What happens when a $70 phone meets smart financing and trust tech

A billion smartphones ship every year, yet billions of people still can’t get online. The barrier isn’t coverage—or even a $70 device—it’s trust, credit, and the lack of banking rails in places where daily income leaves no room for upfront purchases. We sit down with Trustonic CEO Dion Price to unpack a counterintuitive solution: secure device locking that makes micro‑installments viable, protects lenders, and teaches first-time buyers how financing works without requiring bank accounts, addresses, or formal credit histories.

Dion explains how the tech lives natively inside devices—think Samsung KnoxGuard, MotoSafe, and Android capabilities—so retailers and carriers don’t need special hardware variants or clunky apps. A financed phone boots with a simple, transparent policy: keep up with small payments via mobile money or in-store and the phone stays fully usable; fall behind and you’ll see clear prompts with instant pathways to pay and unlock. That light-touch control is enough to flip risk models, inviting capital into markets it has long avoided. The payoff is human: students walking hours from schools can stream lessons, parents triage illness with reliable health guidance, and young creators publish videos that change their trajectories.

We also trace the ripple effects. A fully paid phone becomes a live credit proxy—proof of reliability that can unlock access to solar home systems, small business tools, or even future financial products. In mature markets, the same stack improves collections and makes stolen devices worthless to resellers, reducing street and supply‑chain theft. It’s one infrastructure layer serving two missions: digital inclusion at the frontier and resilience in cities where device crime is rampant.

If you’re curious about how carriers, OEMs, and financiers can align to connect the next billion—and how a “lock” can unlock opportunity—this conversation will shift your view of affordability, credit, and scale. Listen now, share with a friend who cares about access and fintech, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Framing The “Next Billion” Gap
• 1:41 Why Affordability Beats Hardware Costs
• 5:21 Credit Deserts: No Banks, No Addresses
• 6:29 Secure Locks As Financing Infrastructure
• 8:26 [Ad] Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
• 8:59 (Cont.) Secure Locks As Financing Infrastructure
• 9:01 Behavior, Reminders, And Ethical Locking
• 9:29 Life Change Stories From First Smartphones
• 12:47 Inside The Tech: OEM Locks Stitched Together
• 17:52 Scale, Capital, And Building Credit Proxies
• 20:52 Beyond Phones: Solar And New Ecosystems
• 22:44 Western Use Cases: Collections And Theft

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey everybody, fascinating discussion today as we're diving into the one of the most uh important stories in tech connecting the next billion people. And Trustonic is helping make smartphones affordable, secure for those who have been left out in the digital world. Dion, how are you? I'm very well, Evan, and yourself. Thanks so much. Doing well, really intrigued by uh what you're up to. Maybe describe the mission at Trustonic and uh your journey. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01: 0:32

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, our journey here at Trustonic started out as uh as kind of often you do in a sort of slightly different adjacent space. We were very, very sort of heavily concentrated on quite deep cybersecurity, et cetera. But probably five, six years ago now, we sort of turned our attention to something probably a little bit more egalitarian as a problem to solve. And that, as you rightly pointed out, was uh connecting the next billion. So we started on that journey trying to figure out, you know, what's the problem here, what's the challenge, how do we unlock that, and and certainly how we can help. And fast forward sort of five, five and a half years later, and we'll make some inroads. Clearly, we're not quite there yet, but uh there's certainly other things to do. But uh yeah, we we're making some headway with our handset manufacturer partners and obviously all of the carriers, retailers, financiers, all the guys that are important in the in the ecosystem. It's certainly not a certainly not a one-man journey, put it that way. So you have to kind of work in partnership.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31

Indeed. So let's unpack that. What does connecting the next billion mean in practice, you know, in terms of users and um what's standing in their way?

