Two friends from working-class Black families, four hundred miles apart, both remember the same kind of Friday. The electricity bill was due, but the paycheck did not land until Monday. A parent had to choose between fixing a car and paying rent. Travis Holoway grew up watching it in Cleveland. Rodney Williams grew up watching it too. By the time they met, became best friends, and eventually business partners, they had both concluded that nobody had ever really tried to build a solution for people like their families at scale.
In 2018, they built one. SoLo Funds started as a peer-to-peer lending app, a way for everyday people to borrow and lend small amounts of money to each other, with terms set by the borrower rather than dictated by a bank. Seven years later, it is the largest Black-owned personal finance platform in the United States, and by the founders' own account in a 2025 interview, it has surpassed 2 million registered users and $1 billion in transaction volume.
That is a real, verifiable number, confirmed by Holoway and Williams themselves. It is also worth being precise about what it is not. SoLo Funds is not marketed as a faith app the way a Bible study tool or a church giving platform is. It is a community finance company. But the distinction matters less than it might seem, because the communities SoLo Funds was built to serve and the communities sitting in pews on Sunday are, in large part, the same people.
A company built on borrowed trust, not borrowed capital
Before SoLo Funds, Holoway worked as a financial advisor at Northwestern Mutual. He saw firsthand how expensive it is to build a regulated financial company from the ground up, and how much harder that becomes when your target customer is exactly the person traditional banks have spent decades underpricing or ignoring outright. Williams, a West Virginia University graduate, brought his own version of the same story: parents who worked hard and still could not access small-dollar credit without predatory interest rates attached to it.
The two of them built SoLo Funds around a simple bet: that people who already trust each other inside their own communities do not need a bank to vouch for them, they need a platform. By 2022, the company had processed more than 150,000 loans and served over 400,000 customers. That same year, SoLo Funds became the only African-American-owned fintech company to earn B Corp certification, a designation reserved for businesses that meet verified standards of social and environmental performance. The momentum kept building from there. CNBC named SoLo Funds to its 2023 Disruptor 50 list, noting the company had raised $24 million in funding at a $150 million valuation. By 2024, Endeavor was describing Holoway as leading the first Black-owned personal fintech company to reach one million users, a milestone the company would double within roughly a year.
Holoway and Williams have since expanded beyond lending. The company now offers a suite of tools it calls SoLo IQ and SoLo NowCAST, which the founders describe as a way of reading American household cash flow ahead of official government economic data, essentially using the borrowing patterns of everyday Americans as an early signal for the broader economy. They have also launched a podcast, The Wealth Break, in partnership with iHeartRadio and Essence, aimed at bringing financial literacy conversations to an audience that rarely sees itself centered in that kind of media.
SoLo Funds is not the only one
The rise of Black-owned digital finance did not happen in isolation, and it did not happen quietly. In the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020, Donald Hawkins and Asya Bradley founded a digital bank in Overland Park, Kansas, originally called Tenth and later renamed First Boulevard. Hawkins had previously built a company serving community banks and credit unions; Bradley had helped build banking infrastructure at the fintech platform Synapse. Together, they discovered there were only about 19 Black-owned banks left in the entire United States, holding a combined $5 billion in assets, a fraction of what a single large regional bank might hold on its own. First Boulevard raised $5 million in seed funding from backers that included Barclays, Anthemis, and actress Gabrielle Union, and built a bank around a simple, direct pitch: unapologetic banking built for Black America, complete with a cash-back rewards program specifically for spending at Black-owned businesses.
First Boulevard later rebranded as Kinly and grew to roughly 300,000 users before being acquired in 2023 by Greenwood, another Black-owned digital banking platform, this one backed publicly by Killer Mike and Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover. Greenwood had already been on an acquisition run of its own, absorbing the networking hub The Gathering Spot, the A3C music festival, and the professional networking platform Valence, building what Glover described to Banking Dive as the largest combined fintech and community platform for Black and Latino Americans, serving a community of over a million people even before the Kinly deal closed. Around the same time, Greenwood closed a $45 million funding round led by Pendulum.
Then there is MoCaFi, short for Mobility Capital Finance, which launched on Juneteenth in 2020 specifically to serve the more than 50 million Americans who are unbanked or underbanked, a population that overlaps heavily with the same congregations these community platforms have quietly become embedded in.
Where faith actually fits into this story
None of these companies market themselves primarily as faith-based products, and it would be inaccurate to describe SoLo Funds, Greenwood, or MoCaFi as faith-first apps in the way that a prayer journal or a Bible-study platform is. But faith communities are where a meaningful share of their growth actually happens, for a reason that has nothing to do with marketing budgets. Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be both unbanked or underbanked and highly engaged in church life. A platform that solves a real financial problem for that population does not need to advertise inside a church bulletin. Word of mouth inside a community that already trusts each other's referrals more than a bank's ad campaign does that work for free.
The giving side of church technology tells a parallel story, with its own real, separate numbers worth stating plainly rather than rounding up. Pushpay, a donor management platform built specifically for faith communities, processes roughly $5 billion a year in giving across more than 10,500 church and nonprofit customers. Tithe.ly, a competing giving platform, says its standalone church app is trusted by more than 5,000 churches, though the app itself has logged a more modest 240,000 or so downloads on Android. Neither of those figures is "two million," a number that has circulated in some corners of the trend press without a clear source behind it. What is real and independently tracked is the trajectory: research firm Towards Healthcare projects the broader spiritual wellness app category, which includes giving and faith-based finance tools, to grow from $2.89 billion in 2026 to $9.91 billion by 2035, a compound growth rate of nearly 15 percent a year.
The actual milestone worth reporting
Put those two threads together and the real headline is not that a faith app quietly crossed two million downloads. It is that a Black-owned community finance company, built by two friends who grew up watching their families choose between the electric bill and the rent, actually did cross two million users, doubling that number in roughly a year, while an entire ecosystem of Black-owned banks and church giving platforms have been building the same kind of trust-based scale around it. Kinly's 300,000 users folding into Greenwood's base, MoCaFi's Juneteenth launch aimed at 50 million unbanked Americans, Pushpay's $5 billion in annual church giving processed. None of it needed a faith label to find its way into a church parking lot on Sunday morning. The trust was already there. The apps just had to show up.
