My On-and-Off Relationship With Fintech (And Why I'm Finally Committing)

I've circled fintech for years without ever fully landing in it. Interested, then busy, then interested again — a pattern I'm guessing a lot of people who read this will recognize in themselves, just pointed at a different subject.

It started for real in March 2024, when I got hired as an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Analyst at a bank. On paper, the job is about compliance — tracing suspicious transactions, understanding how money moves, knowing what regulators are actually looking for. But sitting inside that machinery for over a year taught me something I didn't expect: I wasn't just learning AML. I was learning personal finance, almost by osmosis. You can't spend your days studying how money behaves at scale without starting to ask sharper questions about how it behaves in your own life.

That's when it clicked for me: it doesn't matter what position you're in — analyst, teller, engineer, marketer, whatever — you need to understand personal finance. Not as a nice-to-have. As a baseline. I had a front-row seat to that lesson, and it was hard to unsee.

Here's the "off" part of the on-and-off, though. I'd had an interest in this space before the AML job even started. But between school and everything else competing for my attention, that interest kept getting shelved. Not abandoned — just paused, over and over, until "later" became a pattern instead of a plan.

I also had a completely different project sitting in the background this whole time: LAY/ERD. Originally, it wasn't about finance at all — it started as an idea for an independent clothing line. At some point I realized the name didn't need to stay attached to clothes. What I actually wanted to build was something about perspective — how people make decisions, why they make the ones they do, and how to make better ones. So LAY/ERD became a blog, a place to give advice, built around the same realization the AML job handed me: understanding your money isn't optional, and most of us never got taught how.

So why now? Honestly — time. School isn't eating every hour anymore, the interest that kept getting paused has room to breathe again, and I have actual field experience to draw from instead of just curiosity. This isn't a New Year's-resolution kind of commitment. It's closer to picking back up something I put down more than once and finally having the space to not put it down again.

LAY/ERD, for me, isn't about positioning myself as an expert with all the answers. It's about sharing what I've picked up — from the AML side, from personal finance, from just being a person who had to learn this the slow way — and hoping it saves someone else a few of the loops I ran in circles on. If it helps even a handful of people think differently about a decision they're about to make, that's the whole point. Spread the word, one perspective at a time.

This is the first of what I hope is a real series, not another paused interest. More fintech pieces — some personal, some more practical — are coming.