SPEAKER_01: 1:40

Sure. I mean, it's one of those fascinating problems where you look at the kind of the broad economics of the handset manufacturer industry. And any given year, probably for the last 10 to 15 years, we as a sort of global population of manufacturers have been making anywhere between sort of a billion and 1.4 billion phones in a given year. About 300 million of those are still sort of uh sort of dumb phones, feature phones, just basic talk and text devices. So the overwhelming majority being smartphones. So if we're making over a billion of these things a year, how come there's broadly three billion people in the world that are yet to gain access to one? The mass doesn't quite add up. So what's going on? So generally the issue is you know wouldn't be sort of too surprising to many, uh, is one around uh affordability. So we work a lot in countries and markets where you know the average income is somewhere between$1.50 and$3.50 sort of per day. So these are you know very, very kind of budgetary constrained markets. And when you take sort of even the upper end of that, and this is these are sort of World Health Organization, World Bank type statistics here on that$3.50 per day, even when you take that and you spread that out across all of the things that you need to sort of survive and run your life for you and your family, so food, clothing, housing, et cetera, et cetera, uh, there's literally nothing left. So even if you are able somehow to get smartphones all the way down to maybe sort of$70 or even$50, uh, and that still isn't solving the problem of affordability, then there's something else that's wrong. So I think in the Western world, we often take that for granted. You know, we're kind of paying a thousand bucks for an iPhone or maybe kind of more than that for the high-end models. But certainly you should think logically, if you can get it down to sub 100 bucks, you should crack, crack this problem. No, no issue around the world. Unfortunately, that's not the case. So, as we said, once you take out all these life essentials, you you can't possibly help hope to save the money to even buy a very, very basic device. So the challenge then becomes okay, in order to make this affordable for those uh elements of the population, you're gonna have to spread this cost. So, just like any kind of major purchase, relatively speaking, in the Western world, be that a mortgage for a home or a car loan or something like that, you've then got to spread that cost to make it affordable. In order to do that, the vehicles that we use in the West to generate things like a credit rating, for example. So you and I will have a credit history, we'll have a job history, we'll have a bank history. And then the credit agencies use that to put together a bit of a view or an opinion in terms of how well prepared you are to repay this loan. The challenge you've got in emerging markets is the credit rating systems simply don't exist. So these are huge populations that are completely unbanked, so they have no formal bank account. The vast majority of the time they don't have a formal work history either. So, not to over-generalize, but in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, you may be working uh, you know, on this farm one day, you may be working on this construction site, another day you may be helping out a family member on another day. So there's no history of employment, there's no history from your bank account. And even the basics, things like an address system, simply doesn't exist in huge parts of the world. So the address system, as we know it today, uh was a function of a postal service needing to move letters and packages around the world, very kind of colonial, if you like, but uh a huge percentage of the world actually doesn't have a formal address system either. So there's no hooks to hang uh a formal credit rating system onto. So if I'm a person that's walking into a store, let's just use Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and I say, hey, look, this phone, I can't afford to take it all in one go. Can I spread the cost of this device? They don't really know sort of how to do that. Like how who are you? How well prepared are you financially to pay this over the fullness of time? Do you even understand what a deferred payment plan actually is? Like because that's a complete education uh process where that concept just doesn't exist in a lot of markets. So, really, it's about how do you then solve that problem? So, really, unless you solve that problem, the financiers of the world won't enter those markets and then facilitate the spread of those devices. So then we kind of look back to, well, why won't they enter? Why won't they come in? Of course, there's no kind of traditional uh credit system, so they they can't lean on that. But there is another way of doing it. The way in which we operate and how we help in this system is that we, in effect, provide very, very secure locking technology on the phone. So, what does that locking technology actually do in this sort of ecosystem? It basically allows the financiers, the people bringing the money in, to then say to the end consumer, if you can give me 10%, 20% down, you can walk out of the store with this device, but then I need you to come back in two weeks or three or four or one or whatever it might be. And I need you to pay me like the next$5 or$2 or$10 or whatever it might be. And this is going to be a journey we're gonna be on together. I'll be sending you some messages to say, look, your next payment is this amount, it's due in this number of days. Here are the directions to the store where you can go and pay, or you can call this number and you can pay via some sort of mobile payment, which they have via SMS in a lot of parts of the world. And then we kind of go on this journey together where I'm kind of helping you learn what financing actually is. But I am secure in the knowledge that I've allowed you to walk out of a store with a$70 smartphone or a hundred dollar smartphone, and I know that if you don't come back and pay the next instalment, then those messages then turn into uh lock messages. So, okay, you know, your your payment is now due on this day, and we're one day beyond that, we're two days beyond that, we're five days beyond that, we're a week beyond that. We're now gonna have to lock this phone, and the only thing you will now see on the phone is you owe$4.30, uh, click here to pay, call here to pay, or walk, drive, bus, whatever, to the nearest store, and this is how you pay. And then it's unlocked within 20 seconds anywhere in the world. So then the lenders in this system are like, okay, right, now I can trust that the next payment will come and it'll come after that, and after that, and after that. And the consumer gets used to, oh, I see, I get the game now. So we basically have to then save this money and then go and make the next installment, next installment, and I can use this phone and spread the cost. So that's a little bit of a whistle stop tour, Evan. So it's a little bit sort of uh uh of a journey to kind of go on because it's so alien and so different, obviously, for a Western audience to kind of wrap their heads around how this might work in practice.

