December 31, 2025 • 45 mins
We’re sharing a preview of another podcast we think you’ll enjoy: What’s Your Problem?
Hosted by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, What’s Your Problem? asks entrepreneurs and engineers about the problems they’re trying to solve to build a bigger and brighter future.
In this episode: How do you build an app where strangers lend each other money? Nina Mohanty, CEO of Bloom Money, explains how centuries-old saving and lending global traditions—often used by immigrant communities—are being rebuilt for the modern financial system. It’s a conversation about trust, access, and what the future of money might look like when banks aren’t the center of it.
Find What’s Your Problem? on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, what's going on? It's Dexter and today we got
an episode of another show that I think you're going
to be into. It's called What's Your Problem? So What's
Your Problem is hosted by former Planet Money hosts Jacob Goldstein,
and it asks entrepreneurs and engineers about the problems they're
trying to solve to make the future a better place.
The episode you're about to hear asks if an app
(00:20):
can help immigrants manage their money. Nina Mahanti is the
CEO of Blue Money, and she's taken the informal saving
and lending traditions that immigrant communities have relied on for
generations and trying to make them work inside a financial
system that wasn't built for them. She's built an app
where strangers can still lend each other money through trust,
but using software to formalize everything. So here's the episode.
(00:43):
If you dig it, you can find more stories about
the global problems that really smart people are trying to
solve on the What's Your Problem podcast on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get into the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
By twenty twenty, Nina Mohunti had been working in fintech
in financial technology for several years. She'd worked at MasterCard.
At this point she was working at Klarna, the buy now,
pay later company, and she was working for them in London,
and she started paying attention to what seemed like a
big underserved market for financial technology immigrants. There were, of course,
(01:21):
lots of tools for immigrants to send money home right,
lots of tools for remittances, but it didn't seem like
anyone was creating financial tools to help immigrants save money
in the UK where they were for themselves.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
So I went down the rabbit hole and I spoke
to anyone that was speak to me. People often say
that I have the personality of a golden retriever.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
So just speak to anyone.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I was going up to people and saying, you know,
bus drivers on their cigarette bricks and asking them, how
are you managing your money? And I was going to
cleaners and offices, and I.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Was going up to you know, nurses.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I was literally someone was taking blood and I was
asking them about how they're managing their money. And these
all became translated over time into post it notes that
started to populate my wall, and it very much looked
like that meme from Always sunny in Philadelphia where he's
got the Red String. And I remember one day waking
(02:21):
up and just looking at this wall, and because I
had just moved back to.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
The UK, I didn't have anything on my walls.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
It was like a barely furnished flat 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. 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. And so
(02:51):
that was my decor and that was ultimately what pushed
me to start my business Blue Money.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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. My guest today is Nina Mohunti, the
founder and CEO of Blue Money. 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, literally a thousand years, and she told
(03:26):
me she hopes to build on this thousand year old
tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
So the problem that I kept coming.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Across is people that are new to a country find
it very, very difficult to actually integrate into the financial system.
And there's a number of reasons for this. People might
struggle to get access to credit because they don't have
(03:57):
a credit score, and especially in the and increasingly in Europe,
your credit score determines a lot about what you can do,
oftentimes if you can rent a place from a private landlord,
for example, where you can get a job, So these
are all things that are really important. It affects your
ability to get insurance, right and if you're driving, you
(04:19):
need car insurance most places. And if the financial system
doesn't know who you are, because there's no pay por
trail of you in this country, you're basically invisible to
the financial system. And that's what I kept hearing over
and over and over when I spoke to folks, which
was I'm here, I have a bank account, but I
(04:43):
don't know what is available to me, and I struggle
to access other financial products.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
And when I do, if I get to.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
That stage where I know what I want, I want
a car loan, I can't be because I don't exist.
I don't have a credit score, so I'm going to
just have a someone say well, computer says no, there's
no car loan available for you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So okay. So this is the landscape that you're walking into.
What do you decide to do?
