Shivani Siroya
CEO & Founder, Tala (Formerly InVenture)
Discussion
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
Hi Everyone, psyched to be here today to answer your questions. Excited to chat about emerging markets, flexible and customized credit systems and future of financial identity.
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Harry Stebbings
@harrystebbings · Podcast Host @ The Twenty Minute VC
@shivsiroya thanks so much for joining us today Shivani. Big fan of yours, my question is; what has been the biggest takeaway from having such a great relationship with the legend @sacca? Also what are your targets for the next year for InVenture? P.S Would love to have you on @twentyminutevc and share your story!
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@harrystebbings It’s been great working with @sacca because he understands and helps us think through our massive vision for unlocking credit in these markets. Our focus for next year is to deepen the value we provide our customers by expanding the scope of our products, while also continuing to expand geographically into new markets. I’d be happy to come on @twentyminutevc!
Amos Amanya
@amos_amanya
@shivsiroya @harrystebbings @sacca @twentyminutevc how can I be assisted so that my tala resume in its network thus it has a problem of shooting
Chris Sacca
@sacca · Chairman, Lowercase Capital
You run one of the most ethnically diverse and gender balanced companies I've ever seen. Is that one of Tala's competitive advantages?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@sacca First off, could you please answer all the questions about how awesome it is to work with you :)
In regards to gender and ethnic diversity, we are always striving to bring in as many perspectives and experiences into our office, and bringing in diverse employees is one of the best ways to do so. We are trying to solve an incredibly challenging problem and recognize that we need a very diverse team to really accomplish all of our goals.
Shivani Bhargava
@shivzb · CEO and Founder of TheRightMargin
Hey Shivani, Shivani here. What did initial traction look like for you? What was an early adoption milestone and how did you get there? What was the strategy that worked?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@shivzb When we first launched the product, we were the first company in Kenya to do mobile lending using smartphone data. So we had no idea whether people would download our app or even repay us. We were amazed by the instant demand for the product but even more so by our repayment rates. Our customers call our product magic – they are so happy that a financial institution actually trusts them and sees their potential. They are accustomed to empty promises from banks, so the fact that they receive credit in under 5 minutes (instantly!) is still amazing to them. The strategy that has really worked for us has been to focus on understanding the underlying pain points and challenges in the market and creating a solution that address these issues.
neeharika sinha
@neeeharika · Google, Threadchannel
Hello @shivanisoraya Wondering how you choose the markets in which you want to expand. Is there a way to calculate risk? How does the company use data science to make better decisions?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@neeeharika We have a dedicated Expansion team that follows a thoughtful game plan for assessing markets. We assess each potential market in several stages with different criteria, from the macro-environment down to user demand. We leverage data science in this too, doing pilots to understand actual user behavior and tailoring our credit models accordingly. It's fascinating to see how each market is different!
Akin Sawyerr
@akinsawyerr · MD, Feleman Limited
What the average tenure of your loans? Is your platform available as a service to telcos, mobile money operators etc?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@akinsawyerr Our loans are currently all short-term loans of either 3-week or 1-month tenure. Our platform is available as a service to telcos and mobile money operators. In Kenya, we partner with Safaricom the largest mobile money provider in the country. In every country we expand to, we explore the landscape for telcos and mobile money as partners in the endeavour. Beyond these kinds of partners, we constantly cultivate partners across a range of financial services, so that we can create more value for our users!
Neej Parikh
@neejparikh · Founder @ Athletiqa.com
Would love to learn about some of your growth and user acquisition strategies, when you were in an early launch stage. Can you share what worked for you and what didn't?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@neejparikh We focused on finding good product/market fit before investing a lot in growth. Since achieving strong product/market fit, growth has been much easier. It’s amazing to hear from our customers about their experience when they find out they’ve been approved for a loan in a matter of minutes, and receive the money right away. It’s this “magic moment” where they realize the trust we’re placing in them without having met them, and that’s something really special for people. As a result, customers really love to refer the service to their friends, and we’ve been able to build on top of that with advertising through other channels like facebook and adwords.
AriChowdhury
@aricheck · I run a digital agency and keep learning
@shivsiroya @neejparikh
Grt q n a. Product market fit may actually take care of growth in a big way. Getting a loan approved for the likes of Jennifer is like God magical moment.. and so social sharing is so obvious.
Bharath B Lohray
@lordloh · PhD student at Texas Tech University
I understand that InVenture is a "bank" and a "credit bureau"? Or, have I got this wrong? What do you think the Big Three credit bureaus could learn from InVenture? What is InVenture doing differently from the Big Three?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@lordloh Technically we’re not actually a bank or a credit bureau, though our services have significant overlap with both because we do credit scoring and lending. But funny you should ask! We just did a side by side comparison of ourselves with a large credit bureau in Kenya. We saw that our models are 5% more accurate in predicting default and we are able to score 40% more individuals than they were able to, because we aren’t relying strictly on traditional financial data.
Vinay Khosla
@vinay123 · Co-founder Zenyx.com. Builder. Investor.
Hi Shivani,
For Tala to be useful and used by your customers in Kenya, the Philippines and beyond, the user experience must resonate trust with diverse cultures. How did you build a great user experience and build trust with customers unfamiliar with mobile transactions?
Thanks.
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@vinay123 I agree, building for diverse cultures is essential! Being close to the user is part of our DNA. When I founded InVenture, I had interviewed 4,000 microcredit borrowers in 9 countries, working at the U.N. It was actually that experience that lit my fire to create a better solution for financial access. And once the company started, we spent a lot of time being close to the users, whether that’s going in-country or studying their phone data extensively. Hanging out with customers has taught us so much. We actually found out that customers are comfortable with mobile transactions, especially in Kenya where mobile money has 80% penetration. It was also during user research trips in Kenya that we realized we could leverage smartphones to create credit scores. And guess what, hanging out with users is really fun! I love doing it and our team loves it too!
Vinay Khosla
@vinay123 · Co-founder Zenyx.com. Builder. Investor.
@shivsiroya thanks Shivani. Great to hear you spent time understanding your customer and data. Wonderful venture.
JASON CAVNESS
@jasoncavnesshr · CEO/Founder of cavnessHR
First, thanks for answering our questions and letting us learn from you. From your experience, when should Founders start thinking about HR?
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Shivani Siroya
@shivsiroya · CEO & Founder, Tala
@jasoncavnesshr I think of HR as a combination of people ops, benefits, compliance/hiring policies, culture, training. I think there are parts of it that you want to do from the beginning so that you can make sure that your team is aligned on the mission/culture/values and that there is transparency and focus internally on key priorities and what the decision making framework is. It’s also important to create a high bar for performance so we’ve done performance reviews from very early on. I think the other pieces of HR on the compliance/policy side usually come after you have 50 teammates or more. As a team that is growing quickly we’re adding in some of those policies now to ensure that we’ve got good hiring practices and benefits for our team across the globe.