AI transcript
0:00:01 This is an iHeart podcast.
0:00:33 And how they’ve grown companies to incredible heights.
0:00:36 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
0:00:37 That’s hit the gas.
0:00:41 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
0:00:44 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:00:46 It’s anything but business as usual.
0:00:53 Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
0:01:04 Pushkin.
0:01:15 By 2020, Nina Mohanty had been working in fintech, in financial technology, for several years.
0:01:18 She’d worked at MasterCard.
0:01:21 At this point, she was working at Klarna, the buy now, pay later company.
0:01:23 And she was working for them in London.
0:01:30 And she started paying attention to what seemed like a big, underserved market for financial technology.
0:01:32 Immigrants.
0:01:36 There were, of course, lots of tools for immigrants to send money home, right?
0:01:37 Lots of tools for remittances.
0:01:43 But it didn’t seem like anyone was creating financial tools to help immigrants save money in the U.K.
0:01:45 where they were for themselves.
0:01:48 So, I went down the rabbit hole.
0:01:51 And I spoke to anyone that would speak to me.
0:01:55 People often say that I have the personality of a golden retriever.
0:01:58 So, I just speak to anyone.
0:02:02 I was going up to people and saying, you know, bus drivers on their cigarette breaks.
0:02:05 And asking them, how are you managing your money?
0:02:07 And I was going to cleaners and offices.
0:02:10 And I was going up to, you know, nurses.
0:02:12 I was literally, someone was taking blood.
0:02:15 And I was asking them about how they’re managing their money.
0:02:22 And these all became translated over time into post-it notes that started to populate my wall.
0:02:30 And it very much looked like that meme from Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he’s got the red string.
0:02:35 And I remember one day waking up and just looking at this wall.
0:02:39 And because I had just moved back to the U.K., I didn’t have anything on my walls.
0:02:42 It was like a barely furnished flat.
0:02:53 And I didn’t have room for art on my walls because it was covered in screenshots of apps that already exist out there and what I thought they were doing well.
0:03:01 It had notes of, you know, a quote that someone said to me when we were having a chat and about how they wish they could do X, Y, Z.
0:03:09 And so that was my decor and that was ultimately what pushed me to start my business, Blue Money.
0:03:21 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:03:26 My guest today is Nina Mohanty, the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
0:03:35 As you’ll hear, Nina wound up creating an app based on a savings and credit system that has been used around the world for a thousand years.
0:03:36 Literally a thousand years.
0:03:45 And she told me she hopes to build on this thousand-year-old tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
0:04:00 So the problem that I kept coming across is people that are new to a country find it very, very difficult to actually integrate into the financial system.
0:04:04 And there’s a number of reasons for this.
0:04:10 People might struggle to get access to credit because they don’t have a credit score.
0:04:18 And especially in the U.S. and increasingly in Europe, your credit score determines a lot about what you can do.
0:04:23 Oftentimes, if you can rent a place from a private landlord, for example, where you can get a job.
0:04:26 So these are all things that are really important.
0:04:30 It affects your ability to get insurance, right?
0:04:34 And if you’re driving, you need car insurance most places.
0:04:45 And if the financial system doesn’t know who you are because there’s no paper trail of you in this country, you’re basically invisible to the financial system.
0:04:52 And that’s what I kept hearing over and over and over when I spoke to folks, which was, I’m here.
0:04:57 I have a bank account, but I don’t know what is available to me.
0:05:01 And I struggle to access other financial products.
0:05:14 And when I do, if I get to that stage where I know what I want, I want a car loan, I can’t because I don’t exist.
0:05:15 I don’t have a credit score.
0:05:21 So I’m going to just have someone say, well, computer says, no, there’s no car loan available for you.
0:05:25 So, okay, so this is the landscape that you’re walking into.
0:05:27 What do you decide to do?
0:05:36 One of the things that kept coming out of these conversations was the presence of informal financial systems.
0:05:39 And this was really intriguing to me.
0:05:41 I come from an immigrant background.
0:05:55 And one of the behaviors that kept coming up was a behavior that I recognized, actually, in which groups of people would come together and pool their funds, often with their own social group.
0:06:13 So, you know, someone that they see at the market, or they live on the same council estate together, or they see each other at church or mosque, and they would come together and pool their money and kind of increase their affordability for one person at a time within that group.
0:06:18 Let’s talk about this in some detail, because this is a very specific thing, right?
0:06:20 It has an academic name.
0:06:21 It does.
0:06:21 Right?
0:06:24 It’s called the Rotating Savings and Credit Association.
0:06:25 Absolutely.
0:06:26 Araska to its friends.
0:06:27 Yes.
0:06:34 And, like, it’s actually one of the most interesting things to me about what you are doing is that it is this thing that is, like, a thousand years old, literally.
0:06:35 Literally.
0:06:40 So, like, so tell me specifically, like, how does Araska work?
0:06:41 Right.
0:06:42 Old school, before you come along.
0:06:52 Old school, the way that this would work is, I’m going to give you the example of my grandma, who used to do this in her village in India.
0:06:54 This is a true story?
0:06:55 This is a true story.
0:06:57 This is not just so story, it’s actually happened?
0:06:58 This is actually happened.
0:06:59 So this is a true story.
0:07:11 My grandmother lived in a small village, and she would choose people from the village who she would see at market, who she would see at the temple,
0:07:16 who she knew were trustworthy to come together into this group.
0:07:20 And she would determine a set sum of money.
0:07:24 So, to make the math easy, let’s say 100 rupees.
0:07:25 Okay.
0:07:29 And let’s say there were 10 women that were coming together.
0:07:36 So, these 10 women would agree to put 100 rupees into a pot every month.
0:07:43 So, my grandmother would go around and she would collect the 100 rupees from all 10 women.
0:07:47 And that pot would suddenly have 1,000 rupees in it.
0:07:54 And one woman would be given that 1,000 rupees to have for the month.
0:07:57 So, they could spend it however they wished.
0:08:00 They could buy a new sari.
0:08:05 They could, you know, sacrifice something at the temple.
0:08:08 They could put it towards their child’s tuition for school.
0:08:10 Whatever they wanted to do with it.
0:08:13 The next month, they would all come together.
0:08:20 Or rather, my grandmother would go and seek them out and gather that 100 rupees from each person.
0:08:25 Until all 10 had put 100 rupees in, which meant there was 1,000 rupees for the next person to use.
0:08:36 And so, every month, that would rotate until each person over that 10-month cycle had an opportunity to use that 1,000 rupees.
0:08:47 And what is so fascinating about this to me is it is something that I thought was Asian because I’m half Indian, half Taiwanese.
0:08:51 We do this in Taiwan and in China as well.
0:09:00 We call it hui, which means association, or he hui, kind of coming together in an association.
0:09:03 But in India, we call them chip funds or kitties.
0:09:05 So, I thought it must be an Asian thing.
0:09:15 And then, I remember when I first moved here to working at the U.S. Embassy in London, I met a Jamaican man.
0:09:19 He said, oh, we do something just like this.
0:09:22 And we call it pardna or pardna hand.
0:09:27 And then, I spoke to my friend who’s British-Pakistani.
0:09:28 And she said, we do this too.
0:09:29 We call it khameti.
0:09:31 And I thought, okay, well, that’s still Asia.
0:09:32 Interesting.
0:09:35 Then, I met someone who was Somali.
0:09:37 And she said, we do this too.
0:09:38 We call it hegbad.
0:09:44 And then, I met someone who’s Mexican and said, we do this too.
0:09:45 We call it tanda.
0:09:54 And so, the more I sought it out, the more I realized that in the global majority, most of us are doing this.
0:09:58 And we have been doing it for generations, for a thousand years.
0:09:59 Right.
0:10:08 There’s literally, I saw a study that found evidence of this in like Song, China, which is truly like a thousand years ago.
0:10:08 Literally.
0:10:09 You’re one thousand.
0:10:09 Right.
0:10:13 So, there is this interesting question of why, right?
0:10:15 Like, this is a kind of technology, right?
0:10:25 It’s like a bottom-up financial technology that I think pretty clearly has been sort of independently invented in different places over time, right?
0:10:31 So, like, what is it about it that makes people keep figuring this out and keep doing it?
0:10:42 So, that is something that has plagued my mind for years now, not least because I’m building my business around it.
0:10:56 But one of the things that I think about often is our different cultural attitudes towards money, but also just society in general.
0:11:22 And there’s a, I believe he’s Dutch, a man named Gertz Hofstetter, and he had this framework, the Hofstetter’s framework of culture, and where every culture has a different flavor to it, obviously, but some cultures are very individualistic, and some cultures are very collective.
0:11:42 And in the Global South, in Asian countries, in African cultures, in Latin cultures, we tend to have more collective cultures, whereas in the West, we are often more individualistic.
0:11:47 So, there is this broad context of, like, okay, a more communal vibe leads you into this kind of thing.
0:11:51 I mean, I could also imagine, like, it’s a kind of savings, right?
0:11:51 Yes.
0:11:52 It’s a kind of savings.
0:11:53 It’s right there in the name.
0:12:01 And you can think of a lot of places in the world where you cannot put your money in the bank, or if you could, your money might disappear, right?
0:12:13 Like, the idea that the bank is not going to go under, and that if it does, there’s a reliable government insurance, which is in fact the case now in the U.S. and much of the developed world, is obviously not the case for most of world history.
0:12:22 So, like, that seems like quite a, whatever, a less warm and fuzzy, but also plausible virtue of the Rosca.
0:12:24 I absolutely think this.
0:12:33 But if we really drill down, I mean, in the States, we have credit unions, right, or community banks and that sort of thing.
0:12:38 And that’s just a more macro version of a Rosca, right?
0:12:41 It’s a group of people coming together with some sort of affinity.
0:12:43 We all live in the same area.
0:12:55 Or in Edinburgh, there’s a lovely facade of what is now a clothing store, but it says the Laundry Workers Bank.
0:13:02 And it was people who worked at the Laundry together that came together to form, effectively, a community bank.
0:13:07 And so it’s something we’ve been doing, but have lost sight of over time.
0:13:21 But I definitely think that you’re right, that there’s something in trust or the lack of trust, especially if you live in a country where maybe you do not trust financial institutions, you do not trust your government for whatever reason.