SPEAKER_00: 8:52

Well, it's mind-blowing and so eye-opening. I I had no idea all of the challenges and roadblocks and just shifting away from tech for a moment, I'm a techie, but you you must have so many great anecdotes and stories around how access to a smartphone can change a person's complete life trajectory. Um care to share insight into how this is unfolding on the ground.

SPEAKER_01: 9:16

Yeah, of course. You know, it's one of the fascinating things, and it really kind of boosts uh a lot of our sort of morale and kind of keeps us all going in the business when we pick up some of these fantastic stories. And, you know, there's some some great ones where uh people are sort of picking up their smartphone for the first time ever, and they may be in a rural community. And then what that smartphone represents to them is the very first time that they may have uh access to sort of you know, the entire encyclopedia, cornucopia of the world's knowledge is now in their hands. So that is obviously great for providing education where the nearest school maybe hours, walk away, or maybe days, quite frankly. So you're then kind of bringing that to the to the all of the edges of a community, which is fantastic. Uh, again, from a medical standpoint, when somebody uh becomes unwell, they are able to look up what's going wrong and they're able to kind of uh provide some sort of uh triage or or help before kind of getting some kind of formal medical attention somewhere else. It also allows people to access uh work and sort of economic opportunities online. And there's some lovely stories like this that sort of come out of parts of Africa where uh you've had um very often kind of you know late teenagers, early 20s, they get hold of their first smartphone and then they start recording videos and they're using sort of like the basic video manipulation on the device, and they're uploading that to YouTube, it's catching attention. You know, there have been stories where there have been Hollywood directors that have kind of been in contact with them, gone, wow, this is amazing, you know, fantastic uh opportunity that would just never have existed. There has been one case where um there was uh uh I can't remember which part of uh Central Africa it was now, but there was a chap there that taught himself the javelin and he did that via YouTube. And without that smartphone, he wouldn't have been able to sort of teach himself the techniques, and he actually ended up qualifying for the last Olympics. And again, he just taught himself through YouTube, and he wouldn't have had that opportunity if not it been in his hands. So you get like thousands and thousands of stories around it's allowed me to provide for my family and it saved my child's life through this medical information. But it's those little quirky ones actually that I think I think are quite cool as well. So yeah, you know, we get to directly and indirectly kind of touch the lives of a lot of people, but you know, it can sound a little um sort of uh uh abrasive when it's like, oh, locking technology. It's like, well, actually, what it's doing is it's enabling financiers to come in. It gives them the trust to lend in markets that previously they just wouldn't touch. So, really, what we're doing is trying to provide the confidence for the whole ecosystem to kind of get involved. And then also what's quite nice is that once uh those consumers get an idea of what finance is, how it works, it then allows them to think about other things that might work in a similar way. So when there are villages that are completely off-grid, uh solar is is obviously a great opportunity for them. But uh again, they don't have the means to sort of like buy a solar array in one go. So it's okay, there's a financing opportunity here. They understand the model now and how that could be applied to other things as well. So it starts to open up other ecosystems, not just from a smartphone perspective.

SPEAKER_00: 12:32

But yeah, we uh we enjoy our work. Uh indeed, so exciting. Uh, really, your enthusiasm is infectious. Um, give us a peek behind the scenes in terms of how you work with the mobile operators, the financiers, uh financiers behind them to kind of scale this secure device finance. And how does that work?

