Smartie: The New App Making Cashless Payments and Food Delivery Easy in the Islands

“With Smartie, we are proving the Pacific can lead in creating practical, culturally relevant technology.”

That’s the vision driving the Cook Islands–born super app making waves across the Pacific. Smartie is the brainchild of a local tech entrepreneur Brett Baudinet who saw an opportunity to blend community values with cutting-edge solutions and in doing so, change how locals and visitors connect, pay, and experience island life.

The app’s current features include Pay and Food Delivery, but its roadmap is ambitious: Tours, Rideshare, and even a kids’ financial literacy app are already in development. It’s all part of a plan to create a single, easy-to-use platform for both residents and tourists.

“It is inspiring to see Pacific-led technology solving problems in ways that reflect our realities,” says founder Brett Baudinet “Our tourism-driven economy needs tools that work for visitors, while our communities need technology that makes everyday life easier.”

The spark for Smartie was lit years ago. After working in website development since 2000, Baudinet noticed the lack of simple, affordable payment solutions for smaller markets like the Pacific. That gap, combined with an upbringing in the Cook Islands, shaped the approach.

“Growing up in the Cook Islands taught me the importance of community, while also understanding how much our economy relies on tourism,” he explain.

From day one, Smartie was designed to bridge those two worlds. Tourists can pay for meals, activities, or transport without cash. Locals can instantly transfer money across islands or order from a favourite takeaway with a few taps.

For small and family-run businesses, often the lifeblood of island economies, Smartie could be transformative.

“Small and family-run businesses are the backbone of our islands, yet for years they have been excluded from affordable digital tools,” says Baudinet.

“Smartie changes that by letting a single app do it all — take card payments without expensive terminals, receive instant local transfers, offer food delivery, and soon even list tours or rides.”

The benefits are twofold: visitors spend more easily, and local businesses see faster payments, more sales, and stronger connections to their customers.

Looking ahead, the team believes the Pacific is poised for a wave of homegrown tech solutions.

“The opportunity is enormous,”

“To keep tech community-focused, we must involve local people and businesses in the design process, make sure products are culturally relevant, and think beyond single-service solutions.”

For now, Smartie is already in the hands of users, quietly reshaping daily life, one payment, one delivery, one connection at a time. But its broader vision is clear: a Pacific-built digital hub, serving the Pacific first, and showing the rest of the world what island innovation can look like.