0:13:27 I think that’s probably why it’s so prevalent in those areas, more so than it is in the West.
0:13:35 Okay, so you discover the Rosca, and you’re going to, and then what?
0:13:36 You’re going to build a Rosca app.
0:13:38 I mean, that’s basically the move?
0:13:58 At that point, what really intrigued me about the Rosca, and as someone who had seen it, right, with my own parents doing it, with my grandparents doing it, was, one, it exists in almost every culture, non-Western culture, I should specify.
0:14:05 And what was interesting to me about that is just like remittances and money transfer, it’s something that every culture does, right?
0:14:19 It doesn’t matter if you’re sending money from, like my dad did, California to India or to Pakistan or to wherever in the world, to Mexico, people are sending money.
0:14:23 And so similarly, it was a behavior that was replicable across cultures.
0:14:28 What was very interesting to me is everyone has their own name for it.
0:14:29 Yeah, give me a list.
0:14:30 You did a few.
0:14:32 Like, how many can you give me?
0:14:34 If you just go in one breath.
0:14:35 Oh, gosh.
0:14:36 How many different names can you do?
0:14:39 On your marks, get set, ready, go.
0:14:49 We’ve got Tanma in Mexico, Consorcio in Brazil, Pardana or Pardana Han in Jamaica, Moneybox in St. Lucia,
0:14:57 Hegbad Ayuto in Somalia, Ajo in Nigeria or Isuzu, depending on your tribe,
0:15:03 Nikolimba in Congo, Tung Tin in any Francophone African country.
0:15:12 We’ve got Kamiti in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Paluwagin in Philippines, Arizon in Malaysia,
0:15:19 Hui or Hehui in China and Taiwan, Gyeongyum in South Korea.
0:15:21 The list goes on.
0:15:22 Very good.
0:15:25 And I can say, I’m talking to you on video, you were not reading.
0:15:26 No.
0:15:27 I thought you were looking like up at the ceiling.
0:15:29 That was truly off the top of your head.
0:15:30 Yes, off the top of my head.
0:15:31 It’s my party trick now.
0:15:33 It’s a good party trick.
0:15:35 I mean, people will be like, I’m from here.
0:15:36 What is it called?
0:15:38 And I have to try and figure it out.
0:15:43 And then more importantly, and going back to the original problem that we were discussing,
0:15:48 is people are moving huge sums of money.
0:15:55 Depending on who you speak to, there’s one startup that’s done the math and they think globally
0:15:59 there’s $300 billion moving through Roskos globally.
0:16:06 But it’s something that people take with them, especially immigrant communities, when they move
0:16:11 to a new place because they are new, they know their community, they seek out their community
0:16:17 first, they might join the community circle or club, as we might call it.
0:16:26 And what is fascinating and so valuable about this is if someone is putting in $100 or 100
0:16:32 pounds or 100 euros every month and they’re paying in on time, that’s actually really great
0:16:33 financial behavior, right?
0:16:35 It tells me you’re good for the money.
0:16:38 Yes, that’s a good credit, right?
0:16:44 I mean, fundamentally, you select people when your grandmother was doing this, choosing people
0:16:45 for her club.
0:16:47 She had a credit score in her mind, right?
0:16:47 Exactly.
0:16:50 You are just reducing trust to the neighborhood.
0:16:57 You’re not going to invite somebody who’s going to get $1,000 right now and pay you back $1,000
0:16:59 over the next year.
0:17:01 You’re not going to invite them if they’re sketchy.
0:17:01 No, absolutely.
0:17:09 And some of my favorite interactions, I speak French and so where I live in London, it’s called
0:17:16 Lewisham and there’s a lot of West African folks here, a lot of Francophone West Africans.
0:17:19 And there’s a hair salon where I go to get my eyebrows done.
0:17:21 There’s a lovely Sri Lankan woman that does that.
0:17:26 But there are these Ivorian women doing braiding hair.
0:17:28 And I started speaking to them about it.
0:17:33 And they’re speaking in French and I don’t think they realize that I speak French.
0:17:39 And they were basically just talking shit about the various people.
0:17:41 And they’re like, we don’t like so-and-so.
0:17:43 She never pays in on time.
0:17:48 She’s not allowed into our tontine, as they call it in Francophone Africa.
0:17:52 And so people are underwriting their community in real time.
0:17:54 Yeah, that’s the original credit score.
0:17:54 Exactly.
0:17:56 Gossip at the Salon is the original credit score.
0:17:57 Gossip at the Salon.
0:17:58 It’s the original way.
0:18:00 And it’s like, we know that she doesn’t pay on time.
0:18:01 She doesn’t go to church.
0:18:02 She’s not going to be there.
0:18:02 Whatever.
0:18:08 But these are things that people have been using to underwrite each other for a thousand
0:18:10 years plus, right?
0:18:11 So, okay, we’ve got the thousand years.
0:18:15 It’s time for you to start your company in this narrative now.
0:18:18 How do you start a company, you know, around this idea, around this practice?
0:18:21 Not easily.
0:18:22 I’ll tell you that much.
0:18:30 I think the interesting thing is I have worked in the fintech industry, financial technology,
0:18:32 for so long now.
0:18:38 And it never occurred to me that I would be a founder myself or the entrepreneur in charge.
0:18:42 I’m very good at building things.
0:18:47 And I get a lot of pleasure out of building interesting products.
0:18:50 And so I built a no-code app.
0:18:54 And I said, let’s just see if this thing works.
0:18:59 And so I invited 50 women.
0:19:07 I do a lot of work with various migrant groups and specifically women and invited them to try
0:19:09 buy this web app.
0:19:13 And what we found was there was a hundred percent payment rate.
0:19:15 Everyone paid on time.
0:19:18 And people said to us, this is great.
0:19:20 I didn’t have to go get cash out.
0:19:26 I didn’t have to send my child with the cash down to the auntie’s house for collection.
0:19:27 It was great.
0:19:31 Like it was collected and it was sent out to me when it was time to receive the money.
0:19:33 And so now what do I do?
0:19:35 Because I have to go and get regulated.
0:19:41 I can’t just be, you know, moving large sums of money around and not be regulated.
0:19:50 And so I started the process of explaining to the Financial Conduct Authority what Araska is and why it exists.
0:20:01 And that was actually very, very challenging because there aren’t many people that look like me that work in the innovation department of the FCA, right?
0:20:12 And if you’re, you know, a native born white British person, perhaps you’ve never come across this before and you don’t understand why anyone would engage in this.
0:20:19 And you start to ask questions like, well, it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending or it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
0:20:23 So it does feel a little bit like peer to peer lending.
0:20:26 That is not an that is not a unreasonable thought.
0:20:27 It’s not at all.
0:20:35 And even even crowdfunding, you could argue that, yeah, actually, in a way it is crowdfunding and it rotates fine.
0:20:44 So we really had to make the case that this is neither peer to peer lending nor crowdfunding, but its own specialty.
0:20:50 Then I had to go and face the venture capital industry.
0:20:54 And that was probably the most daunting thing I’ve ever done to this day still.
0:21:00 I’m from the Silicon Valley and, you know, I grew up down the street from Apple.
0:21:08 And, you know, there are, I mean, venture capital firms are a dime a dozen in the Silicon Valley.
0:21:19 But it’s very different just driving past and then going in to actually pitch to these folks to say, here’s this problem that I want to solve.
0:21:20 Here’s why I want to do it.
0:21:24 And here’s why you should give me a million pounds to do it.
0:21:24 Right.
0:21:26 But I did that.
0:21:30 And it was very, very daunting, very, very difficult.
0:21:42 But it was one of those things where I wouldn’t be able to bootstrap, as we say, kind of use my own money to fund this business because, of course, we’re building a tech product and it’s regulated.
0:21:47 And so it just requires a little bit more of that upfront investment.
0:21:50 And then from there, we were off to the races.
0:21:56 We’ll be back in just a minute.
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0:22:40 On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they’ve beaten the odds.
0:22:44 Asking really strong questions is a superpower.
0:22:49 You want to show up with something radically different and how they’ve grown companies to incredible heights.
0:22:52 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
0:22:53 That’s hit the gas.
0:22:57 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
0:23:00 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:23:03 It’s anything but business as usual.
0:23:10 Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
0:23:18 So, so how does it work?
0:23:20 What’s the thing you have now and how does it work?
0:23:23 Yeah, so the Bloom app is pretty straightforward.
0:23:30 It’s an app where you download it, you register, you go through, know your customer or KYC.
0:23:40 So we ask you for a selfie and a picture of your ID and from there we do all these checks in the background, make sure you are who you say you are.
0:23:46 And then you go to the homepage and you’re able to either create a circle.
0:23:50 So we call them Bloom circles to homogenize the name across cultures.
0:23:57 You can either create your own circle and choose how much you want to put in, how often.
0:24:03 So you can do it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, although monthly is the most popular cadence.
0:24:08 You choose how much, how many people, and then your start date.
0:24:14 And from there you can share your circle and say, here’s the code, join my circle.
0:24:17 And in a private circle, that means you are in full control.
0:24:25 And this is the most faithful reproduction, I guess, of what we have done for a thousand years.
0:24:27 So it can be my friends and family.
0:24:29 It can be the people, the mosque, whoever, right?
0:24:36 So in this case, this is just replacing, like, having to take cash to whoever every month.
0:24:36 Correct.
0:24:38 With an automated system.
0:24:41 And so how does the money actually flow?
0:24:43 Like, does everybody have to have a bank account?
0:24:44 Are you a bank?
0:24:51 So everyone has to have their own UK-based bank account because we’re based in the UK.
0:24:56 And then they have to have a UK-issued debit card.
0:25:02 So we don’t let people use credit for this particular financial activity.
0:25:11 But what they do is they connect their debit card and the money is automatically collected on the set date each month or whatever the cadence is.
0:25:13 And then we take your bank details.
0:25:18 And when it’s your turn to receive your payout, we send that straight into your bank account.
0:25:19 So a lot of that-
0:25:21 So you’re basically the rails.
0:25:22 You’re the pipes.
0:25:22 Exactly.
0:25:23 We are the pipes.
0:25:31 We orchestrate the payments for you and take that stress out of, you know, following up and trying to figure out where is the money.
