Name: Brainstorm Tech 2023: Democratizing Finance
Uploaded: 2023-07-11
Duration: 19 min 18 s
Description: Wemimo Abbey, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Esusu (appearing virtually) , Shivani Siroya, Founder and CEO, Tala | In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Brainstorm Tech

Wemimo Abbey, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Esusu (appearing virtually) , Shivani Siroya, Founder and CEO, Tala | In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Brainstorm Tech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Democratizing Finance 

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Alongside many attractions of the fintech sector is its potential to democratize finance. And here in the in the US with neo banks in the mix, there are now specialized solutions that are catering directly to niche markets, creating access for previously marginalized groups. So our next conversation is going to zero in on how emerging tech can and should leverage this moment and bridge existing gaps globally. Joining us virtually is WMO Abbi, co founder and co CEO of SUU, one of the pioneering fintech unicorns that provides credit building solutions to underserved communities. And also joining us is Shani Croy, founder and Ceo of Talla Tala is a global tech company committed to fostering financial inclusion and empowerment and they're going to be interviewed by brainstorm tech coacher Joely Kent. Please welcome them. Good morning. How's everyone doing? It was a great conversation with Adam. Uh Thank you all for being here this morning. Um I'm thrilled to be joined by Abby and also thank you both for being here. Uh Virtually, we wish you were here, but thank you both for attending today. Thanks a lot for having us. So I wanted to start by just briefly introducing the two companies. I think that what you both do is so important and it's important for everyone here to understand that Vanni, you run Tala and it's a micro loan company and a mobile app for emerging markets. You've dispersed over $3 billion in loans and you provide credit scores and now banking products and services with a really impressive 98% repayment rate. And Abby at Esu, you guys are helping renters and low income Americans build credit while maintaining secure housing. Basically capturing the fact that people are making on time rental payments. And it's pretty remarkable because 45 million people are considered to be rent credit invisible due to the fact that they're a renting household. So I'd like to start with you, Abby. I was wondering given this tight economic environment and where we are with the macro global picture. How does that impact your customers and your business? Yeah, thanks a lot. Um It's definitely a tough and challenging time right now for the particular customer base that we focus on just to give you context. Um the population, we focus on the average income is roughly around $43,000. So there are three mega trends that we're watching. Um Number one debt to equity ratio has skyrocketed um based on our data debt debt to equity ratio in 2020 was around 9 10%. Today has shut up to 47%. So we're saying um and the healthy level just for context is around 30%. So same households living paycheck to paycheck struggling um and not having the ability to essentially get the liquidity, um they need. Uh And then the effect of high interest rates is also, you know, impacting the demographic that we, you know, serve day in day out. Um you know, for other issues with folks being priced out um from a leverage perspective. Um And that's really, really challenging. And the third piece which is um concerning and no one is talking about today is the rate of eviction. Um based on our data in 2019 today, eviction is four times higher than what it is um than what it was in 2019 and as well as delinquents, so there's a mass eviction crisis that we need to deal with and especially given the interest rate environment, we're going to be in a long era of pain Giovanni. What is the global picture like? Because I've heard you say before, you know, in reference to the United States where you do not operate, but you're, you're based here that, you know, according to bank rate four in 10 Americans can't afford a financial emergency right now. Is the global customer of your company more resilient or is it a more crouched position right now? It's a good question. Um And, and I think even even more so I think right now, um we are really seeing more resiliency in our customer base. Um I think it really goes into the fact that our customers live this kind of volatility every single day. So what I would say is I think it's important to separate two things. I think resiliency comes from just their character, their attitude towards life, their just kind of normal pace is volatile. So they will figure it out. That is just in their DNA at this point. Now, when it comes to what are the tools that they can use to be more resilient and not do it with so much sacrifice and pain. I think that's where there are more tools available in the US. And now, you know, whether they're spread out and, and being given to the under served, you know, I know more about the global side and I would say that what we see is really on, you know, in our customer base, two thirds of our customers still tell us that they don't have access. And that's because even though we see fintech globally, you know, starting to appear, they're still focusing on the prime segment, they're still focusing on the customer that has again choice and so tools like enable our customers to now become more resilient and to do it. I think with, I think more agency um as opposed to sacrifice. It's interesting when you talk about agency and sacrifice that Abby I'd like to ask you about affordable housing here in the US because so much of what you do is directly linked to that. And I know that as Suu recently partnered with Fannie Mae, and it's a really interesting partnership because essentially Fannie Mae says they're going to pay for the first year of service fees of sou and to incentivize borrowers to report their on time