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
One of the things that kept coming out of these
conversations was the presence of informal financial systems. And this
was really intriguing to me. I come from an immigrant background,
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 pull their funds, often with
(05:41):
their own social group. 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 pull their
money and kind of increase their affordability for one person
at a time within that group.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Let's talk about this in some detail, because this is
a very specific thing, right. It has an academic name. Right,
it's called the Rotating Savings and Credit Association absolutely ROSCA
to its friends. Yes, 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, so so tell me specifically,
(06:26):
like how does erosca work right, old school before you come.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Along, old school.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
The way that this is work, 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.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
But this is true story. This is a true just
so story. It's actually happened.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
This is actually happens. This is a true story. My
grandmother live 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, who she knew
were trustworthy, to come together into this group, and she
would determine a set sum of money. So to make
(07:09):
the maths easy, let's say one hundred rupees, okay, and
let's say there were ten women that were coming together.
So these ten women would agree to put a hundred
groupees into a pot every month. So my grandmother would
go around and she would collect the one hundred rupees
(07:29):
from all ten women, and that pot would suddenly have
a thousand rupees in it, and one woman would be
given that one thousand rupees to have for the month
so they could spend it. However they wished they could
buy a new sorry, they could, you know, sacrifice something
(07:51):
at the temple. They could put it towards their child's
tuition for school, whatever they wanted to do with it.
The next month, they would all come together, or rather
my grandmother would go and seek them out and gather
that one hundred rupees from each person, until all ten
had put one hundred rupees in, which meant there was
a thousand rupees for the next person to use. And
(08:14):
so every month that would rotate until each person over
that ten month cycle had an opportunity to use.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
That one thousand rupees.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
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. We do this in Taiwan and
in China as well. We call it hui which means
association or hui kind of coming together in an association.
(08:47):
But in India we call them chip funds or kiddies.
So I thought it must be an Asian thing. And
then I remember when I first moved here to working
at the US embass in London, I met a Jamaican man.
He said, oh, we do something just like this, and
we call it pardna or pardner hand. And then I
(09:11):
spoke to my friend who's British Pakistani and she said,
we do this too, we call it committee. And I thought, okay,
well that's still asia interesting. Then I met someone who
was so molly and she said, we do this too,
we call it hegbud. And then I met someone who's
Mexican and said, we do this too, we call it tanda.
(09:34):
And so the more I sought it out, the more
I realized that in the global majority, most of us
are doing this, and we have been doing it for
generations for a thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right, there's literally I saw a study that found evidence
of this in like Song China, which is truly like
a thousand years max. You're one thousand, right, So there
is this interesting question of why, right, Like, this is
a kind of technology, Right, It's like a bottom up
financial technology that I think pretty clearly has been sort
(10:08):
of independently invented in different places over time, Right, So
like what is it about it that makes people keep
figuring this out and keep doing it?
Speaker 3 (10:20):
So that is something that has plagued my mind for
years now, not least because I'm building my business around it.
But yeah, one of the things that I think about
often is our different cultural attitudes towards.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Money, but also.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Just society in general. And there's a I believe he's Dutch,
a man named Hirts Hofstetter, and he had this framework,
the hofstead is framework of culture and where every culture
has a different flavor to it. Obviously, but some cultures
(11:05):
are very individualistic and some cultures are very collective. 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.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So there's this broad context of like, okay, a more
communal vibe leads you into this kind of thing. I mean,
I could also imagine like it's a kind of savings, right,
it's a kind of savings. It's right there in the name.
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, Like
the idea that the that the bank is not going
(11:51):
to go under and that if it does, there's a
reliable government insurance, yeah, which is in fact the case
now in the US and much of the developed world,
is obviously not the case for most of world history.
So like that seems like quite a whatever, a less
worm and fuzzy but also plausible virtue of the ROSCA.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
I absolutely think this.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
But if we really drill down, I mean, in the States,
we have credit unions, right, or community banks and that
sort of thing, and that's just a more macro version
of a ROSCA, Right, It's a group of people coming
together with some sort of affinity. We all live in
the same area. Or in Edinburgh, there's a lovely facade
(12:37):
of what is now a clothing store, but it says
the Laundry Workers Bank, and it was people who worked
at the laundry together that came together to form effectively
a community bank. And so it's something we've been doing
but have lost sight of over time. But I definitely
think that you're right that there's something in trust or
(13:00):
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. I think
that's probably why it's so prevalent in those areas, more
so than it is in the West.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Okay, so you discover the roscam and you're going to
and then what you're going to build a rosca app.