0:25:35 And someone says, oh, I need to get cash out or all the drama that comes with that.
0:25:37 And what do you charge?
0:25:40 So we charge a transaction fee of 4%.
0:25:49 And that allows us to safely process and manage your account with a little bit of margin for us to be able to put back into our business, of course.
0:25:56 But what is really interesting is when you’re in the Bloom circles, you have the option to do a private circle.
0:26:02 But most of our volume is actually through what we call community or public circles.
0:26:09 And this is where people will join complete strangers in a circle.
0:26:13 And that has been fascinating to me because as someone-
0:26:14 That is wild.
0:26:15 That’s most of your business.
0:26:23 I would say 95% of our circles are pure strangers coming together in circles.
0:26:30 Is it like a, well, what happens if somebody gets all the money the first month and then bails?
0:26:31 And that is exactly it.
0:26:34 So we have had bad actors.
0:26:40 But you know what is fascinating is we’ve had people take the money and then run.
0:26:48 And in this instance, that will mean they’ll stop topping up their account or they’ll cancel their card or whatever.
0:26:56 But what is very fascinating is the people that have cut and run end up coming back and we’ve been made whole.
0:27:08 They have paid us back for that money because they realize if they want to join a subsequent circle, there’s no way that we’re going to let them onto our platform because they screwed everyone else over.
0:27:12 I mean, I wouldn’t let them back even if they asked.
0:27:14 If they cut and run and then said, can I come back?
0:27:15 I don’t think you should say yes.
0:27:16 Absolutely.
0:27:16 Do you say yes?
0:27:19 So we’ve not let anyone back in.
0:27:27 We have a rehabilitation program where people can start to like pay back smaller sums because there is-
0:27:30 Or you can let them join, but they’re the ones who get paid last in the circle.
0:27:31 Yes, that’s insurance.
0:27:36 But wait, let me ask, just to be clear, like, is there any kind of insurance?
0:27:43 Like if somebody takes all the money the first month and then splits, are the other people in the circle just screwed or is there some kind of insurance?
0:27:47 At present, we don’t have insurance and we make that very clear when people-
0:27:48 And is it a contract?
0:27:52 Like is the person committing fraud or anything if they take the money and bail or are they just a bad person?
0:27:54 Well, both.
0:27:59 There is a contract and so they actually have to sign it.
0:28:02 And that has really come in handy.
0:28:08 And it says a lot about signatures in today’s digital world to me.
0:28:12 Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn’t?
0:28:13 Is that the secret of the contract?
0:28:17 It truly is because first we tried doing biometrics.
0:28:23 So people would do a selfie or, you know, use face ID or they would do their touch, you know, thumbprint.
0:28:23 Yeah.
0:28:26 And they would say, oh, well, I didn’t sign anything.
0:28:29 That’s not me signing, even though they’ve used their biometric.
0:28:36 And so we actually have a step now where you have to sign with your finger your signature.
0:28:36 Like on your phone?
0:28:37 Yeah.
0:28:38 You’re signing on your phone with your finger.
0:28:47 And it has really changed people’s perception of like, oh, I am actually entering into an agreement now and I’m going to pay this money in.
0:28:50 And so we do not make people whole.
0:28:55 We make that very clear in our terms and conditions and when people are joining circles.
0:29:01 And yet we have a 98% payment rate.
0:29:06 And so very rarely are people cutting and running.
0:29:11 And even if they do, they tend to come back and kind of feel guilty about it.
0:29:16 And I think that says something about this social cohesion, right?
0:29:16 Yes.
0:29:20 And just to be clear, this is people who are just randomly assigned to a circle.
0:29:21 Correct.
0:29:23 They don’t know the other people in the circle.
0:29:23 They do not know each other.
0:29:25 They’re not from the same community.
0:29:26 They don’t live in the same neighborhood, whatever.
0:29:27 Exactly.
0:29:28 That’s really interesting.
0:29:30 I guess it’s heartening in a way.
0:29:33 I think I would have predicted worse behavior.
0:29:33 Yeah.
0:29:34 I think that’s good news, right?
0:29:44 In today’s society where you’re very skeptical of humanity and you’re looking for the good but expecting the worst, perhaps.
0:29:49 Especially in a, you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way.
0:29:50 Exactly.
0:29:56 And I think, though, one of the things that kind of helps us is we have a carrot and a stick.
0:30:00 So what we’ve been doing is actually taking this data that we’re collecting.
0:30:03 Let’s say that you, Jacob, have paid in every month on time.
0:30:08 We are building our own underwriting algorithm and saying, Jacob’s good for the money.
0:30:09 This is fantastic.
0:30:16 So that we can eventually go into lending and say, hey, Jacob, you’ve got a perfect Bloom credit score.
0:30:18 We’re going to lend to you now.
0:30:25 In the way that SoFi started out doing just this very narrow, like, oh, we’ll lend money from alumni to college students.
0:30:27 And now they’re just like a giant financial institution.
0:30:28 You’re that, but for immigrants.
0:30:30 Exactly that.
0:30:36 And so what we keep seeing is that people want to have a good record.
0:30:38 You’re their credit score.
0:30:40 You’re the immigrant credit score.
0:30:41 We’re the immigrant credit score.
0:30:49 And we have the largest data set in the UK on immigrant communities and their financial behavior at present.
0:30:50 How big is it?
0:30:51 How big is it?
0:30:52 So we’re still tiny.
0:30:54 We’re 13,000 customers.
0:30:56 We’re very, very early stage.
0:31:01 But the very interesting thing is no one else has thought to do this before.
0:31:04 How many, by the way, how many people do you reject up front?
0:31:10 How much of your, you know, high payment rate comes from figuring out beforehand who did not let in?
0:31:16 Usually, they wouldn’t even have made it to be able to join a circle.
0:31:27 Like, if there’s someone that has fraudulent behavior, all of those back-end checks that we do to make sure you are who you say you are will usually have already declined to even offer you an account in the first place.
0:31:29 How often does that happen?
0:31:32 Maybe 1% of the time.
0:31:42 I mean, that is the beauty of kind of, I think we are that bridge from the informal financial system into the formal financial system.
0:31:46 Because we can kind of take all of this other data access around us.
0:31:52 And, you know, you might have a record, good or bad, elsewhere, but we can connect those dots.
0:32:03 And then, ultimately, our goal is to work with, you know, the TransUnions, the Experians, the Equifaxes, to actually help people build their credit scores using Bloom Circles.
0:32:10 Though it’s not actually a credit product, it is a behavior that people are already doing.
0:32:14 And we’re just formalizing it and digitizing it.
0:32:22 And so it’s something that, longer term, will actually show us more valuable insights into the financial behavior of our customers.
0:32:25 What was something you tried that didn’t work?
0:32:29 I’ll be honest, it’s the private circles.
0:32:33 When we first launched, we launched with private circles.
0:32:38 And, you know, in the startup land, they say, build it and they will come.
0:32:42 So I was like, great, here it is.
0:32:42 The app’s out.
0:32:43 We’re regulated.
0:32:44 Let’s go.
0:32:47 And no one was transacting.
0:32:52 It was, I was, I felt like I was running into a brick wall.
0:32:55 Come on, why isn’t anyone moving money?
0:32:57 Build it and they will come.
0:33:03 And they were creating accounts and they were registering and connecting their debit cards, but they weren’t joining or creating circles.
0:33:12 And I started to speak to people and just call customers up or email them and say, you know, we see you’ve registered.
0:33:16 What’s keeping you from going the next step and actually joining a circle?
0:33:19 And we heard a lot of excuses.
0:33:27 We heard, I’m in the circle right now and it, you know, it’s a cash one and it will end in a few months and I’ll join a bloom one then.
0:33:34 Or I’m going to join a bloom one at the start of the year because I always do one at the beginning of the year.
0:33:35 So some of it was timing.
0:33:42 But the most common response that we got was, I don’t have enough friends.
0:33:48 And that was so, so interesting to me because I pushed them on that.
0:33:49 What does that mean?
0:33:50 What do you mean you don’t have enough friends?
0:33:58 And what they meant is I don’t have enough people that can match the financial obligation of what I want to put in to my circle.
0:34:05 So they might say, you know, I want to put a hundred pounds a month in, but my sister can only afford to do 50.
0:34:09 And actually that’s not enough for me.
0:34:15 I want to be able to do it with six people and have 600 pounds at the end of it to make it really worth my while.
0:34:17 Instead of maybe 300 pounds.
0:34:21 And I kept hearing this over and over and over.
0:34:28 I heard a lot of people say, I don’t want to be in a circle with my friends and family because I don’t want them to know.
0:34:29 That’s awkward.
0:34:30 Yeah.
0:34:30 Oh yeah, right.
0:34:31 I don’t want them to know.
0:34:32 That’s interesting.
0:34:33 And it was fascinating.
0:34:38 I don’t want them to know that I’m going to get a thousand pounds one month because that’ll create problems.
0:34:56 And one of our team members, Asha, she comes from an Ashraf Yemeni family and she was joking, like, I don’t want them knowing my business because, you know, if they know how much disposable income I have, they’re going to pressure me to send more money home.
0:34:58 And that was fascinating to me.
0:34:58 It’s kind of.
0:34:59 No, that’s really interesting.
0:35:02 Some of it was just mind your own business.
0:35:04 Like you want anonymized finance, right?
0:35:04 Exactly.
0:35:07 This is like, no, no, I don’t want community finance.
0:35:08 I just want finance.
0:35:09 I just want finance.
0:35:16 I want culturally resonant and I, you know, it’s something we understand and the behavior is done, but I actually don’t want to do it.
0:35:19 But it is kind of an anti-communal vibe, right?
0:35:21 It’s like, I want my business to be my business.
0:35:23 Paradoxically, exactly that.
0:35:25 And nowadays it’s fascinating.
0:35:36 People that join public circles, oftentimes we have one person that will then start and they’ll become a node and create their private circle and bring in their group of family.
0:35:46 And that tells us that that person probably was seeing if they could trust us and if the money was going to end up where it was supposed to before bringing in their social group.
0:36:00 So it was one of those things where we launched with it and yeah, it’s, it didn’t just go gangbusters, but it’s, it taught us a lot about the underlying behavior of our, of our community.
