. At companies like Flashpoint and later Bellingcat, she worked on uncovering illicit activity on the deep web—training algorithms to detect fraud and disinformation. In cybersecurity, she learned that the only way to keep systems safe was through shared context and collective verification, principles that would become the foundation of SOLO.

Her first fintech venture, Zivmi, emerged during the pandemic. It was a lending platform for unbanked freelancers and small businesses in Egypt—built on the belief that open banking could automate financial inclusion. The company scaled quickly to facilitate tens of thousands of transactions before being acquired by the National Bank of Egypt. But Georgina realized that access to data wasn’t the real problem—its fragmentation was. APIs didn’t equal usability, and financial institutions were still drowning in repetitive, manual data processing. That challenge became her next mission.

SOLO’s Founding Idea: Collaborative Data Infrastructure

In 2023, Georgina founded SOLO with the goal of rebuilding open banking from the ground up. SOLO is not just another data aggregator or bureau—it’s what Georgina calls a “relationship engine.” Rather than collecting or selling static data sets, SOLO acts as a multi-party network where banks, fintechs, and other financial actors contribute and validate customer information in real time.

Its core product, the Customer Data Clearinghouse, creates a “governed network” that allows verified customer data to move across institutions—securely, transparently, and with the customer’s consent. Where legacy bureaus operate as centralized hubs of control, SOLO’s network decentralizes that control. Every participant in the network is both a data consumer and a data contributor, and each interaction with a customer adds verified knowledge to a shared, living system of trust.

In Georgina’s words, “In an industry where data has replaced relationships, access no longer hinges on who owns the data, but on who is incentivized to share trust”.

Rebuilding Incentives and Trust

SOLO’s incentive model is its quiet disruption. Instead of extracting value from data, the network compensates the institutions that do the actual work of verification. Banks and fintechs that validate or enrich customer data—through KYC, underwriting, or compliance—are rewarded when that validated information is safely reused elsewhere. That model makes collaboration financially rational while reinforcing trust as the true currency of finance.

This “Trust-as-a-Service” approach has attracted over 100 banks into SOLO’s network, including Choice Bank and Coastal Bank as founding members. These institutions are saving millions in duplicated onboarding and origination processes—an estimated $29 billion industry-wide problem—while giving consumers control over their own financial records.

A New Era for Open Banking

Open banking has long promised customer empowerment, but Georgina argues that it hasn’t delivered on its most crucial promise: portability. SOLO’s vision moves beyond static APIs or bilateral integrations toward a multilateral, self-regulating data economy. It treats trust as infrastructure, where institutions are naturally incentivized to vouch for consumers rather than gatekeep them.

By framing data sharing as collective stewardship rather than ownership, SOLO is redefining how the financial ecosystem operates. Banks no longer need to fear being disintermediated by aggregators, fintechs no longer start from scratch with every new customer, and consumers finally gain visibility and agency over how their data is used.

Under Georgina’s leadership, SOLO has become a flagship example of what responsible financial data collaboration looks like in the United States. Its participation in the American Fintech Council underscores a broader goal—to create a governance model that restores accountability and human context to digital finance.

When reflecting on her journey, Georgina often points out that the future of open banking doesn’t belong to any one entity or technology; it belongs to the networks that can coordinate trust. Her mission for SOLO is not just to build infrastructure—it’s to make financial connectivity equitable, sustainable, and, above all, collaborative.