Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #59 - Providing Fair Financial Products for the 56% of the US Without Access to Them - Jake Rosenberg of LendUp
Episode Date: January 31, 2018Jake Rosenberg is the cofounder and CTO of LendUp (W12). They provide access to quality credit cards and loans without hidden fees or debt traps. Their customers are the 56% of American...s that have what is described as a “subprime” credit score, meaning they can’t be approved for credit by most banks.Ali Rowghani is the CEO of YC Continuity.Read the transcript on our blog.
Transcript
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Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast.
Today's episode is with Jake Rosenberg and Ali Rogani.
Jake's the co-founder and CTO of Lendop, which was in the Winter 2012 batch,
and their customers are the 56% of Americans that have what is described as a subprime credit score,
and that basically means they can't get approved for credit at most banks.
And Ali, who you've probably heard on the podcast before, is the CEO of YC continuity.
All right, here we go.
Jake, really awesome to have you here.
Thanks for coming back to YC and spending some time with us and spending some time on the mic.
Absolutely.
Cool.
So I wanted to ask you a few questions about yourself, first of all.
Like you've got a really cool background.
You got started in this industry a long time ago as a youngster and have been at some interesting company.
So tell us how you kind of got involved in tech and where you've been and how you're today at Lend up.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I grew up in the Bay Area.
So I was here during the first dot-com boom.
And when I was a teenager, I was really interested in tech.
In two main areas, actually, were messing around with computers and video production.
And so the two companies that I really wanted to work for when I was a teenager
and that I applied to summer internships for that I really was excited about were Yahoo and Pixar,
which, you know, obviously your background in Pixar.
Yeah, that place isn't bad.
Yeah, it's a pretty awesome place.
and Yahoo ended up contacting me about a summer internship.
I'm still waiting to hear back.
So I'm hoping you can help me there.
You're in.
Okay, right.
And so I was in high school.
Yeah, I was 16, and I was looking for a summer internship.
And so Yahoo ended up contacting me about being a production intern.
So just coming in and doing anything they needed.
So I went in and interviewed.
My mom actually drove me to the interview because I was 15 and a half.
I had my learner's permit, but I didn't have my license yet.
By the time I would get the job, I would have my license.
So my mom drove me and then waited outside while I interviewed with some of the early people at Yahoo.
They were about at the time, they were 65-ish people.
And so they were, when I interviewed, they were still private.
By the time I joined that summer, which was the summer of 96, they had gone public with like 80 people and 1.6 million in revenue or something like that.
So it was a different time.
A different time.
So I ended up being a production intern that summer
and worked on cold calling to try to get listings for Yahoo classifieds,
cold calling car dealerships and getting them to export their cars and Excel and stuff like that.
And then writing Perl scripts to like munge the data and loaded into our database.
So immediately got just thrilled and excited about what was going on with tech and with the web
and wanted to be a part of it and sort of took off from there and never looked back.
So went back to Yahoo the next few summers as I graduated from college and with a degree in CS.
And then went and joined full-time and was there for about eight years, building a bunch of different products,
eventually working my way up to a more senior sort of architectural position there.
And then after that I moved on to Zinga where a friend of mine who was a product manager was building out a
team that was building infrastructure for all the games. So it was building out shared messaging
and communications infrastructure for the scale of Farmville plus Cityville, plus Mafia Wars, plus
words with friends. So doing a lot of user-to-user messaging and the gifting system and email system
and things like that. So really fun as an engineer to work on very, very high throughput, high-volume
applications. And really enjoyed that. I was there for a couple years through the IPO. And then
started on Lenda. So my brother and Sasha and I embarked on that journey. Great. So tell me,
so you'd been an engineer at startups and seen two amazing companies scale. You saw one IPO
inside the company and obviously Yahoo was kind of a legendary company for a long time and still
a big company today. What sort of told you, hey, it's time to start a company? Was that something
you always wanted to do or did Sasha convince you to do it? Tell us that. A little of both. So I always
was interested conceptually in doing it.
But I was never actually steeped in startup culture.
Even growing up here, I was at what became very rapidly a big company.
By the time I joined Zingha, they were 300-something people.
So never really was, you know, I was a big fan of Paul Graham and his essays,
but never really got into following startup culture.
And so it was never sort of reading blogs about how to be an entrepreneur or anything like that.