0:36:08 One of the things that we found over and over again, when we spoke to customers is, okay, I have this money now and I don’t know what to do with it.
0:36:15 So I end up sending more home and it ends up being like a bonus for everyone back home.
0:36:21 Or I end up buying something that ends up being useless and not something that I actually need.
0:36:23 And it’s a waste of money.
0:36:26 So I want to know where I should put this money.
0:36:32 And so now with technology, what we can do is say, hey, Jacob, you’ve received 500 pounds.
0:36:37 Why don’t you put half of that into a money market fund and actually grow your money?
0:36:40 Why don’t you put it into a pension pot?
0:36:43 And again, have your money work for you.
0:36:47 And the people are right there in your app when they get the money, right?
0:36:54 And so now we can just direct that flow of funds and say, yeah, put it in this, in this money market fund.
0:36:55 Great.
0:36:59 Yes, of course, there are socioeconomic and geopolitical differences between us.
0:37:09 But can we actually get people to have access to financial products and serve them to them at the right time in a culturally relevant way
0:37:15 and help them build financial resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is?
0:37:17 That’s ultimately what we’re driving towards.
0:37:23 Not to be crass after that high-minded idea, which I am a fan of.
0:37:30 But like in that universe, do you get essentially a commission from whatever money market fund you’re sending the people to?
0:37:31 Like what’s the business model for that side of it?
0:37:32 Yeah, exactly.
0:37:39 So it would be very much like your betterments of the world where you charge a management fee of some sort.
0:37:45 And then we would just take that percentage off the assets under management.
0:37:50 So in that universe, they’re like coming to the blue map to look at their money market fund.
0:37:51 Exactly.
0:37:54 And you’re not the money market fund, but you’re where they sort of deal with it.
0:38:10 We ultimately, over time, as we grow as a business, become that financial headquarters, but through the lens of people who live a diaspora lifestyle, where it’s, we get it.
0:38:11 You’re going to have to send money home.
0:38:12 That’s great.
0:38:14 But why don’t you also put some aside for you?
0:38:25 Or down the line, you know, my dad bought a plot of land in India and built a house for my late grandparents and his siblings.
0:38:32 It’s very common for people from immigrant backgrounds to buy a plot of land, build a house and that sort of thing.
0:38:40 Well, imagine a world where at Bloom, you can also like manage the flow of your funds so that the builders get paid and everything.
0:38:46 And, you know, you have the money to, a mortgage to buy that plot of land, right?
0:38:57 And there’s so many different directions that these things can go where it’s very specific to straddling countries, if not continents, right?
0:39:03 But being of diaspora means that you are often one foot on one continent and one foot on the other.
0:39:06 And so we’re the place that they can come.
0:39:07 And that’s the grand vision.
0:39:13 Are you going to come to the U.S.?
0:39:18 I mean, I am coming to the U.S.
0:39:19 I’m an American citizen.
0:39:23 Bloom, it’s an interesting one.
0:39:26 Bloom money is serving immigrants.
0:39:31 And of course, the United States is the largest market for that to be a success.
0:39:44 I think what I find exciting about Europe is that we are largely becoming a region of immigration across the European continent.
0:39:51 And it’s something that people don’t realize or they do through a political lens, but not through a financial services lens.
0:39:52 And so there’s a huge opportunity.
0:39:58 Whereas in the States, it’s kind of written on the tin that we’re a country of immigrants.
0:40:01 Like that’s literally how we started.
0:40:07 And so it’s a bit more of an obvious problem, which means there’s a lot more players in the space.
0:40:14 No one’s doing exactly what we’re doing, but there’s a lot more folks, you know, specifically serving Latinos, right?
0:40:17 So does that mean you’re going to Europe next?
0:40:19 That is the plan.
0:40:34 And I think, you know, be a country like France or maybe Germany, where you have really large captive audiences, whether it’s Turkish and Syrian in Germany or Francophone African in France.
0:40:38 So watch this space.
0:40:43 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:41:27 On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they’ve beaten the odds.
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0:41:39 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
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0:41:43 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
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0:42:06 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:42:07 Oh, gosh.
0:42:08 Okay.
0:42:09 Oh, gosh.
0:42:18 If you could join a money club with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?
0:42:30 I would join with, hmm, I would join with Emmeline Pankhurst.
0:42:33 We love a suffragette queen.
0:42:40 I would join with Benazir Bhutto.
0:42:45 Indira Gandhi.
0:42:46 And there’s me.
0:42:48 So maybe I’ll add one more.
0:42:53 So these are political leaders who happen to be women.
0:42:57 And Mohamed Yunus, who is like, I guess, the interim leader of Bangladesh right now.
0:43:08 But he was the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and has very much experimented with
0:43:12 ROSCAs and how they can be used in developing countries.
0:43:14 So, yeah, those would be my few people.
0:43:17 I feel like those people would all be good for it.
0:43:19 Oh, yeah, I feel like they’d be good for the money as well.
0:43:25 Although Emmeline Pankhurst, I don’t know, she got up, she was, you know, pamphleting.
0:43:30 Women weren’t allowed to have pockets because we would give pamphlets out, you know, about suffragettes.
0:43:36 It’s amazing how many women’s pants still do not have pockets.
0:43:37 It’s shocking to me.
0:43:38 It is actually shocking.
0:43:43 And it’s actually one of the things that I look for from a fashion perspective.
0:43:47 When I buy dresses, even, I’m like, yes, pockets, pockets.
0:43:48 It’s a useful technology.
0:43:50 More pockets for women.
0:43:50 It should be for everybody.
0:43:56 What’s one thing written on a post-it note in front of you right now?
0:44:00 Slow it down.
0:44:02 Calm it down.
0:44:04 Pressure breaks.
0:44:16 Yeah, that’s just a reminder for me to not just speak too quickly when I’m actually speaking to people, but also just in the course of business.
0:44:22 Like, applying pressure through speed doesn’t always help things.
0:44:27 And sometimes it breaks things and keeps a deal from happening because people feel pressured.
0:44:28 So, slow it down.
0:44:29 Calm it down.
0:44:30 It’s funny.
0:44:34 I was thinking it was going to be like, make dentist appointment.
0:44:39 I mean, I’ve got those too, but they’re far less deep, Jacob.
0:44:41 I need you to think I’m an intelligent woman.
0:44:42 Maybe it’s very important to go to the dentist.
0:44:43 Yes.
0:44:48 How did your parents talk about money when you were a kid?
0:44:55 Definitely from a scarcity mindset.
0:44:59 We were a family that my father would, like, keep plastic bags.
0:45:10 And we very much would, like, you know, back in the 90s when they used proper plastic for ice cream tubs, like, those would become Tupperware for us to use until that thing broke down.
0:45:14 But I think it was always the scarcity mindset that there’s never enough.
0:45:17 And everything was about scrimping and saving.
0:45:23 And my prom dress was $30 from, like, I think it was Ross or Marshall’s.
0:45:28 And, you know, it was – I was always just taught that there was never enough.
0:45:34 And that has, unfortunately, affected me as an adult because what is enough?
0:45:38 And what is enough in your emergency fund?
0:45:39 What is enough to have in savings?
0:45:42 What is enough to have in your investment account?
0:45:47 And it becomes very difficult when you’re trying to enjoy life as well.
0:45:50 Can you just go out to dinner and not worry about it?
0:45:51 Can you just order the fucking app?
0:45:52 Yeah.
0:45:53 Just get the fucking latte.
0:45:54 You know?
0:45:55 Like, it’s okay.
0:45:56 Exactly.
0:45:57 Yeah.
0:45:59 Yeah.
0:46:05 I mean, I don’t want to stereotype, but I do feel like it’s a classic immigrant vibe.
0:46:06 Like, my grandfather was an immigrant.
0:46:11 And that’s how I always – that’s how I came to understand that vibe.
0:46:11 Yes.
0:46:15 It’s like, it’s just people for a thousand years didn’t have enough.
0:46:23 And so being in this world where it’s like, we’re doing great, that’s not natural to me, to my family, historically.
0:46:34 I think it’s something that, to this day, my dad refuses – our garage at home is full of just, like, crap that doesn’t work.
0:46:35 Yeah.
0:46:38 I have a box of cords that I’d like to show you.
0:46:43 And my dad, he’s got this one vacuum cleaner that he bought from Costco.
0:46:48 This thing, like, probably weighs more than I do, and he refuses.
0:46:51 I was like, I’m taking this to the dump.
0:46:52 Like, no one is going to buy this.
0:46:54 He’s like, no, I’m selling it for $2,000.
0:46:59 I said, Dad, you bought it for $2,000 from Costco, and this thing doesn’t even work.
0:47:00 You’ve got a Dyson.
0:47:01 What are you doing?
0:47:11 But it really – like, this hoarding mentality, when you felt like you never had enough, it really sticks with you.
0:47:16 So I’m trying to break the cycle now, and hopefully I won’t pass it down to any future children I may have.
0:47:17 Yeah.
0:47:23 It’s complicated, though, because, like, I sort of like it at some level.
0:47:24 You know what I mean?
0:47:24 Yeah.
0:47:25 Like, it’s a balance, right?
0:47:25 Of course.
0:47:28 Obviously, like, people do spend all their money.
0:47:28 Yeah.
0:47:30 People do, you know, live beyond their means.
0:47:30 Of course.
0:47:31 So you can –
0:47:33 It’s like, in your head –
0:47:34 Equanimity is hard.
0:47:35 Equanimity is hard.
0:47:35 Exactly.
0:47:36 Everything in moderation.
0:47:37 There we go.
0:47:48 Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
0:47:50 Just a quick note.
0:47:55 What’s Your Problem is going to take a break for the next couple weeks, and then we’ll be back with more episodes of the show.
0:47:59 Please email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:48:02 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:48:07 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:48:11 It was edited by Alexandra Gerritsen and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:48:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:48:34 On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they’ve beaten the odds.
0:48:37 Asking really strong questions is a superpower.
0:48:43 You want to show up with something radically different and how they’ve grown companies to incredible heights.
0:48:46 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
0:48:47 That’s hit the gas.
0:48:50 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
0:48:53 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:48:56 It’s anything but business as usual.