rental payments to up their credit score. And so how are these partnerships going? How are they paying off? Do you feel like, you know, these types of opportunities are able to build your customer base and actually make a longer term positive impact for your customers? Absolutely. I think it's important to go down memory lane a little bit just to give the audience a little bit of context. You know, we have 36% of Americans rents and on an average, they send roughly $1.44 trillion in rent to their landlords every year. And the unfortunate part is when you pay your mortgage, that data is reflected in your credit score. But when you pay your rent, unfortunately, it's not reflected and even worse, less and 10% of that data is captured today. So the technology we build and collaborations with institutions like the fragile housing finance agency, FH Fa or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, um essentially gives the opportunity for our clients which are large owners and operators of real estate to be able to subsidize the cost of our services. Um So you know, when a renter pays their rent on time instead of charging the renter the landlord and provided, they have a Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loan. Now, they can essentially get access to our services for free. And one thing I'm really, really excited about is really the impact that we've seen. You know, since that collaboration, the combined effort has essentially created credit scores for over 50,000 people that never had a credit score before. That's incredibly powerful. You know, when my mother and I moved to this country, we had to go borrow money from a predator lend at over 400% interest rate. My mother sold my father's wedding ring, bought money from church members and that's how we got started. So collaborations with Freddie Mac and is really proven a simple hypothesis, no matter where you come from the color of your skin and particularly your financial identity, shouldn't determine the kind of opportunities or the financial access you have. Even from a record perspective, we've seen folks that have established their credit scores and folks that have improved their credit on an average by 46 points. I've also gone on to get access to over $4 billion in credit activities and mortgage um is a quintessential part of that, accounting for roughly $1.2 billion. So we're incredibly proud of our collaborations with not only Fannie Mae but Freddie Mac and we're really excited to really continue to pave that permanent bridge, the financial access and inclusion um for the stakeholders, we have the good fortune to work alongside Abby. I should point out that your personal story brought you to my home state of Minnesota and we share that in common and it's, it's, it's an, it's an incredible thing because what happens in a state like Minnesota is you really do see the diversity of needs economically when it comes to the housing market. And this is a question for both of you about what you can do with the technology that you have. I was wondering Giovanni and then Abby, how are you integrating A I? And how are you leveraging or using the data that you're gathering on your customers? And how are you using language learning models to build the next part of your products at your company? Sini, I'll start with you. So I think it's important to start with, you know, what is the customer gaining through this technology? And so we really ask ourselves always, you know, what can the customer provide that then creates more value for them that enables us to again create more and more value down the down the line for them. So in that sense, you know, similar to what Abby just mentioned, you know, our customers are largely unseen by the financial marketplace and so we really have to start with, OK, what do they have available to us that enables us to understand them better, they have their daily life data and it's sitting, you know, on devices. And so we really started from this place of saying, can we build a new kind of credit score using alternative data? Because our customers are largely spending in cash, you know, their receipts, their transactions are unseen. And so we really needed to think about it as how do we actually gather these different data sources, these patterns, these transactions, their daily life behavior in a way to then create a proprietary credit score that can use to do lending. But we've now moved beyond lending to be a full global money app for the underserved. We've already reached now about a million customers in the Philippines that are not just borrowing from us, but these are customers that now have a full account product. And so now leveraging A I and machine learning to really think of it as the right offer at the right time. And that's not always credit. It's really meeting the customer where they already are and what they're showing us that they need that they want how they want to use their money over time. And so I think it really allows us to again be front and center in the customer's lives. And then I think the other uses of A I that, you know, all Syntech are talking about um and that we're leveraging as well is how do we actually again create more efficiency and more cost effectiveness in our supply chain. And so we're, you know, we work across five different global offices. We operate in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico and India. We've now served nearly 9 million customers. And, you know, our CS and CL team is only 200 people that we're really thinking of it as again, how do we personalize, how do we customize using technology but still be able to have that trust and that relationship with our customers. Um And so we've been doing that since day one for the last seven years, but it's exciting to see where the technology is now going because again, it'll enable us to scale much faster. How about you, how is, is the company integrating A I and language learning models? Absolutely. You know, it's really three things for us. It's access number one. We capture a plethora of data when we capture information and report that