Stilt with Rohit Mittal | E237

Loans for immigrants and the underserved.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Rohit Mittal, CEO of Stilt. The company is an online lender that specifically targets immigrant and unreserved populations who have very specific challenges when trying to obtain debit and credit. Rohit shares how he solved the credit card problem and how does one figure out who to lend to?

Episode Highlights

  • 0.32: Stilt is a Fintech company focused on immigrants. When immigrants move to a new country, they don't have a credit history or credit score and it's very difficult for them to access financial products.

  • 1.11: We are continuing to serve the immigrant population and recently we also launched a new product called Onbo, where we leverage all the infrastructure that we built at Stilt to help other companies serve their target markets, says Rohit. 

  • 3.04: After Rohit graduated at Colombia, he worked at a company called Argus Information and Advisory Services that primarily built credit risk models for banks and there he got to understand about the US financial system a little bit more.

  • 6.17: When we started the company, we said immigrants are not an exception, they are actually the policy for us. So, we build everything in our company focused on immigrants, says Rohit. 

  • 7.10: Underwriting is one key portion of serving the population. We built a very unique and different way of acquiring the customers, which is actually through content marketing, says Rohit.

  • 7.52: All immigrants are stretching for is content that's helpful to them and they come to our site or blog pages and then they apply for a loan and then we apply underwriting model built specifically for this market, says Rohit.

  • 8.40: Rohit talks about the efficacy of how his risk model working thus far because what he is saying is we can’t get access to Fico score but let’s compile other data into basically a different version of that.

  • 9.28: There are a lot of different data sources that are available to you at low cost that are consistent, reliable. You can put together all of different data sources that were not available when the original scores were created, says Rohit.

  • 10.31: The banks have the biggest balance sheet and so they do the most lending and they are still stuck in their old ways and it's very difficult for them to bring in new data sources to serve a new population. 

  • 13.15: Immigrants first get to know about us in a non-financial context. They look at our content, they get to know about the company, they know we are legit, they become familiar with us and when they need financial products then they come to us and apply for a loan, says Rohit. 

  • 14.48: We are seeing this infrastructure of lending that we have built is actually valuable to other companies who want to launch a lending product, says Rohit.

  • 16.43: Fintech companies wanting to launch lending product like the NEO Bank that offers debit products now wants to help their customers build credit. 

  • 17.02: On the commercial side, working capital lines are the most common use case we see for commercial companies. 

  • 18.24: We are allowing customers to get high quality loans even before their Fico score is built, says Rohit.

  • 19.06: Rohit explains what happened in the modeling process or what data in the modeling process ended up being important?

  • 20.54: Rohit wants regulators to move faster than they do. If they can update their beliefs or move a little faster to help consumers that's just going to lift everyone up. 

  • 23.10: New age Fintech is not as penetrated in the broader ecosystem and there's a lot of positive impact that can be made on consumers and businesses in the future and that's the most positive thing is the rate of change of the industry and the opportunity ahead.

3 Key Points

  1. Rohit answers how he had discovered a problem in the market and decided to fix it and how Stilt was launched?

  2. Different companies have used different types of underwriting methodologies to serve the customer segments that they are going after.

  3. There are traditional lenders who want to expand their running capacity and there are people looking for other markets other under service verticals. Rohit talks about his target market.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “Over the past 6 plus years we have served immigrants from 160 different countries. We have given hundreds of millions of dollars of loans, and we have thousands of customers.” - Rohit

  • “The core of the idea to build Stilt just started with our personal experience of not being able to find an apartment in New York mainly because of my credit history.” – Rohit

  • “The credit bureaus and the credit scoring agencies are also incorporating new data sources although but they're doing it very slowly as compared to Fintech.” – Rohit

  • “You can actually launch a lending product in a few weeks with the infrastructure that we used to build Stilt instead of building everything again on your own.” – Rohit

  • “What we realized at least for the immigrant population that doesn't have credit scores or may not have a thick credit profile is how much their day-to-day habits are predictive of their rest score.” – Rohit 

  • “Getting some money to lend was the biggest challenge when we started the company and then later on it became scaling the company while managing credit at risk.” - Rohit

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech