HIBT Lab! Tala: Shivani Siroya

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So for many of us, a three digit number can decide a lot. For our future. If we can buy a home.

how much our interest rates are, and if we can start a new business. Those three digits make up our credit score, and there are billions of people around the world who do not have one. In fact Many people around the world have no trace of a financial identity whatsoever. And this means No loan history, no bank accounts, and no credit score.

Shivani Saroya met some of these people when she was working for the UN Population Fund back in the mid-2000s. Shivani was based in Africa, where she met entrepreneurs who didn't have access to cash to expand their businesses. People who made jewelry or sold food at market stalls. And they weren't looking for gigantic loans, but rather a hundred bucks or even fifty. So in 2011, Shivani founded a financial technology company to help service these microentrepreneurs. It's called Tala, and it operates in Kenya, India, the Philippines, and Mexico. To date, Kawa has loaned out over$3 billion to artisans, taxi drivers, bakers, furniture makers, you name it, in all small dollar amounts. The vast majority of Tala's customers have no paper trail, no bank accounts, and no credit history, so Tala evaluates their creditworthiness in a very different way.

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