Wole Coaxum (he/him)

CEO & Founder, Mobility Capital Finance (MOCAFI)

Providing access to banking services, credit-building tools, and aid programs for tens of millions of Americans locked out of traditional banking institutions.

Although he comes from a long line of community activists, Wole Coaxum’s path through the finance industry didn’t intersect obviously with social-justice work. But in 2014—while he was thriving professionally as Managing Director of JP Morgan Chase—Coaxum’s trajectory was altered by national tragedy: the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager shot fatally by police in Ferguson, Missouri. “I knew I had to do something,” Coaxum says. “And I wanted to reimagine change through my unique perspective.”

Coaxum realized that the deep social-justice roots of the Black community lacked an economic component. He wanted to build a scaffolding for communities of color to participate in a system that traditionally rewards the already-wealthy. He risked his career to found Mobility Capital Finance (MoCaFi), a financial technology company whose mobile platform provides access to banking services, credit-building tools, and aid programs for tens of millions of Americans locked out of traditional banking institutions.

MoCaFi wasn’t easy to launch. “Investors tend to pattern match,” Coaxum says, “and there was no preexisting model here.” But his gambit—aided by networks he began developing at NYU—has paid major dividends. MoCaFi has attracted over 70,000 users and has been pivotal in distributing more than $50 million in emergency pandemic relief to underserved communities. And Coaxum—whose accomplishments have been recognized by most major financial publications—is just getting started. “The goal,” he says, “is to build something that will outlast me.”