Sean Pawley

Sean Pawley is the founder and CEO of Seshat Bank, the premier bank for the ZEDE ecosystem in Honduras, and an expert on banking, finance and agriculture. The bank departs from traditional Central American banking by letting customers manage everything from their phone or laptop with full API access, operating under a regulatory regime designed to reduce risk for depositors.

He began the project after dealing with banks in East Africa and concluding that the problem was regulatory rather than technical: the compliance burden on a small bank makes it impossible to serve the customers a large one will not bother with. The plan was originally for Rwanda and Uganda before he moved it to Próspera, where the rules for chartering a bank are written by the zone itself.

Seshat takes deposits on fixed terms of several years, which lets it lend on longer horizons than a bank funded by instant-access accounts can, and it runs from a phone or a browser with full programmatic access rather than through branches.

It is named after the Egyptian goddess of writing and accounting, and it is one of the clearer tests of whether a new jurisdiction can produce something a regulator elsewhere would not permit and a customer would still trust.