I was pretty focused on the technical craft and improving my technical skills.
and so when Sasha sort of came to me with his ideas around what we could do to reinvent financial services with technology,
I got pretty excited by it. I got pretty excited by the impact potential by the technical challenges involved.
But it was definitely a little bit of a leap of faith. It was not something where I was I was a little bit used to being at companies that had a little more structure, had a little bit of a safety net.
And so I knew it was something I had always thought about and wanted to do, but it was definitely a little nerve-wracking to make that leap for sure.
So one of the things, among many things that's special about Lendup is the strong mission, the sense of purpose that you guys have.
Can you talk about that and talk about how that pervades the culture of the company and the types of people who work there?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, that was the thing that eventually did, you know, encourage me to make that leap.
financial services has such an incredible impact on so many people and has by making
even small improvements to some of these products you can really impact people's lives
in a very positive way especially in the parts of the market that are underserved or poorly
served which is huge right you describe that for the audience so for context so lend up is
essentially a company that is creating
socially responsible financial services products online focused on the 56% of the United States
that doesn't have access to prime banking and credit services. So that means essentially since 2008
there's been a huge move based on a number of different factors in the market and regulation
that have created a lot of financial exclusion, that it basically meant that there are a lot of
people who don't have access to traditional credit products. And Lendup is trying to fill that gap
by offering online personal loans and credit cards and continuing to build more products as we build out a whole ecosystem for that group.
And these are people who, you know, have, you know, potentially poor credit history and don't have access to banks and credit unions and therefore need alternative products.
Right.
So just to put a point on that, I think what you just said is 56% of Americans don't have the ability to get loans at reasonable interest rates.
or credit cards that,
I admit perhaps at all.
And that 56% number is the FICO cutoff of 680 or below,
which is what banks would consider subprime.
Right.
And so you guys are focused on that population.
We're focused on that population
and giving them safe, constructive credit products
and then tying those credit products together
using incentives and education and gamification
to essentially help them improve their financial well-being
by incentivizing the right behavior.
So we win when they win.
We set the products up so that when they succeed, you know, we do well as well.
And that's – so going back to your original question about the mission, that was the big insight that Sasha had that really set the company up to be mission-oriented,
which is that we could create a product where the consumer succeeds when we succeed when we succeed and we align those incentives together so that the consumer can go through multiple different products in the ecosystem, continue to grow.
We can educate them, bring in financial services education, and incentivize the best possible
behaviors to help improve their credit score and get them access to more money at lower interest rates
and basically just help them improve their financial lives and have a long-term relationship
with that customer and have a good relationship with that customer over the long-term
and create a profitable business at the same time.
And by doing that, we could force a lot of the incumbents also to change the way they view this market
and the way that they treat the market,
which is, in many cases,
not constructive to the consumer's financial health.
Right.
I've seen some of the customer testimonials,
your customer testimonials.
Yeah.
Can you just describe the type of person that you serve,
the type of problems that you help them with,
just so, you know, the listening audience just has a sense of that?
Yeah.
There's actually a pretty wide mix, right?
I think people's natural instinct is assume you're dealing,
with, you know, low-income consumers. And it's actually, you know, it affects income volatility
is just a rising problem with the nature of our economy, moving towards a service and information
based economy, the gig economy coming up. We see a lot of significant income volatility.
Huge percentage of our customers have income fluctuations of over $200 a month. And that makes it
really hard to budget, really hard to plan. And it actually affects a wide group of people.
So it may not be the person that you might have in mind.
It really affects a large group.
So we refer to it as the emerging middle class because it really is a huge percentage,
as I said, 56% of the U.S.
We spent a lot of time actually.
I personally like to spend a lot of time in our servicing center
and listening to calls.
Because I feel like for me it's personally just really inspiring.
First of all, I get energized every time I go in there.
It's exciting to see the way that the customers love the product and are excited about the opportunity.
When you give somebody a chance that they may not have had that other companies wouldn't take a chance on them,
the level of commitment and loyalty that it generates is just really amazing.
But in addition, I like being in there because I see how our products are working,
whether they're resonating with consumers, what features we need to be building,
what servicing tools we need to be building for our customer service.
account managers to see if we can improve their efficiency and make their job easier and better as well.
So it's just a really great experience to go in there and hear from the customers and learn about it.
But as I said, a lot of them are struggling with income volatility and they are looking for ways to smooth out sort of their financial lives.
And that is the common thread that we see a lot.
Right.
Terrific.