rental data into the consumer and agencies. We have a lot of um personal identifiable information. And our goal that is, is really how do we better price risk and how do you reach that information dislocation whereby we want to make sure someone that has access to information on Wall Street, someone living in, you know, Crookston Minnesota or Saint Paul Minnesota, um that might be low to medium income as the same information. Um And that's one of the ways um we're thinking about A I especially from a such standpoint there's a lot of financial literacy content out there and that information is just not um readily distributed to this particular demographic. So making sure access is there um is is of utmost importance for us. Number two is our underwriting model, the price risk. So how do we essentially make sure if someone wants to get a mortgage today in addition to their FICO scores. Can we include rent or data? Um Rent is 30 to 50% of the population. We focus on um their largest monthly expense. So how do we make sure when you are getting their big ticket items like a mortgage, that data is factored or things like their car notes to better price that risk and actually see them um in full um picture. The third thing is proximity. Um You know, I'll tell you a story when, when raised 100 and $30 million and the company was valued at a billion. I called my mother and say, hey mom, you know, I think we made it. This is an exciting period. I know my mother told me my mother was like, oh, I'm so proud of you, son. How's the wedding planning coming along? Issue of proximity? Right? Necessarily comprehend, you know, what's going on. Um particularly because there's lack of information and she doesn't really understand the full extent of what that kind of um you know, funding could have in, in, in um in isu's trajectory. So how do we level the playing field and how do we make sure access to information is just not selective, rather equally distributed. And folks can essentially make decisions, we give them social agency and people don't want to hand out people just want to fight. And so those are some of the things that we are leveraging A I to do customer support is also another important um you know, for us to streamline our operations and make sure that things are very efficient because that is we believe in running a value business with growth outcomes. But we're really, really excited about, you know, a lot of impact A I will have in the landscape and we think the best is still yet to come. I'd like to open it up to audience questions. If you have a question for Shabani or Abby, please raise your hand and I'd be happy to come to you with a microphone. In the meantime, I'd like to know from both of you what it's like to compete in this environment because both what you both do are very unique skills and services that you provide for the communities that you do. You see bigger players, bigger banks trying to come in and do what you do in order to take advantage of an under served under banked population or in the case of the credit score issue, Sivani, do you, what is the competition like I know you've said before, there isn't that much competition. But has that changed recently? What we're finding is, uh we're actually finding a lot more around the partnership front. Um I would say that bigger banks are coming to us really saying they see the opportunity, but again, for them to actually go downstream, they would need to change their entire infrastructure, they'd have to change again, all of their working models, right? Because this customer again needs to be designed for uniquely. It's not just about how you credit score this customer or even KYC the customer. It is really about going beyond that to think about how do you service at every single point in the journey. And so in that sense, uh we're finding actually not just banks. Um I would say mobile operators, we're finding Remittance companies, bill payment companies, the gig economy. Um you know, service providers all coming to us saying you are the platform that allows us to get to this segment. Um And I think actually starting to realize that there is double sided value in this. So it's not just that they can, you know, make money through lending through as the platform, but it's really thinking about how do they better retain and even provide more value to their customer base by giving them access to a platform. Like I would say that what we do see is within the in tech industry. We are starting to see that because of, you know, kind of new technology coming out. That's where we're both excited and also driven to produce higher quality products for our customers. But we are seeing again that there is more options for this customer base coming up. Thank you, Abby. I have 20 seconds or left for you to answer the question. I apologize. What's your closing thoughts? Closing thoughts um is just I think Ghana and it's really collaboration, you know, a you know what we stand for and the, the meaning of the company is if you want to go fast, you go alone and if you want to go far, you fundamentally need to go together. So we're saying there are large institutions saying it's just you can very, you can price risk and score people that have been considered credit invisible. And one important start I'll close with is there are 45 million people in this country that don't have a credit score, deem credit invisible, the average debts around $92,000. We are focusing on those demographic and particularly if we can just do simple math and multiply $92,000.45 million, we can unlock over $4.1 trillion. So what we are doing at is um is not a charity case. It's a win, win, win, outcome, a win for the American Society, a win for our owners and operators of real estate and a win for the renters at large. And you know, by doing that we believe that we can essentially, you know, lift everyone up in this equation and from our, from our vantage point, it's what we like to call justice capitalism is not sustainable. Well, Abby, thank you so much to Soraya. Thank you also as well for joining us today. We really appreciate your time.