0:49:03 Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
0:49:09 This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:00:33 And how they’ve grown companies to incredible heights.
0:00:36 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
0:00:37 That’s hit the gas.
0:00:41 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
0:00:44 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:00:46 It’s anything but business as usual.
0:00:53 Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
0:01:04 Pushkin.
0:01:15 By 2020, Nina Mohanty had been working in fintech, in financial technology, for several years.
0:01:18 She’d worked at MasterCard.
0:01:21 At this point, she was working at Klarna, the buy now, pay later company.
0:01:23 And she was working for them in London.
0:01:30 And she started paying attention to what seemed like a big, underserved market for financial technology.
0:01:32 Immigrants.
0:01:36 There were, of course, lots of tools for immigrants to send money home, right?
0:01:37 Lots of tools for remittances.
0:01:43 But it didn’t seem like anyone was creating financial tools to help immigrants save money in the U.K.
0:01:45 where they were for themselves.
0:01:48 So, I went down the rabbit hole.
0:01:51 And I spoke to anyone that would speak to me.
0:01:55 People often say that I have the personality of a golden retriever.
0:01:58 So, I just speak to anyone.
0:02:02 I was going up to people and saying, you know, bus drivers on their cigarette breaks.
0:02:05 And asking them, how are you managing your money?
0:02:07 And I was going to cleaners and offices.
0:02:10 And I was going up to, you know, nurses.
0:02:12 I was literally, someone was taking blood.
0:02:15 And I was asking them about how they’re managing their money.
0:02:22 And these all became translated over time into post-it notes that started to populate my wall.
0:02:30 And it very much looked like that meme from Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he’s got the red string.
0:02:35 And I remember one day waking up and just looking at this wall.
0:02:39 And because I had just moved back to the U.K., I didn’t have anything on my walls.
0:02:42 It was like a barely furnished flat.
0:02:53 And I didn’t have room for art on my walls because it was covered in screenshots of apps that already exist out there and what I thought they were doing well.
0:03:01 It had notes of, you know, a quote that someone said to me when we were having a chat and about how they wish they could do X, Y, Z.
0:03:09 And so that was my decor and that was ultimately what pushed me to start my business, Blue Money.
0:03:21 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:03:26 My guest today is Nina Mohanty, the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
0:03:35 As you’ll hear, Nina wound up creating an app based on a savings and credit system that has been used around the world for a thousand years.
0:03:36 Literally a thousand years.
0:03:45 And she told me she hopes to build on this thousand-year-old tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
0:04:00 So the problem that I kept coming across is people that are new to a country find it very, very difficult to actually integrate into the financial system.
0:04:04 And there’s a number of reasons for this.
0:04:10 People might struggle to get access to credit because they don’t have a credit score.
0:04:18 And especially in the U.S. and increasingly in Europe, your credit score determines a lot about what you can do.
0:04:23 Oftentimes, if you can rent a place from a private landlord, for example, where you can get a job.
0:04:26 So these are all things that are really important.
0:04:30 It affects your ability to get insurance, right?
0:04:34 And if you’re driving, you need car insurance most places.
0:04:45 And if the financial system doesn’t know who you are because there’s no paper trail of you in this country, you’re basically invisible to the financial system.
0:04:52 And that’s what I kept hearing over and over and over when I spoke to folks, which was, I’m here.
0:04:57 I have a bank account, but I don’t know what is available to me.
0:05:01 And I struggle to access other financial products.
0:05:14 And when I do, if I get to that stage where I know what I want, I want a car loan, I can’t because I don’t exist.
0:05:15 I don’t have a credit score.
0:05:21 So I’m going to just have someone say, well, computer says, no, there’s no car loan available for you.
0:05:25 So, okay, so this is the landscape that you’re walking into.
0:05:27 What do you decide to do?
0:05:36 One of the things that kept coming out of these conversations was the presence of informal financial systems.
0:05:39 And this was really intriguing to me.
0:05:41 I come from an immigrant background.
0:05:55 And one of the behaviors that kept coming up was a behavior that I recognized, actually, in which groups of people would come together and pool their funds, often with their own social group.
0:06:13 So, you know, someone that they see at the market, or they live on the same council estate together, or they see each other at church or mosque, and they would come together and pool their money and kind of increase their affordability for one person at a time within that group.
0:06:18 Let’s talk about this in some detail, because this is a very specific thing, right?
0:06:20 It has an academic name.
0:06:21 It does.
0:06:21 Right?
0:06:24 It’s called the Rotating Savings and Credit Association.
0:06:25 Absolutely.
0:06:26 Araska to its friends.
0:06:27 Yes.
0:06:34 And, like, it’s actually one of the most interesting things to me about what you are doing is that it is this thing that is, like, a thousand years old, literally.
0:06:35 Literally.
0:06:40 So, like, so tell me specifically, like, how does Araska work?
0:06:41 Right.
0:06:42 Old school, before you come along.
0:06:52 Old school, the way that this would work is, I’m going to give you the example of my grandma, who used to do this in her village in India.
0:06:54 This is a true story?
0:06:55 This is a true story.
0:06:57 This is not just so story, it’s actually happened?
0:06:58 This is actually happened.
0:06:59 So this is a true story.
0:07:11 My grandmother lived in a small village, and she would choose people from the village who she would see at market, who she would see at the temple,
0:07:16 who she knew were trustworthy to come together into this group.
0:07:20 And she would determine a set sum of money.
0:07:24 So, to make the math easy, let’s say 100 rupees.
0:07:25 Okay.
0:07:29 And let’s say there were 10 women that were coming together.
0:07:36 So, these 10 women would agree to put 100 rupees into a pot every month.
0:07:43 So, my grandmother would go around and she would collect the 100 rupees from all 10 women.
0:07:47 And that pot would suddenly have 1,000 rupees in it.
0:07:54 And one woman would be given that 1,000 rupees to have for the month.
0:07:57 So, they could spend it however they wished.
0:08:00 They could buy a new sari.
0:08:05 They could, you know, sacrifice something at the temple.
0:08:08 They could put it towards their child’s tuition for school.
0:08:10 Whatever they wanted to do with it.
0:08:13 The next month, they would all come together.
0:08:20 Or rather, my grandmother would go and seek them out and gather that 100 rupees from each person.
0:08:25 Until all 10 had put 100 rupees in, which meant there was 1,000 rupees for the next person to use.
0:08:36 And so, every month, that would rotate until each person over that 10-month cycle had an opportunity to use that 1,000 rupees.
0:08:47 And what is so fascinating about this to me is it is something that I thought was Asian because I’m half Indian, half Taiwanese.
0:08:51 We do this in Taiwan and in China as well.
0:09:00 We call it hui, which means association, or he hui, kind of coming together in an association.
0:09:03 But in India, we call them chip funds or kitties.
0:09:05 So, I thought it must be an Asian thing.
0:09:15 And then, I remember when I first moved here to working at the U.S. Embassy in London, I met a Jamaican man.
0:09:19 He said, oh, we do something just like this.
0:09:22 And we call it pardna or pardna hand.
0:09:27 And then, I spoke to my friend who’s British-Pakistani.
0:09:28 And she said, we do this too.
0:09:29 We call it khameti.
0:09:31 And I thought, okay, well, that’s still Asia.
0:09:32 Interesting.
0:09:35 Then, I met someone who was Somali.
0:09:37 And she said, we do this too.
0:09:38 We call it hegbad.
0:09:44 And then, I met someone who’s Mexican and said, we do this too.
0:09:45 We call it tanda.
0:09:54 And so, the more I sought it out, the more I realized that in the global majority, most of us are doing this.
0:09:58 And we have been doing it for generations, for a thousand years.
0:09:59 Right.
0:10:08 There’s literally, I saw a study that found evidence of this in like Song, China, which is truly like a thousand years ago.
0:10:08 Literally.
0:10:09 You’re one thousand.
0:10:09 Right.
0:10:13 So, there is this interesting question of why, right?
0:10:15 Like, this is a kind of technology, right?
0:10:25 It’s like a bottom-up financial technology that I think pretty clearly has been sort of independently invented in different places over time, right?
0:10:31 So, like, what is it about it that makes people keep figuring this out and keep doing it?
0:10:42 So, that is something that has plagued my mind for years now, not least because I’m building my business around it.
0:10:56 But one of the things that I think about often is our different cultural attitudes towards money, but also just society in general.
0:11:22 And there’s a, I believe he’s Dutch, a man named Gertz Hofstetter, and he had this framework, the Hofstetter’s framework of culture, and where every culture has a different flavor to it, obviously, but some cultures are very individualistic, and some cultures are very collective.
0:11:42 And in the Global South, in Asian countries, in African cultures, in Latin cultures, we tend to have more collective cultures, whereas in the West, we are often more individualistic.
0:11:47 So, there is this broad context of, like, okay, a more communal vibe leads you into this kind of thing.
0:11:51 I mean, I could also imagine, like, it’s a kind of savings, right?
0:11:51 Yes.
0:11:52 It’s a kind of savings.
0:11:53 It’s right there in the name.
0:12:01 And you can think of a lot of places in the world where you cannot put your money in the bank, or if you could, your money might disappear, right?
0:12:13 Like, the idea that the bank is not going to go under, and that if it does, there’s a reliable government insurance, which is in fact the case now in the U.S. and much of the developed world, is obviously not the case for most of world history.
0:12:22 So, like, that seems like quite a, whatever, a less warm and fuzzy, but also plausible virtue of the Rosca.
0:12:24 I absolutely think this.
0:12:33 But if we really drill down, I mean, in the States, we have credit unions, right, or community banks and that sort of thing.
0:12:38 And that’s just a more macro version of a Rosca, right?
0:12:41 It’s a group of people coming together with some sort of affinity.
0:12:43 We all live in the same area.
0:12:55 Or in Edinburgh, there’s a lovely facade of what is now a clothing store, but it says the Laundry Workers Bank.
0:13:02 And it was people who worked at the Laundry together that came together to form, effectively, a community bank.
0:13:07 And so it’s something we’ve been doing, but have lost sight of over time.
0:13:21 But I definitely think that you’re right, that there’s something in trust or the lack of trust, especially if you live in a country where maybe you do not trust financial institutions, you do not trust your government for whatever reason.