So you mentioned one thing that motivated you was to start a company was the incredible social
mission of serving an underserved population. And the second thing was the opportunity to build
your own technology and do this in a different way than the traditional financial services
industry did it. Can you talk about that? What have you guys built and what's different in terms
of the technology stack? Yeah. So we sort of approach the problem, you know, as my background,
as I said, is, you know, distributed system, web application engineer. This is actually my first foray
into financial services and I've had to learn a lot as I went. But we approach the problem kind of
from first principles, right?
How would we want the product to work and how would all the systems that support a credit
product work in real time and could we build all that infrastructure on a modern technology
stack?
And by doing that, we've been able to have a bunch of firsts in terms of customer features
and enabling them to use the product.
So for example, we were the first company that had fully algorithmic instant decisioning
where someone could apply online for one of our products and instantly know whether they
got approved for the product or not, and we did that fully across the board.
We were the first lender to roll out instant funding so that we could deploy capital to people's bank accounts really rapidly when they needed it,
which is a big deal for our customer segment who are trying to deal with emergencies that may arise or, again, trying to smooth out their financial lives.
So coming at it from first principles and building everything real time allows us to make sure all of the systems that we have that support those products can work in concert.
And what we've seen is that competitors, you know, oftentimes are, they're buying their technology from vendors.
They think of IT as sort of an outsourced function in the business.
And that gives us a huge advantage because we have the ability to completely customize our tooling.
Our efficiency, as I mentioned, for our account managers is much higher than our competitors.
We have a fully in-house decisioning system.
We can tune to take advantage of new data sources.
to roll out new machine learning models as quickly as possible.
And in addition, the data pipeline is a huge part of that.
We have a holistic view of how all those systems are working in real time
and offline for analytics.
And one of the first times that I realized that Lindup was going to be really successful
was early on when we were starting out,
I had a competitor call us up and want to talk potentially about an acquisition,
potentially about a partnership.
And they wanted to learn about the risk management infrastructure we had built the real-time
decisioning system.
And this was a pretty big competitor doing like a billion dollars a year of originations.
And I was thinking, man, what am I going to tell these guys about risk management that
they don't already know?
And we got on the phone with their chief risk officer.
And the first question he asked me was, when you make a loan to someone, how do you know
they don't already have a loan out with you?
Very basic question.
You're right.
So I genuinely did not understand the question.
I was like,
are you joking?
Are you joking?
Like,
what do you mean?
But he meant it because his customer relationship management system and his
underwriting and decision management system, they didn't talk to each other.
And so that was a moment where I was like, whoa, we're like, we're going to kill these guys.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like we have infrastructure that can communicate, can adapt in real time, and can really help
our customers succeed in ways that, you know, they're just not able to.
And so that was a moment where I knew that we could align the mission that you were talking about before in terms of helping the customers do better with efficiencies in the business to make something that was effective and scalable and sustainable as well.
Got it.
So financial services, banking, lending, et cetera, is highly regulated.
It's regulated at the, I think, at the federal and state level in complicated different ways.
How much does that hamper your ability to kind of build what you want to be?
build on the technology side or what unique challenges does that create for you?
Yeah, it definitely creates some unique challenges. So, you know, you have to start with every
product that you build, you know, compliance with all those state and federal regulations is table
stakes. And we have a value at Lendup, set the new standard where we say we want to go above and
beyond being compliant, which is the base that you have to do to meet the requirements of the law
and set a new standard for our customers, our partners, and our regulators. But,
But it does, you know, there is a base level of certain statutes that you must comply with.
So in certain areas, and some of those statutes are written for an era of pen and paper or, you know, brick and mortar.
Right.
Right.
And so some of them aren't as relevant.
So what we've done is try to establish really good relationships with all of our regulators so that we can have real-time conversations and say, hey, we want to do this thing.
We think it's in line with the statute.
We think it's better for the consumers.
how do you feel about that and create a good two-way communication so that we can try to innovate.
But there's also plenty of room for innovation within the bounds of what the statute provides.
And there's also an opportunity, I think, from a competitive advantage perspective,
to do the compliance better through technology.
So automating a lot of the compliance validation and automating a lot of the infrastructure that we use for reporting.
So we've been able to get some leverages against other companies.
because the compliance affects everybody in the market, not just us.
And by using technology, we can actually view that as an advantage.
Got it.
There's an element there as well.
So you're the CTO of Lendup today.
How big is your engineering team?
Yeah.
So we are 60 engineers, roughly, and growing fast, so hiring as fast as we can.
