The colmado question that could rewire dominican fintech

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor 

A colmado owner doesn’t need another payment app. He needs a reason to use it.

Picture a customer at the counter who wants to pay by phone. The owner has a familiar set of questions: Will the payment arrive? How much will it cost? When can I use the money? And what happens if something goes wrong?

A technology company can answer the first question with a demonstration. The others decide whether it has a business.

That small exchange helps explain one of the Dominican Republic’s biggest financial opportunities. Digital payments are growing, but cash remains deeply useful. For the shopkeeper, the question isn’t whether the country is becoming more modern. It’s whether a new way of getting paid makes an already busy day any easier.

Cash Still Has a Job

In September 2025, the Central Bank reported 2.5 million card transactions initiated through digital wallets, totaling RD$4,351.6 million. That is one specific kind of digital card transaction, not a count of all payments made electronically in the country.

The same institution’s 2023 National Financial Inclusion and Education Survey found that 55.9% of respondents received their main income in cash, while 54.1% said they preferred to receive it that way. Those figures concern income, not the share of purchases made at shops, and come from a different period than the wallet data.

Still, the picture is clear enough: people are adopting new payment tools without necessarily giving up the old ones. A worker may receive cash, transfer money to a relative and use a card at a supermarket, all within the same week.

For a colmado, that means the winning payment option might not be the newest one. It might be whichever one causes the least confusion at closing time.

A Newcomer With a Familiar Problem

Paydoly is one company trying to answer that question. The US-founded fintech, led by Edward A. Nupa, is developing a service for consumers and merchants in the Dominican Republic. Its proposed features include a digital wallet, transfers, QR-code payments that customers can scan with a phone, payment links and a simple sales tool called Quick Sell.

To someone who hasn’t heard of Paydoly, the idea is straightforward: give customers more ways to pay and help small businesses keep track of those sales.

Nupa’s background is in the systems most customers never see. According to the biography supplied by the company, he worked in banking operations at PNC and in enterprise analytics at Fiserv before founding Quvah, a technology consultancy and Microsoft Partner. He says Quvah grew beyond US$1 million in revenue.

That experience may prove useful. Making a payment look simple on a screen is one thing. Making sure a merchant can find it in the day’s records, understand the fee and resolve a problem is another.

But Paydoly is not yet an established Dominican payments success story. It remains in private beta. The company reported around 100 merchant sign-ups for testing as of September 2026. Sign-ups are not the same as regular users, completed purchases or recurring revenue. Its payments authorization and some operating integrations were still in progress in the materials it shared.

That distinction matters. A promising concept should be allowed to prove itself, rather than being declared a success before customers have used it.

The Second Payment Is the Real Test

Consider how a first transaction might happen. A merchant agrees to try a new payment link. A customer uses it once. The screen shows a confirmation.

Now imagine the following morning. Can the merchant see exactly which customer paid? Does the amount match the sale after fees? Has the money become available when expected? If something failed, is there someone who can fix it?

And a week later, has anybody chosen to pay that way again?

Those questions are more revealing than the number of people who registered for an app. A first payment can demonstrate that a feature works. A second, voluntary payment starts to show whether people find it useful.

For a small shop, the cost of a confusing payment isn’t limited to a transaction fee. It’s also the time spent checking a transfer, calling a customer back, or reconciling numbers after the store closes.

A good digital tool should take work away from the merchant, not give them a second job.

Where Banks and Merchant Groups Come In

This isn’t a challenge for fintech founders alone. Banks already have relationships with businesses, systems for handling funds and duties to protect customers. Merchant associations hear every day what shop owners struggle with. Young technology companies may be able to test solutions more quickly.

Each sees a different piece of the same problem.

There is room for practical cooperation, but it should begin with something smaller than a ceremonial partnership announcement. For example, a bank or merchant association could help identify a group of shops willing to explain how they collect payments today and what problems they actually need solved. Any subsequent product test would need the appropriate authorization, safeguards and clear agreement from participants.

A useful conversation would establish who is responsible, what the merchants stand to gain and what evidence would justify the next step. Without those answers, a dozen meetings may produce plenty of photographs and very little change.

The Dominican Republic does not lack financial technology or ambitious entrepreneurs. Its harder challenge is making the benefits reach ordinary business routines.

Paydoly still has to show that its tools can do that. So will any other company hoping to win a place at the colmado counter.

The future of digital payments may be decided less by the first customer willing to try something new than by the shopkeeper who, after a busy day, decides it is worth using again.

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Jonathan Joel Mentor is CEO of Successment and founder of Digital Nomad Summit Santo Domingo. His work focuses on revenue systems, innovation architecture and economic modernization. He is a UN World Summit Award nominee and recipient of ADOEXPO’s National Export Excellence Award. www.jonathanjmentor.co | digitalnomadsummit.co