0:13:27 I think that’s probably why it’s so prevalent in those areas, more so than it is in the West.
0:13:35 Okay, so you discover the Rosca, and you’re going to, and then what?
0:13:36 You’re going to build a Rosca app.
0:13:38 I mean, that’s basically the move?
0:13:58 At that point, what really intrigued me about the Rosca, and as someone who had seen it, right, with my own parents doing it, with my grandparents doing it, was, one, it exists in almost every culture, non-Western culture, I should specify.
0:14:05 And what was interesting to me about that is just like remittances and money transfer, it’s something that every culture does, right?
0:14:19 It doesn’t matter if you’re sending money from, like my dad did, California to India or to Pakistan or to wherever in the world, to Mexico, people are sending money.
0:14:23 And so similarly, it was a behavior that was replicable across cultures.
0:14:28 What was very interesting to me is everyone has their own name for it.
0:14:29 Yeah, give me a list.
0:14:30 You did a few.
0:14:32 Like, how many can you give me?
0:14:34 If you just go in one breath.
0:14:35 Oh, gosh.
0:14:36 How many different names can you do?
0:14:39 On your marks, get set, ready, go.
0:14:49 We’ve got Tanma in Mexico, Consorcio in Brazil, Pardana or Pardana Han in Jamaica, Moneybox in St. Lucia,
0:14:57 Hegbad Ayuto in Somalia, Ajo in Nigeria or Isuzu, depending on your tribe,
0:15:03 Nikolimba in Congo, Tung Tin in any Francophone African country.
0:15:12 We’ve got Kamiti in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Paluwagin in Philippines, Arizon in Malaysia,
0:15:19 Hui or Hehui in China and Taiwan, Gyeongyum in South Korea.
0:15:21 The list goes on.
0:15:22 Very good.
0:15:25 And I can say, I’m talking to you on video, you were not reading.
0:15:26 No.
0:15:27 I thought you were looking like up at the ceiling.
0:15:29 That was truly off the top of your head.
0:15:30 Yes, off the top of my head.
0:15:31 It’s my party trick now.
0:15:33 It’s a good party trick.
0:15:35 I mean, people will be like, I’m from here.
0:15:36 What is it called?
0:15:38 And I have to try and figure it out.
0:15:43 And then more importantly, and going back to the original problem that we were discussing,
0:15:48 is people are moving huge sums of money.
0:15:55 Depending on who you speak to, there’s one startup that’s done the math and they think globally
0:15:59 there’s $300 billion moving through Roskos globally.
0:16:06 But it’s something that people take with them, especially immigrant communities, when they move
0:16:11 to a new place because they are new, they know their community, they seek out their community
0:16:17 first, they might join the community circle or club, as we might call it.
0:16:26 And what is fascinating and so valuable about this is if someone is putting in $100 or 100
0:16:32 pounds or 100 euros every month and they’re paying in on time, that’s actually really great
0:16:33 financial behavior, right?
0:16:35 It tells me you’re good for the money.
0:16:38 Yes, that’s a good credit, right?
0:16:44 I mean, fundamentally, you select people when your grandmother was doing this, choosing people
0:16:45 for her club.
0:16:47 She had a credit score in her mind, right?
0:16:47 Exactly.
0:16:50 You are just reducing trust to the neighborhood.
0:16:57 You’re not going to invite somebody who’s going to get $1,000 right now and pay you back $1,000
0:16:59 over the next year.
0:17:01 You’re not going to invite them if they’re sketchy.
0:17:01 No, absolutely.
0:17:09 And some of my favorite interactions, I speak French and so where I live in London, it’s called
0:17:16 Lewisham and there’s a lot of West African folks here, a lot of Francophone West Africans.
0:17:19 And there’s a hair salon where I go to get my eyebrows done.
0:17:21 There’s a lovely Sri Lankan woman that does that.
0:17:26 But there are these Ivorian women doing braiding hair.
0:17:28 And I started speaking to them about it.
0:17:33 And they’re speaking in French and I don’t think they realize that I speak French.
0:17:39 And they were basically just talking shit about the various people.
0:17:41 And they’re like, we don’t like so-and-so.
0:17:43 She never pays in on time.
0:17:48 She’s not allowed into our tontine, as they call it in Francophone Africa.
0:17:52 And so people are underwriting their community in real time.
0:17:54 Yeah, that’s the original credit score.
0:17:54 Exactly.
0:17:56 Gossip at the Salon is the original credit score.
0:17:57 Gossip at the Salon.
0:17:58 It’s the original way.
0:18:00 And it’s like, we know that she doesn’t pay on time.
0:18:01 She doesn’t go to church.
0:18:02 She’s not going to be there.
0:18:02 Whatever.
0:18:08 But these are things that people have been using to underwrite each other for a thousand
0:18:10 years plus, right?
0:18:11 So, okay, we’ve got the thousand years.
0:18:15 It’s time for you to start your company in this narrative now.
0:18:18 How do you start a company, you know, around this idea, around this practice?
0:18:21 Not easily.
0:18:22 I’ll tell you that much.
0:18:30 I think the interesting thing is I have worked in the fintech industry, financial technology,
0:18:32 for so long now.
0:18:38 And it never occurred to me that I would be a founder myself or the entrepreneur in charge.
0:18:42 I’m very good at building things.
0:18:47 And I get a lot of pleasure out of building interesting products.
0:18:50 And so I built a no-code app.
0:18:54 And I said, let’s just see if this thing works.
0:18:59 And so I invited 50 women.
0:19:07 I do a lot of work with various migrant groups and specifically women and invited them to try
0:19:09 buy this web app.
0:19:13 And what we found was there was a hundred percent payment rate.
0:19:15 Everyone paid on time.
0:19:18 And people said to us, this is great.
0:19:20 I didn’t have to go get cash out.
0:19:26 I didn’t have to send my child with the cash down to the auntie’s house for collection.
0:19:27 It was great.
0:19:31 Like it was collected and it was sent out to me when it was time to receive the money.
0:19:33 And so now what do I do?
0:19:35 Because I have to go and get regulated.
0:19:41 I can’t just be, you know, moving large sums of money around and not be regulated.
0:19:50 And so I started the process of explaining to the Financial Conduct Authority what Araska is and why it exists.
0:20:01 And that was actually very, very challenging because there aren’t many people that look like me that work in the innovation department of the FCA, right?
0:20:12 And if you’re, you know, a native born white British person, perhaps you’ve never come across this before and you don’t understand why anyone would engage in this.
0:20:19 And you start to ask questions like, well, it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending or it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
0:20:23 So it does feel a little bit like peer to peer lending.
0:20:26 That is not an that is not a unreasonable thought.
0:20:27 It’s not at all.
0:20:35 And even even crowdfunding, you could argue that, yeah, actually, in a way it is crowdfunding and it rotates fine.
0:20:44 So we really had to make the case that this is neither peer to peer lending nor crowdfunding, but its own specialty.
0:20:50 Then I had to go and face the venture capital industry.
0:20:54 And that was probably the most daunting thing I’ve ever done to this day still.
0:21:00 I’m from the Silicon Valley and, you know, I grew up down the street from Apple.
0:21:08 And, you know, there are, I mean, venture capital firms are a dime a dozen in the Silicon Valley.
0:21:19 But it’s very different just driving past and then going in to actually pitch to these folks to say, here’s this problem that I want to solve.
0:21:20 Here’s why I want to do it.
0:21:24 And here’s why you should give me a million pounds to do it.
0:21:24 Right.
0:21:26 But I did that.
0:21:30 And it was very, very daunting, very, very difficult.
0:21:42 But it was one of those things where I wouldn’t be able to bootstrap, as we say, kind of use my own money to fund this business because, of course, we’re building a tech product and it’s regulated.
0:21:47 And so it just requires a little bit more of that upfront investment.
0:21:50 And then from there, we were off to the races.
0:21:56 We’ll be back in just a minute.
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0:23:18 So, so how does it work?
0:23:20 What’s the thing you have now and how does it work?
0:23:23 Yeah, so the Bloom app is pretty straightforward.
0:23:30 It’s an app where you download it, you register, you go through, know your customer or KYC.
0:23:40 So we ask you for a selfie and a picture of your ID and from there we do all these checks in the background, make sure you are who you say you are.
0:23:46 And then you go to the homepage and you’re able to either create a circle.
0:23:50 So we call them Bloom circles to homogenize the name across cultures.
0:23:57 You can either create your own circle and choose how much you want to put in, how often.
0:24:03 So you can do it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, although monthly is the most popular cadence.
0:24:08 You choose how much, how many people, and then your start date.
0:24:14 And from there you can share your circle and say, here’s the code, join my circle.
0:24:17 And in a private circle, that means you are in full control.
0:24:25 And this is the most faithful reproduction, I guess, of what we have done for a thousand years.
0:24:27 So it can be my friends and family.
0:24:29 It can be the people, the mosque, whoever, right?
0:24:36 So in this case, this is just replacing, like, having to take cash to whoever every month.
0:24:36 Correct.
0:24:38 With an automated system.
0:24:41 And so how does the money actually flow?
0:24:43 Like, does everybody have to have a bank account?
0:24:44 Are you a bank?
0:24:51 So everyone has to have their own UK-based bank account because we’re based in the UK.
0:24:56 And then they have to have a UK-issued debit card.
0:25:02 So we don’t let people use credit for this particular financial activity.
0:25:11 But what they do is they connect their debit card and the money is automatically collected on the set date each month or whatever the cadence is.
0:25:13 And then we take your bank details.
0:25:18 And when it’s your turn to receive your payout, we send that straight into your bank account.
0:25:19 So a lot of that-
0:25:21 So you’re basically the rails.
0:25:22 You’re the pipes.
0:25:22 Exactly.
0:25:23 We are the pipes.
0:25:31 We orchestrate the payments for you and take that stress out of, you know, following up and trying to figure out where is the money.
0:25:35 And someone says, oh, I need to get cash out or all the drama that comes with that.
0:25:37 And what do you charge?
0:25:40 So we charge a transaction fee of 4%.
0:25:49 And that allows us to safely process and manage your account with a little bit of margin for us to be able to put back into our business, of course.
0:25:56 But what is really interesting is when you’re in the Bloom circles, you have the option to do a private circle.