Right.
And what are the kind of the most interesting problems you're working on today on the engineering side that you're psyched about?
Yeah.
So I think one of the things we're doing.
doing internally is, you know, for a long time, we were moving really fast, building
technology really quickly. And we're trying to just shift the culture just a little bit
towards one of craftsmanship. One of the big, the two big engineering values, I think, are really
critical for a strong engineering culture, are pragmatism and craftsmanship. And pragmatism
is about thinking about what you build in the context of the business and making sure that
you are building things that are relevant to the business. And craftsmanship is a
building things well and building them right and having pride in what you're building on a regular basis.
And those two things sometimes feel like they can be at odds, but I actually don't think they are most of the time.
Most of the time being pragmatic about what you choose to build and then building it really well are not in conflict.
But I think we needed to lend up really think about we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could get to market quickly,
how we could build the products and test things very rapidly.
And we're trying to build more of a culture of craftsmanship within the organization.
And that means shifting to every time we build something thinking about how does it work really,
really well for our customer.
And that's a change that is challenging.
It happens as your organization scales and you have more to lose and more to think about as you scale your company.
And it's something that is really critical as well.
we get to the next level because our products are not, they're not something people use casually.
They affect their lives in a very real and genuine way. They have a huge impact on their daily lives.
And so if they don't work really, really well, it can have a really deleterious impact on our customers.
And as I said, when I'm in the call center, you know, talking to customers, if something doesn't
work right, I see how it affects them on a daily basis. And so it's become really important that we
improve the craftsmanship and quality of what we do every single day. So that's one of the
cultural shifts that we're making. In terms of the technology challenges specifically, you know,
there's a huge machine learning pipeline that we've built that has to do with taking all the
data that we collect on consumers, behavioral data, credit bureau data, everything else that we
collect, and enabling our data science team to analyze that experiment and build really powerful
decision models, models around fraud, models around risk management, and just really helping
improve our ability to identify customers, the right product for the right customer at the right
time. So that's a huge challenge that we're always working on and always improving that real-time
machine learning infrastructure. And then I think one of the other big ones is how do we build
a best-in-class data warehouse and data infrastructure? The data that we have is so complex. It comes
from so many different sources. One of the things I've learned about financial services is just
the amount and variance of the data is just really huge.
And the reporting, similar to the way the product works and when we're dealing with people's money,
the reporting has to be dead on accurate.
So when I was at Zinga and I was looking at clicks or looking behavior,
as long as you were in a rough ballpark about how people were using the product,
you could make decisions that were accurate about what to build next.
When you're dealing with financial and compliance reporting,
every penny has to add up.
And so really improving our data infrastructure and data pipeline,
is one of the big things that we're working on as well.
Got it.
I mean, you mentioned Zinga and Lendup.
On the one hand, they seem so different.
Yep.
But can you talk about what you learned at Zinga
that you were able to apply at Lendup?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the most obvious one is about the gamification piece, right?
So a bunch of the things that I learned about at Zinga
on how you incentivize behavior
in short and medium, long-term incentives and goals,
we applied to our financial products
to try to help people use them as responsibly as possible.
So, for example,
we have, the way we tie our loans products together is that a consumer comes in and takes a short-term
small dollar loan, and then we immediately, once they've been approved for that loan and we deposit
the money in their bank account, we give them the opportunity to participate in credit education.
And by participating in the credit education and by making their payments on time, they earn points,
which then allow them to get access to larger dollar products at lower interest rates and
with longer terms to help stabilize them.
So that entire incentive structure sort of came out of the gamification stuff that I had learned at Zinga.
I think Zinga had an incredibly data-oriented culture.
All the decision-making was data-oriented.
Mark Pinkis was very much a data-driven CEO, and he culturally instilled that across the company.
So that's something we've tried to do as well.
When you're having a conversation about what you should do next, what you should prioritize,
how to think about what to build.
Usually someone has data and someone may not,
and the person with the data can tell the story of why something is important,
whereas the other person might just be telling their own narrative
of where they think things may go.
It's always good to follow the data and let the actual data tell the story.
And so that's something culturally we've tried to definitely instill.
You guys lend up has a couple of credit card products in the market today.
And they have some really neat features that maybe haven't gotten as much attention as they deserve.
Can you describe, like, the lend-up credit card product and some of the features that I think are only available on your card?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we're really excited about the card product.