I mean, that's basically the move at that point.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
What really intrigued me about the rosca and as someone
who had seen it right with my own parents doing
and my grandparents doing it, was one it exists in
almost every culture, uh non Western culture, I should specify.
And what was interesting to me about that is just
(13:48):
like remittances and money transfer, it's something that every culture does, right.
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
and so similarly it was a behavior that was replicable
(14:10):
across cultures. What was very interesting to me is everyone
has their own name for it.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, give me a list. You did a few, Like,
how many can you give me? If you just go
in one breath? Oh okay, you get set, ready go.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
We've got tanline Mexico, Consocio in Brazil, Partner or Partnerhan
in Jamaica, money Box in Saint Lucia, hegbad Ayuto in Somalia,
Ajo in Nigeria or is Susu depending on your tribe,
Kelimba in Congo, Tontine in any Francophone African country. We've
(14:52):
got Committee in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Poluagan in Philippines, Aisan
in Malaysia, Hui in China, and Taiwan Jungyim in South Korea.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
The list goes on very good. And I can say,
I'm talking on video you were not reading now you
are looking like up at the ceiling. That was truly
off the top.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yes, off the top of my head.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
It's my party trick now, So I mean people will
be like, I'm from here, what is it called? And
I have to try and figure it out. And then
more importantly, and going back to the original problem that
we were discussing, is people are moving huge sums of money.
(15:38):
Depending on who you speak to. There's one startup that's
done the math and they think globally there's three hundred
billion dollars moving through roscas globally. But it's something that
people take with them, especially immigrant communities when they move
to a new place. Because they are new, they know
their community. They seek out their community first. They might
(16:00):
join the community circle or club as we might call it.
And what is fascinating and so valuable about this is
if someone is putting in one hundred dollars or one
hundred pounds or one hundred euros every month and they're
paying in on time, that's actually really great financial behavior.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
It tells me you're good for the money.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yes, that's that's a good credit right. I mean fundamentally,
you you select people. When your grandmother was doing this
choosing people for her club, she had a credit score
in her mind, right, Like exactly, you are just reducing
trust to the neighborhood. You're not going to invite somebody
who's gonna get a thousand bucks right now and pay
(16:44):
you back a thousand bucks over the next year. You're
not going to invite them if they are sketchy.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
No. Absolutely, And some of my favorite interactions I speak French,
and so where I live in London is called Lewisham,
and there's a lot of West African folks here, a
lot of Francophone West Africans. And there's a hair salon
where I go to get my eyebrows done. There's a
lovely Sri Lankan woman that does that. But there are
(17:10):
these Ivorian women doing braiding hair, and I started speaking
to them about it, and they're speaking in French, and
I don't think they realize that I speak French. And
they were basically just talking shit about the various people.
And they're like, we don't like so and so she
never pays in on time, she's not allowed into are
(17:32):
tol tine as they call it in Francophone Africa. And
so people are underwriting their.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Community's credit score, gossip about the salon salon.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
It's the original way.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
And it's like, we know that she doesn't pay on time,
she doesn't go to church, she's not going to be there, whatever.
But these are things that people have been using to
underwrite each other for thousand years plus, right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
So okay, well you've got the thousand years. It's it's
time for you to start your company in this narrative. Now,
how do you start a company, you know, around this idea,
around this practice.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Not easily, I'll tell you that much. I think.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
The interesting thing is I have worked in the fintech
industry financial technology for so long now, and it never
occurred to me that I would be a founder myself
or the entrepreneur in charge. I'm very good at building things,
and I've get a lot of pleasure out of building
(18:34):
interesting products. And so I built a no code app
and I said, let's just see if this thing works.
And so I invited fifty women. I do a lot
of work with various migrant groups and specifically women, and
invited them to try this web app. And what we
(18:58):
found was there was one hundred percent payment right, everyone
paid on time. And people said to us, this is great.