0:26:02 But most of our volume is actually through what we call community or public circles.
0:26:09 And this is where people will join complete strangers in a circle.
0:26:13 And that has been fascinating to me because as someone-
0:26:14 That is wild.
0:26:15 That’s most of your business.
0:26:23 I would say 95% of our circles are pure strangers coming together in circles.
0:26:30 Is it like a, well, what happens if somebody gets all the money the first month and then bails?
0:26:31 And that is exactly it.
0:26:34 So we have had bad actors.
0:26:40 But you know what is fascinating is we’ve had people take the money and then run.
0:26:48 And in this instance, that will mean they’ll stop topping up their account or they’ll cancel their card or whatever.
0:26:56 But what is very fascinating is the people that have cut and run end up coming back and we’ve been made whole.
0:27:08 They have paid us back for that money because they realize if they want to join a subsequent circle, there’s no way that we’re going to let them onto our platform because they screwed everyone else over.
0:27:12 I mean, I wouldn’t let them back even if they asked.
0:27:14 If they cut and run and then said, can I come back?
0:27:15 I don’t think you should say yes.
0:27:16 Absolutely.
0:27:16 Do you say yes?
0:27:19 So we’ve not let anyone back in.
0:27:27 We have a rehabilitation program where people can start to like pay back smaller sums because there is-
0:27:30 Or you can let them join, but they’re the ones who get paid last in the circle.
0:27:31 Yes, that’s insurance.
0:27:36 But wait, let me ask, just to be clear, like, is there any kind of insurance?
0:27:43 Like if somebody takes all the money the first month and then splits, are the other people in the circle just screwed or is there some kind of insurance?
0:27:47 At present, we don’t have insurance and we make that very clear when people-
0:27:48 And is it a contract?
0:27:52 Like is the person committing fraud or anything if they take the money and bail or are they just a bad person?
0:27:54 Well, both.
0:27:59 There is a contract and so they actually have to sign it.
0:28:02 And that has really come in handy.
0:28:08 And it says a lot about signatures in today’s digital world to me.
0:28:12 Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn’t?
0:28:13 Is that the secret of the contract?
0:28:17 It truly is because first we tried doing biometrics.
0:28:23 So people would do a selfie or, you know, use face ID or they would do their touch, you know, thumbprint.
0:28:23 Yeah.
0:28:26 And they would say, oh, well, I didn’t sign anything.
0:28:29 That’s not me signing, even though they’ve used their biometric.
0:28:36 And so we actually have a step now where you have to sign with your finger your signature.
0:28:36 Like on your phone?
0:28:37 Yeah.
0:28:38 You’re signing on your phone with your finger.
0:28:47 And it has really changed people’s perception of like, oh, I am actually entering into an agreement now and I’m going to pay this money in.
0:28:50 And so we do not make people whole.
0:28:55 We make that very clear in our terms and conditions and when people are joining circles.
0:29:01 And yet we have a 98% payment rate.
0:29:06 And so very rarely are people cutting and running.
0:29:11 And even if they do, they tend to come back and kind of feel guilty about it.
0:29:16 And I think that says something about this social cohesion, right?
0:29:16 Yes.
0:29:20 And just to be clear, this is people who are just randomly assigned to a circle.
0:29:21 Correct.
0:29:23 They don’t know the other people in the circle.
0:29:23 They do not know each other.
0:29:25 They’re not from the same community.
0:29:26 They don’t live in the same neighborhood, whatever.
0:29:27 Exactly.
0:29:28 That’s really interesting.
0:29:30 I guess it’s heartening in a way.
0:29:33 I think I would have predicted worse behavior.
0:29:33 Yeah.
0:29:34 I think that’s good news, right?
0:29:44 In today’s society where you’re very skeptical of humanity and you’re looking for the good but expecting the worst, perhaps.
0:29:49 Especially in a, you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way.
0:29:50 Exactly.
0:29:56 And I think, though, one of the things that kind of helps us is we have a carrot and a stick.
0:30:00 So what we’ve been doing is actually taking this data that we’re collecting.
0:30:03 Let’s say that you, Jacob, have paid in every month on time.
0:30:08 We are building our own underwriting algorithm and saying, Jacob’s good for the money.
0:30:09 This is fantastic.
0:30:16 So that we can eventually go into lending and say, hey, Jacob, you’ve got a perfect Bloom credit score.
0:30:18 We’re going to lend to you now.
0:30:25 In the way that SoFi started out doing just this very narrow, like, oh, we’ll lend money from alumni to college students.
0:30:27 And now they’re just like a giant financial institution.
0:30:28 You’re that, but for immigrants.
0:30:30 Exactly that.
0:30:36 And so what we keep seeing is that people want to have a good record.
0:30:38 You’re their credit score.
0:30:40 You’re the immigrant credit score.
0:30:41 We’re the immigrant credit score.
0:30:49 And we have the largest data set in the UK on immigrant communities and their financial behavior at present.
0:30:50 How big is it?
0:30:51 How big is it?
0:30:52 So we’re still tiny.
0:30:54 We’re 13,000 customers.
0:30:56 We’re very, very early stage.
0:31:01 But the very interesting thing is no one else has thought to do this before.
0:31:04 How many, by the way, how many people do you reject up front?
0:31:10 How much of your, you know, high payment rate comes from figuring out beforehand who did not let in?
0:31:16 Usually, they wouldn’t even have made it to be able to join a circle.
0:31:27 Like, if there’s someone that has fraudulent behavior, all of those back-end checks that we do to make sure you are who you say you are will usually have already declined to even offer you an account in the first place.
0:31:29 How often does that happen?
0:31:32 Maybe 1% of the time.
0:31:42 I mean, that is the beauty of kind of, I think we are that bridge from the informal financial system into the formal financial system.
0:31:46 Because we can kind of take all of this other data access around us.
0:31:52 And, you know, you might have a record, good or bad, elsewhere, but we can connect those dots.
0:32:03 And then, ultimately, our goal is to work with, you know, the TransUnions, the Experians, the Equifaxes, to actually help people build their credit scores using Bloom Circles.
0:32:10 Though it’s not actually a credit product, it is a behavior that people are already doing.
0:32:14 And we’re just formalizing it and digitizing it.
0:32:22 And so it’s something that, longer term, will actually show us more valuable insights into the financial behavior of our customers.
0:32:25 What was something you tried that didn’t work?
0:32:29 I’ll be honest, it’s the private circles.
0:32:33 When we first launched, we launched with private circles.
0:32:38 And, you know, in the startup land, they say, build it and they will come.
0:32:42 So I was like, great, here it is.
0:32:42 The app’s out.
0:32:43 We’re regulated.
0:32:44 Let’s go.
0:32:47 And no one was transacting.
0:32:52 It was, I was, I felt like I was running into a brick wall.
0:32:55 Come on, why isn’t anyone moving money?
0:32:57 Build it and they will come.
0:33:03 And they were creating accounts and they were registering and connecting their debit cards, but they weren’t joining or creating circles.
0:33:12 And I started to speak to people and just call customers up or email them and say, you know, we see you’ve registered.
0:33:16 What’s keeping you from going the next step and actually joining a circle?
0:33:19 And we heard a lot of excuses.
0:33:27 We heard, I’m in the circle right now and it, you know, it’s a cash one and it will end in a few months and I’ll join a bloom one then.
0:33:34 Or I’m going to join a bloom one at the start of the year because I always do one at the beginning of the year.
0:33:35 So some of it was timing.
0:33:42 But the most common response that we got was, I don’t have enough friends.
0:33:48 And that was so, so interesting to me because I pushed them on that.
0:33:49 What does that mean?
0:33:50 What do you mean you don’t have enough friends?
0:33:58 And what they meant is I don’t have enough people that can match the financial obligation of what I want to put in to my circle.
0:34:05 So they might say, you know, I want to put a hundred pounds a month in, but my sister can only afford to do 50.
0:34:09 And actually that’s not enough for me.
0:34:15 I want to be able to do it with six people and have 600 pounds at the end of it to make it really worth my while.
0:34:17 Instead of maybe 300 pounds.
0:34:21 And I kept hearing this over and over and over.
0:34:28 I heard a lot of people say, I don’t want to be in a circle with my friends and family because I don’t want them to know.
0:34:29 That’s awkward.
0:34:30 Yeah.
0:34:30 Oh yeah, right.
0:34:31 I don’t want them to know.
0:34:32 That’s interesting.
0:34:33 And it was fascinating.
0:34:38 I don’t want them to know that I’m going to get a thousand pounds one month because that’ll create problems.
0:34:56 And one of our team members, Asha, she comes from an Ashraf Yemeni family and she was joking, like, I don’t want them knowing my business because, you know, if they know how much disposable income I have, they’re going to pressure me to send more money home.
0:34:58 And that was fascinating to me.
0:34:58 It’s kind of.
0:34:59 No, that’s really interesting.
0:35:02 Some of it was just mind your own business.
0:35:04 Like you want anonymized finance, right?
0:35:04 Exactly.
0:35:07 This is like, no, no, I don’t want community finance.
0:35:08 I just want finance.
0:35:09 I just want finance.
0:35:16 I want culturally resonant and I, you know, it’s something we understand and the behavior is done, but I actually don’t want to do it.
0:35:19 But it is kind of an anti-communal vibe, right?
0:35:21 It’s like, I want my business to be my business.
0:35:23 Paradoxically, exactly that.
0:35:25 And nowadays it’s fascinating.
0:35:36 People that join public circles, oftentimes we have one person that will then start and they’ll become a node and create their private circle and bring in their group of family.
0:35:46 And that tells us that that person probably was seeing if they could trust us and if the money was going to end up where it was supposed to before bringing in their social group.
0:36:00 So it was one of those things where we launched with it and yeah, it’s, it didn’t just go gangbusters, but it’s, it taught us a lot about the underlying behavior of our, of our community.
0:36:08 One of the things that we found over and over again, when we spoke to customers is, okay, I have this money now and I don’t know what to do with it.
0:36:15 So I end up sending more home and it ends up being like a bonus for everyone back home.
0:36:21 Or I end up buying something that ends up being useless and not something that I actually need.
0:36:23 And it’s a waste of money.