It's the next natural step in the ecosystem that we're trying to create and being able to graduate people from, you know, personal installment loans onto credit cards.
Revolving credit products are ideal for a lot of customers in terms of managing that income volatility.
that I mentioned before.
So we're really excited about that product
and we're really starting to scale it.
We've done some pretty cool stuff with it.
So first of all, we're really thinking about it
as a mobile first product.
With the loans product,
the amount of interaction that you do
with that product on a daily basis
as a customer of that product
is not that high because you're coming in
to maybe get an extension,
make a payment, look at your balance,
but it's pretty rare.
Whereas a credit card is a highly transactional product.
It's in your wallet.
You're using it on a regular basis.
You need alerts.
It's a real-time product.
And so we're thinking about that as a mobile first product.
And built into the mobile app, we actually partnered with our credit card processor that we use for interacting with the networks.
And we injected ourselves into the authorization stream that happens every time somebody makes a swipe with one of our cards.
And what's cool about that is we don't just see the stream so that we can do things like push notifications,
which actually has not really been offered in credit cards beyond the vertically integrated.
cards like MX and Discover.
There are no MasterCard and Visa cards that actually do push notifications.
You can get them through Apple Pay, but you cannot actually get them through the card
issue because they're not seeing that stream.
So we have push notifications, but not only can we see the authorizations as they happen in
real time and react, but we can actually participate.
So we can approve or decline transactions in real time on behalf of the customer.
So what that means is we are experimenting with a bunch of really interesting features
that allow people to set limits for what they spend in various categories
or to create fraud prevention in terms of geo-fencing or geolocations
where the card has to be within a certain distance of them
or they have to be in a certain area for it to work.
Their phone has to be here for the card to work
and it has to be within the location of the card.
So there's some really interesting stuff we can do there,
and we're experimenting with those features right now.
We're rolling out that app as a beta to our card customers,
as we sort of learn more about what's working there.
Got it, cool.
So can someone listening to this podcast get a Lendup card?
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
So this year we're planning, we're hoping to open it up to open applications.
Right now it's still a beta program.
Got it.
Just target it.
Yep.
Got it.
We're scaling it pretty significantly, but it is still a closed beta.
Got it.
Great.
So it's been invited.
Yep.
Okay, cool.
I'll get you one, though.
Okay.
Yeah, I won't.
So let me ask you, so what you described at the beginning of the
podcast, you've been in this industry a long time. You got involved and I think you said you were 15
and a half when your mom drove you to Yahoo for an interview. For any sort of young engineer
early in his or her career listening to this podcast, what advice would you give today for someone
who's looking to enter the field and make a big impact? Yeah, that's a great question.
So the thing that comes to mind here is, you know, when I was early in my career, as I mentioned
a little bit earlier, I was really focused on honing my technical craft and really wanted
to be the best possible engineer I could be on a technical level.
Wanted to learn all kinds of patterns and operations and various other pieces of what it meant
to be a well-rounded software engineer.
And I think I really neglected to look at the context of what the work I was doing, how it
fit into the businesses that I was working in until much later in my career.
So it really wasn't until late in my career at Yahoo, some of it at Zingha.
And really, what really pushed me was starting my own company and knowing that everything
I worked on had a direct connection right to what the company was trying to do, where I really
understood what it meant to fully understand how your work fits into the context of a business.
So what I often tell younger engineers now, some of them naturally at age 19 just have a business
sense that is amazing to see. And when that happens, great. But a lot of engineers I see early
on in their career are really focused on their technical skills and don't look at how what they're
doing actually moves the bottom line for their business or the top line for their business or the
mission of their business, all of which are critically important if you're actually going to
be really successful as an engineer. If you want all those things that you're working towards
in your career like mastery and autonomy and purpose and all the ability to create an
innovate. The way that you're going to get those things is by making a big, you are, you know,
if you're working at a company, the company has a mission, it has a bottom line, it has a
focus. Think about how your technology moves that forward. And then start looking for the leverage
points about where your technology can advance that. And the earlier you start thinking in that
context, that sort of that pragmatism that I mentioned before in the context of the business
that you're working in, the better engineer you're going to be. Because building a really
beautiful tech that doesn't advance anybody's goals is really fun. I like messing around with
home automation stuff all the time. But at the end of the day, what creates value in the long
run is trying to advance the mission or enterprise that you're involved with. And so that's the
biggest mistake I see young engineers make is just focusing too much on, am I a good software engineer,
can I code, and not enough on what is my code doing in the world?