I didn't have to go get cash out. I didn't
have to send my child with the cash down to
the auntie's house for collection. It was great, like it
was collected and it was sent out to me when
it was time to receive the money. And so now
(19:20):
what do I do, because I have to go and
get regulated. I can't just be, you know, moving large
sums of money around and not be regulated. And so
I started the process of explaining to the Financial Conduct
Authority what EROSCA is and why it exists. And that
was actually very very challenging because there aren't many people
(19:43):
that look like me that work in the innovation department
of the FCA. Right, 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, and you start to ask questions like, well,
it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending,
(20:05):
where it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
So it does feel a little bit like peer to
peer lending. That is not an that is not an
unreasonable thought.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
It's not at all.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And even even crowdfunding, you could argue that, yeah, actually,
in a way, it is crowdfunding and it rotates fine.
So we really had to make the case that this
is neither peer to peer lending nor crowdfunding, but its
own special thing.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
Then I had to go and face the.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Venture capital industry, and that was probably the most daunting
thing I've ever done to this day.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
Still.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
I'm from the Silicon Valley and you know, I grew
down the street from Apple and you know there, I mean,
venture capital firms are a.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Dime a dozen in the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But it's very different just driving past and then going
into actually pitch to these folks to say, here's this
problem that I want to solve, here's why I want
to do it, and here's why you should give me
a million.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Pounds to do it right.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
But I did that and it was very very daunting,
very very difficult. 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 and so it just requires a little bit more
of that upfront investment.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
And then from there we were off to the races.
Speaker 6 (21:42):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So how does it work? What's the thing you have
now and how does it work?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Yeah, so the Boom app is pretty straightforward. It's an
app where you download it, you register, you go through
Know your Customer or KYC, 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, and then
(22:20):
you go to the homepage and you're able to either
create a circle, so we call them Bloom circles to
homogenize the name across cultures. You can either create your
own circle and choose how much you want to put
in how often, so you can do it weekly, bi weekly,
or monthly, although monthly is the most popular. Cadence, you
(22:43):
choose how much, how many people, and then your start date,
and from there you can share your circle and say
here's the code, join my circle, and then a private circle.
That means you are in full control. And this is
the most faithful reproduction, shouldn't I guess of what we
have done for one thousand years? So it can be
(23:05):
my friends and family, it can be the people at
the mosque whoever.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Right, So in this case this is just replacing like
having to take cash to whoever every month, correct with
an automated system. And so how does the money actually flow?
Like does everybody have to have a bank account? Are
you a bank?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So everyone has to have their own UK based bank
account because we're based in the UK. And then they
have to have a UK issued debit card, so we
don't let people use credit for this particular financial activity.
But what they do is they connect their debit card
(23:44):
and the money is automatically collected on the set date
each month or whatever the cadence is, and then we
take your bank details and when it's your turn to
receive your payout, we send that straight into your bank account.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
So a lot of it you're basically the rail you're
the pipe exactly.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
We are the pipes. 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 and
someone says.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Oh, I need to get cash out or all those drama.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
That comes with that, and what do you charge?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
So we try a transaction fee of four percent 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. But
what is really interesting is when you're in the bloom circles,
you have the option to do a private circle, but
(24:37):
most of our volume is actually through what we call
community or public circles. And this is where people will
join complete strangers in a circle. And that has been
fascinating to me because as someone that.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Is wild, that's most of your business.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
I would say ninety five percent of our circles are
pure strangers coming together in circles.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Is it like a well, what happens if somebody gets
all the money the first month and then bails?
Speaker 4 (25:09):
And that is exactly it.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So we have had bad actors, but you know what
is fascinating is we've had people take the money and
then run, and in this instance that will mean they'll
stop topping up their account or they'll cancel their card
or whatever. But what is very fascinating is the people
that have cut and run end up coming back and
(25:34):
we've been made whole. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I mean I wouldn't let them back even if they asked,
if they cut it run and then said can I
come back? I don't think you should have.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So we've not let anyone back.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
In what we have a rehabilitation program where people can
start to like pay back smaller sums because.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
There is or you could let them join, but they're
the ones who get paid last. In exactle, I guess
that's insurance. Wait, let me ask just to be clear,
like is there any kind of insurance 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 present?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
We don't have insurance, and we make that very clear with.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Is it a contract, Like is the person committing fraud
or anything if they take the money and bail, are
they just a bad person?
Speaker 3 (26:31):
So well, both there is a contract and so they
actually have to sign it. And that has really come
in handy and it says a lot about signatures in
today's digital world to me.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn't.