SPEAKER_01: 12:52

It's pretty straightforward to be honest. So we don't have uh any sort of special brew where we have to load something that's sort of unique uh onto the device. We don't need a special version of the device. So historically, some locking technology required uh sort of a different version, a version two. So you had sort of the regular white label version of the device that's shipped all over the world. But then for something like this, they used to need some kind of hardware variant, so a V1 and a V2. But that hugely complicates supply chains, it adds cost, and it just makes it quite difficult to get things like this moving. So the way in which we have uh worked the solution is we take lock-in technology that already exists within the handset manufacturer. So there are versions, if you think about like Samsung, for example, they run something called NoxGuard that was used originally for sort of enterprise manageability. So if you were an enterprise and you had a fleet of Samsung devices and you lost one in the back of the cab or the subway or something, then your IT administrator could go on and lock and wipe that device. So it's kind of safe. So it's that idea, but it's then moved into a consumer realm. That's a very different journey for a consumer, it's quite different, but the kernel of the idea of the tech is actually very similar. So we have Samsung that has their version, and then everybody has a version of this pretty much. So Motorola have something called MotoSafe, and then you have kind of like the Chinese guys, so like Xiaomi has has their own version, and then Vivo and Oppo and all these guys. We also have our own version, so a couple of those handset manufacturers have not developed their own, so they actually work uh with ours and load it into their devices, but then it ships into the marketplace, and all we do, quite simply, Evan, really, is the handset manufacturer uh ships the device as normal, and each of those devices comes with an IMEI number, right? So a serial number for want of a better word. And the mobile operator in question basically just sends us the entire list. So if they're importing a million or a hundred million, they send us that entire list and we ingest all of those into our system. And then when one of those devices is financed in some way where they're spreading that cost, then that IMEI is just triggered into our system. And when that device is first powered on, the very first thing it does, even before you see the hello welcome screen, it's pulled uh the specification down onto the phone, and it basically says this phone is financed by whoever the customer is. That might be a Vodacom or an ATT or someone like that. Uh, and then they're taken through a series of screens which explains for the phone to remain unlocked and in use, then you have to keep up your payments on this device, and this is how it's going to work, etc. And that's it. And then once the device is paid off, then all of the software basically just unlocks itself and it's it's that user's device then completely unlocked free forever, because obviously they've paid it off, it's now there's no problem. And the device just returns to a normal state. So, in effect, if a consumer just keeps up the repayments on their devices, which the overwhelming majority do, by the way. This is the interesting thing, is people are not trying to cheat or game the system here. They're genuinely trying to make it affordable for them and their family. So they don't really have an intention to try and trick the carrier out of this device. They're just trying to kind of make their way in the world. So when they do that and and they keep up all those repayments, they only ever see that first screen right at the very beginning. They never see hide not hit of that lock screen or apps or anything else ever again, because they've been super diligent as a as a as a consumer and they've paid off that device no problem at all. So it's it's highly enabling. It's only if they if they do not keep up repayments on that device at some point, or if they report it stolen, for example, then that message will appear on the screen, and that's just all API driven between us and the carrier. So it's it's not proprietary, it's very light touch on the consumer. There's no additional payload uh that goes into the device. There's no sort of chatty app that is draining the battery or anything on or on the network load. So it's very, very smooth and light touch. But where we sort of excel, if you like, is that we stitch all of those locking technologies together from every single handset manufacturer. Plus, uh Google has something in its operating system that we are allowed to leverage as well. We're the only one that does it internationally across the globe. So you've got to be a trusted partner of Google to do that. And then we we mesh them all together so then the carrier only ever sees sort of one system. So they don't see seven or eight or nine different systems if they're carrying those handsaped manufacturers. They just see the one. And so it's just uh an API-based system that logs into their point of sale system and then also uh their ERP, so their billing system. So it's all automated and it's pretty smooth.

SPEAKER_00: 17:44

Well, sounds incredible. Um, so when you look at this usage gap, 3.1 billion people offline despite coverage, that's an enormous uh uh challenge. How do you see yourself scaling up? How quickly can you scale?