0:36:26 So I want to know where I should put this money.
0:36:32 And so now with technology, what we can do is say, hey, Jacob, you’ve received 500 pounds.
0:36:37 Why don’t you put half of that into a money market fund and actually grow your money?
0:36:40 Why don’t you put it into a pension pot?
0:36:43 And again, have your money work for you.
0:36:47 And the people are right there in your app when they get the money, right?
0:36:54 And so now we can just direct that flow of funds and say, yeah, put it in this, in this money market fund.
0:36:55 Great.
0:36:59 Yes, of course, there are socioeconomic and geopolitical differences between us.
0:37:09 But can we actually get people to have access to financial products and serve them to them at the right time in a culturally relevant way
0:37:15 and help them build financial resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is?
0:37:17 That’s ultimately what we’re driving towards.
0:37:23 Not to be crass after that high-minded idea, which I am a fan of.
0:37:30 But like in that universe, do you get essentially a commission from whatever money market fund you’re sending the people to?
0:37:31 Like what’s the business model for that side of it?
0:37:32 Yeah, exactly.
0:37:39 So it would be very much like your betterments of the world where you charge a management fee of some sort.
0:37:45 And then we would just take that percentage off the assets under management.
0:37:50 So in that universe, they’re like coming to the blue map to look at their money market fund.
0:37:51 Exactly.
0:37:54 And you’re not the money market fund, but you’re where they sort of deal with it.
0:38:10 We ultimately, over time, as we grow as a business, become that financial headquarters, but through the lens of people who live a diaspora lifestyle, where it’s, we get it.
0:38:11 You’re going to have to send money home.
0:38:12 That’s great.
0:38:14 But why don’t you also put some aside for you?
0:38:25 Or down the line, you know, my dad bought a plot of land in India and built a house for my late grandparents and his siblings.
0:38:32 It’s very common for people from immigrant backgrounds to buy a plot of land, build a house and that sort of thing.
0:38:40 Well, imagine a world where at Bloom, you can also like manage the flow of your funds so that the builders get paid and everything.
0:38:46 And, you know, you have the money to, a mortgage to buy that plot of land, right?
0:38:57 And there’s so many different directions that these things can go where it’s very specific to straddling countries, if not continents, right?
0:39:03 But being of diaspora means that you are often one foot on one continent and one foot on the other.
0:39:06 And so we’re the place that they can come.
0:39:07 And that’s the grand vision.
0:39:13 Are you going to come to the U.S.?
0:39:18 I mean, I am coming to the U.S.
0:39:19 I’m an American citizen.
0:39:23 Bloom, it’s an interesting one.
0:39:26 Bloom money is serving immigrants.
0:39:31 And of course, the United States is the largest market for that to be a success.
0:39:44 I think what I find exciting about Europe is that we are largely becoming a region of immigration across the European continent.
0:39:51 And it’s something that people don’t realize or they do through a political lens, but not through a financial services lens.
0:39:52 And so there’s a huge opportunity.
0:39:58 Whereas in the States, it’s kind of written on the tin that we’re a country of immigrants.
0:40:01 Like that’s literally how we started.
0:40:07 And so it’s a bit more of an obvious problem, which means there’s a lot more players in the space.
0:40:14 No one’s doing exactly what we’re doing, but there’s a lot more folks, you know, specifically serving Latinos, right?
0:40:17 So does that mean you’re going to Europe next?
0:40:19 That is the plan.
0:40:34 And I think, you know, be a country like France or maybe Germany, where you have really large captive audiences, whether it’s Turkish and Syrian in Germany or Francophone African in France.
0:40:38 So watch this space.
0:40:43 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:41:27 On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they’ve beaten the odds.
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0:41:46 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:41:49 It’s anything but business as usual.
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0:42:06 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:42:07 Oh, gosh.
0:42:08 Okay.
0:42:09 Oh, gosh.
0:42:18 If you could join a money club with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?
0:42:30 I would join with, hmm, I would join with Emmeline Pankhurst.
0:42:33 We love a suffragette queen.
0:42:40 I would join with Benazir Bhutto.
0:42:45 Indira Gandhi.
0:42:46 And there’s me.
0:42:48 So maybe I’ll add one more.
0:42:53 So these are political leaders who happen to be women.
0:42:57 And Mohamed Yunus, who is like, I guess, the interim leader of Bangladesh right now.
0:43:08 But he was the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and has very much experimented with
0:43:12 ROSCAs and how they can be used in developing countries.
0:43:14 So, yeah, those would be my few people.
0:43:17 I feel like those people would all be good for it.
0:43:19 Oh, yeah, I feel like they’d be good for the money as well.
0:43:25 Although Emmeline Pankhurst, I don’t know, she got up, she was, you know, pamphleting.
0:43:30 Women weren’t allowed to have pockets because we would give pamphlets out, you know, about suffragettes.
0:43:36 It’s amazing how many women’s pants still do not have pockets.
0:43:37 It’s shocking to me.
0:43:38 It is actually shocking.
0:43:43 And it’s actually one of the things that I look for from a fashion perspective.
0:43:47 When I buy dresses, even, I’m like, yes, pockets, pockets.
0:43:48 It’s a useful technology.
0:43:50 More pockets for women.
0:43:50 It should be for everybody.
0:43:56 What’s one thing written on a post-it note in front of you right now?
0:44:00 Slow it down.
0:44:02 Calm it down.
0:44:04 Pressure breaks.
0:44:16 Yeah, that’s just a reminder for me to not just speak too quickly when I’m actually speaking to people, but also just in the course of business.
0:44:22 Like, applying pressure through speed doesn’t always help things.
0:44:27 And sometimes it breaks things and keeps a deal from happening because people feel pressured.
0:44:28 So, slow it down.
0:44:29 Calm it down.
0:44:30 It’s funny.
0:44:34 I was thinking it was going to be like, make dentist appointment.
0:44:39 I mean, I’ve got those too, but they’re far less deep, Jacob.
0:44:41 I need you to think I’m an intelligent woman.
0:44:42 Maybe it’s very important to go to the dentist.
0:44:43 Yes.
0:44:48 How did your parents talk about money when you were a kid?
0:44:55 Definitely from a scarcity mindset.
0:44:59 We were a family that my father would, like, keep plastic bags.
0:45:10 And we very much would, like, you know, back in the 90s when they used proper plastic for ice cream tubs, like, those would become Tupperware for us to use until that thing broke down.
0:45:14 But I think it was always the scarcity mindset that there’s never enough.
0:45:17 And everything was about scrimping and saving.
0:45:23 And my prom dress was $30 from, like, I think it was Ross or Marshall’s.
0:45:28 And, you know, it was – I was always just taught that there was never enough.
0:45:34 And that has, unfortunately, affected me as an adult because what is enough?
0:45:38 And what is enough in your emergency fund?
0:45:39 What is enough to have in savings?
0:45:42 What is enough to have in your investment account?
0:45:47 And it becomes very difficult when you’re trying to enjoy life as well.
0:45:50 Can you just go out to dinner and not worry about it?
0:45:51 Can you just order the fucking app?
0:45:52 Yeah.
0:45:53 Just get the fucking latte.
0:45:54 You know?
0:45:55 Like, it’s okay.
0:45:56 Exactly.
0:45:57 Yeah.
0:45:59 Yeah.
0:46:05 I mean, I don’t want to stereotype, but I do feel like it’s a classic immigrant vibe.
0:46:06 Like, my grandfather was an immigrant.
0:46:11 And that’s how I always – that’s how I came to understand that vibe.
0:46:11 Yes.
0:46:15 It’s like, it’s just people for a thousand years didn’t have enough.
0:46:23 And so being in this world where it’s like, we’re doing great, that’s not natural to me, to my family, historically.
0:46:34 I think it’s something that, to this day, my dad refuses – our garage at home is full of just, like, crap that doesn’t work.
0:46:35 Yeah.
0:46:38 I have a box of cords that I’d like to show you.
0:46:43 And my dad, he’s got this one vacuum cleaner that he bought from Costco.
0:46:48 This thing, like, probably weighs more than I do, and he refuses.
0:46:51 I was like, I’m taking this to the dump.
0:46:52 Like, no one is going to buy this.
0:46:54 He’s like, no, I’m selling it for $2,000.
0:46:59 I said, Dad, you bought it for $2,000 from Costco, and this thing doesn’t even work.
0:47:00 You’ve got a Dyson.
0:47:01 What are you doing?
0:47:11 But it really – like, this hoarding mentality, when you felt like you never had enough, it really sticks with you.
0:47:16 So I’m trying to break the cycle now, and hopefully I won’t pass it down to any future children I may have.
0:47:17 Yeah.
0:47:23 It’s complicated, though, because, like, I sort of like it at some level.
0:47:24 You know what I mean?
0:47:24 Yeah.
0:47:25 Like, it’s a balance, right?
0:47:25 Of course.
0:47:28 Obviously, like, people do spend all their money.
0:47:28 Yeah.
0:47:30 People do, you know, live beyond their means.
0:47:30 Of course.
0:47:31 So you can –
0:47:33 It’s like, in your head –
0:47:34 Equanimity is hard.
0:47:35 Equanimity is hard.
0:47:35 Exactly.
0:47:36 Everything in moderation.
0:47:37 There we go.
0:47:48 Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
0:47:50 Just a quick note.
0:47:55 What’s Your Problem is going to take a break for the next couple weeks, and then we’ll be back with more episodes of the show.
0:47:59 Please email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:48:02 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:48:07 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:48:11 It was edited by Alexandra Gerritsen and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:48:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:48:34 On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they’ve beaten the odds.
0:48:37 Asking really strong questions is a superpower.
0:48:43 You want to show up with something radically different and how they’ve grown companies to incredible heights.
0:48:46 The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks.
0:48:47 That’s hit the gas.
0:48:50 Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more.
0:48:53 Hear from the founders who’ve changed the game.
0:48:56 It’s anything but business as usual.
0:49:03 Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.
0:49:09 This is an iHeart Podcast.
Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Bloom Money. Nina’s problem is this: How do you build an app to help immigrants manage their money?
On today’s show, Nina talks about bringing a saving and lending practice into the 21st century, navigating regulators who’ve never seen anything like it, and what global traditions can teach us about the future of money.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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