Whether it be the impact that it's making for people or the impact on the bottom line of the business that I'm in.
Right. Great. What about mentorship? That's one thing I haven't asked you about.
Were there, I'm sure you're a mentor now to people. Earlier in your career, were there important mentors for you?
And would you advise young people to look for that as they get started?
Yeah, absolutely. The story about mentorship that I always tell people is that when I did graduate school, it was 2001.
and it was a very, very bad time in tech.
It was post-first.com crash.
And I had an offer from Yahoo to go work there full-time.
And I was graduating.
It was May of 2001.
I was graduating with a degree in computer science.
And I got a call from my then manager at the time who said,
hey, I'm going to FedEx you your offer letter.
And I want, it was like Monday.
He's like, I want it by, you're going to sign it, you're going to FedEx it back.
It's going to be on my desk by Wednesday.
And I was like, what's the big deal?
Like, what's going on?
He's like, just do it.
And I was like, okay.
So I got the thing.
I signed it.
I FedEx it back.
And then the day after he got it and my offer was confirmed, Yahoo announced like layoffs,
hiring freeze, the whole deal.
So I was this close.
And I, because I was so focused on Yahoo and had been a part of it from early on,
I wasn't like looking other places or like interviewing.
or getting my resume together.
And I was always a little bit of a tinker or a builder,
not an academic.
So my academic performance was, shall we say, spotty.
And so I would have been in real trouble.
And that moment for me was just a master class
in mentorship and in management,
in that he knew what was going on with every one of his people
at any given time.
And he made sure to think about them,
to protect them, to make sure that they had
what they needed to be successful.
And as I continued to work for him,
I saw him demonstrate that in so many different ways.
And I ran into someone, after years of not working with that mentor,
I ran into someone who knew him,
and they mentioned that he had been following everything that I had been doing,
that he had been talking proudly about Lendup and all this other stuff,
and I hadn't talked to him in a really long time.
And it's just, you know, it further cemented that he was just the kind of person
who just genuinely cared about the people that he worked.
with and the people who worked for him.
So I always try to model my mentorship and management on that is really learning about
the people that I'm working with and investing in them and knowing I'm not naturally
like a networker and someone who keeps in touch with people on a regular basis.
And so it doesn't come naturally to me, but it matters so much in the connections that
you make in the long term.
So it's something I've had to train and sort of grow in myself.
Right. That's a great story.
Okay. Last question.
If we imagine the world five years from now and think about all of the potential and possibilities for Lendup,
like what does Lendup look like five years from now in your vision and your dreams?
Absolutely. So my dream for Lendup has always been that we create an entire ecosystem of products
that are all constructive for consumers, but are all designed for different use cases and different types of consumers in that realm of
people who don't have a lot of options.
And we connect those all together with technology that can essentially look at an individual
customer and figure out what they need to get to the next level.
So when they come and they apply, there's a product for them.
There's something that they can start with that helps solve their immediate need.
And then we customize a path for that person through a series of our products to help them
improve their financial lives over time.
And that may be credit or maybe other things.
budgeting and financial management, you know, there's so many opportunities to help people
manage their financial lives more effectively.
Bill pay, I mean, you name it, right.
There's so many things we can do.
And so I want to build a whole suite of financial services, sort of what Amex is to the wealthy
business traveler in terms of this whole suite of services that they provide that are all
cohesive and work together.
I want to provide that to the half of the country that doesn't have access to banks in a
constructive way. And I want to tie it all together with machine learning that customizes a path for
every single person. So every single person comes, gets a customized product, and then has a very
customized path for them. This is what you do next to grow your financial well-being. And then that
adapts as they behave, right? If they're succeeding, it's, you know, it continues. If they are
struggling, then we change the way it works for them as we learn more about them and how they
operate. And so that's the dream. So there's a bunch of products that we have that we're
thinking about next in terms of continuing to build out that ecosystem. But it's a huge, huge
market. Credit cards in the U.S. is $350 billion, depends on who you ask, but somewhere between
$350 billion to $450 billion in revenues. This is not a small market, and that's just the
United States. And so we have plenty to grow in where we're at right now, but we want to continue
to innovate and add new products to the ecosystem as well.
Terrific. Well, that's an amazing vision. You guys have made a huge amount of
progress and I'm looking forward to seeing kind of what comes next me too yeah great to see you
thanks for the time thanks thanks for having me awesome thank you all right thanks for listening
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