SPEAKER_01: 17:59

Yeah, I mean, the scale, to be honest with you, it generally comes down to the uh the money side, the finances, and how fast they are willing to go pouring into each country. So a lot of the challenges that we have is sort of like, you know, your traditional uh lenders are are just sort of learning about this opportunity, really, and they are also seeing it as an opportunity to build credit systems in markets that have never previously had one. So, why is it that your Visa Card, your MasterCard, your American Express, just to use the headline brands, don't run in Tanzania or Rwanda or DRC or parts of India. You know, if you think about India, it's 1.3 billion people, there's only about 100 million credit cards in that country. So you think about that massive opportunity. So really uh it's sort of this catch 22 of if they don't have a credit rating system there, then they can't enter. So they need another way, they need a proxy for doing that. And someone's ability to pay off a mobile phone from start to finish across six or twelve or eighteen months, is an incredible proxy for are you going to pay off something else? So if I do give you a credit card at some point in the future or some kind of ability to pay in advance for something, because I've watched you pay off this mobile phone for the past two years or three years, I've got a pretty good idea that you're going to keep going if I provide you with some other facility. So it's it's that kind of gradual trust buildup. So in terms of where we are on that journey, we're just sort of beginning, really. I mean, the numbers that we have are quite incredible. So we've got somewhere between 280 and 300 million devices that sit on our system that pass through our system. That's growing exponentially every year. So we're growing it about 75 to 95% year on year. So it's significant. Um, but really, you know, we're kind of we're at the base of that curve and it's really picking up as the financiers, the people that sit behind this money, gain more confidence to put into these marketplaces because they know they're going to get it back. It doesn't then have to be a purely trust-based system. There is some track record, there is an ability to uh restrict the asset that they financed into the market. So then they're more confident, then they can see another way. So it's it's less about the big headline financiers right now because they tend to be laggards. It's generally the earlier, faster moving sources of finance that are prepared to sort of park a few billion dollars into a market and go, right, let's go for this thing. And you know, the one thing that absolutely everybody wants and needs in every market globally is a smartphone. Generally, that's the one thing. Like once you've kind of done your Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then you're kind of onto communication and then everything that a smartphone provides, which we which we discussed earlier.

SPEAKER_00: 20:44

Wonderful. Well, what's your vision over the next few years in terms of not just fulfilling on the mission here, but what else are you imagining, envisioning you can offer uh these communities, these countries?

SPEAKER_01: 20:57

Yeah, I mean, the for those communities, I think it's significant. As we said, you know, getting them off the ground with a smartphone or similar device to begin with, and then using that as a proxy to see how they can uh enhance their affordability for other essentials that they they have in life as well. We we operate in the Western world as well, so the problems there are slightly different. So um it's less about things like credit ratings, it's more about um the stick, if you like, that carriers wheel today to get people to pay for devices that they've stopped paying for or bill payments that are late. The stick they carry today is is not particularly compelling. They sort of you know send you a an SMS or they might give you a call and say, hey, look, you know, you need to kind of pay your bill. And a lot of communities, particularly kind of sub-40, sub-35, are just like, yeah, it's fine, I'll pay it next week, or I'll get paid in 10 days, I'll do it then. Whereas if you lock that phone, people pay very quickly, right? So it tends to kind of alter people's structure of uh of kind of priority. It's like, you know, do I go out and party on Friday night, or do maybe I'll pay my phone bill first, then I'll go out and party the following week. So we we help in the Western world as well. Uh I think one of the other things as well is around things like uh street theft and also supply chain theft. These are big problems in the West, um, particularly in a lot of eastern seaboard US cities, a lot of European cities. You know, there are uh hundreds of thousands of devices stolen just in central London every year. We think it's an unreported crime as well. We think it's probably more like a million plus. And they all tend to find those themselves sort of worming through organized crime networks and off into China, where they are either stripped for parts or they're resold uh as fully functioning devices. So disrupting that organized crime system uh via effective means of locking, both through street theft but also supply chain theft, where someone might uh hijack an entire truck of devices is extremely important as well. So, you know, we solve different problems for different parts of the world. The emerging markets is definitely sort of like the hyper growth, extremely exciting and very fulfilling. Uh, the other sort of problems that exist in the Western world are slightly different, but no more serious. Like it's it's the there are there are very real consequences to having your mobile phone stolen in some of the cities across the world. So, you know, it's definitely a big problem you have to tackle. And we're very happy to do that, obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 23:24

Well, incredible mission. Congratulations on all the success and success to come onwards and upwards again. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01: 23:30

Indeed. Thank you, Evan.

SPEAKER_00: 23:32

And thanks everyone for listening, watching, and sharing this episode. Take care.