Is that the secret of the contract, It truly is.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Because first we tried doing biometrics, so people would do
a selfie or you know, use face ID, or the
would do their touch, you know, thumbprint, and they would say, oh, well,
I didn't sign anything. That's not me signing, even though
they've used their biometric And so we actually have a
step now where you have to sign with your finger, your.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
A signature like on your phone, just on your phone.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
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 And so we do
not make people whole, and we make that very clearer
in our terms and conditions when people are joining circles.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
And yet we have a ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Percent payment rate and so very rarely are people cutting
and running, and even if they do, they tend to
come back and kind of feel guilty about it. And
I think that says something about this social cohesion, right.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, And just to be clear, this is people who
are just randomly assigned to a circle. Correct, they don't
know each other's not from the same community, they don't
live in the same neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
Whatever, exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
That's really interesting. I guess it's hardening in a way.
I think I would have predicted worse behavior. Yeah, I
think that's good news, right in.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Today's society where you're you're very skeptical of humanity and
and you're looking for the good but expecting the worst, perhaps.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Especially in a you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way exactly.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
And I think though, one of the things that kind
of helps us is we both we have a care
and a stick. So what we've been doing is actually
taking this data that we were collecting. Let's say that you,
Jacob have paid in every month on time. We are
building our own underwriting algorithm and saying Jacob's good for
the money. This is fantastic, so that we can eventually
(28:50):
go into lending and say, uh, huh, hey, Jacob, you've
got a perfect bloom credit score. We're going to lend
to you now.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
In the way that so far started out doings this
very narrow, like, oh, we'll lend money from alumni to
college students, and now they're just like a giant financial institution.
You're that, but for immigrants exactly that.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And so what we keep seeing is that people want
to have a good record.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Uh huh, you're their credit score. You're the immigrant credits,
we're the.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Immigrant credit score.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
And we have the largest data set in the UK
on immigrant communities and their financial behavior at present.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
How big is it? How big is it?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
So we're still tiny. We're thirteen thousand customers. We're very
very early stage. But the very interesting thing is no
one else has thought to do this before.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
And by the way, how many people do you reject
up front? How much of your you know, high payment
rate comes from figuring out beforehand who did not let in?
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Usually they wouldn't even have made it to be able
to join a circle. 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.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
How often does that happen?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Maybe one percent of the time. 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 because we can kind of take all of this
other data access around us and you know, you might
have a record good or bad elsewhere, but we can
(30:30):
connect those dots and then ultimately our goal is to
work with you know, the transunions. The experience the echo
fax is to actually help people build their credit scores
using bloom circles. Though it's not actually a credit product,
it is a behavior that people are already doing and
we're just formalizing it and digitizing it, and so it's
(30:54):
something that longer term will actually show us more valuable
insights into the financial behavior of our customers.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
What was something you tried that didn't work.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I'll be honest, it's the private circles. When we first launched,
we launched with private circles, and you know, in the
startup land, they say build it and they will come.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
So I was like, right here it.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Is the apps out were regulated.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Let's go and no one was transacting.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
It was I was I felt like I was running
into a brick wall, like, come on, why isn't anyone
moving money?
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Build it and they will come.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
And they were creating accounts, and they were registering and
connecting their debit cards, but they weren't joining or creating circles.
And I started to speak to people and just call
customers up or email them and say, you know, we
see you've registered. What's keeping you from going the next
step and actually joining a circle? And we heard a
(31:57):
lot of excuses. 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, 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. So
some of it was timing. But the most common response
(32:17):
that we got was I don't have enough friends.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Huh.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
And that was so so.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Interesting to me because I pushed them on that what
does that mean? What do you mean you don't have
enough friends? 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. So they
might say, you know, I want to put one hundred
pounds a month in, but my sister can only afford
to do fifty. And actually that's not enough for me.
(32:47):
I want to be able to do it with six
people and have six hundred pounds at the end of
it to make it really worth my while, right, instead
of maybe three hundred pounds.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
And I kept hearing this over and over and over.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Want them to know. Yeah, oh yeah, right, I don't
want them to know. That's interesting, and it was fascinating.
I don't want them to know that I'm going to
get one thousand pounds one month, because that'll exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And one of our team members, Asha, she comes from
an Usha Yemeny 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.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
And that was fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
It's kind of that's really interesting. Some of it was
just my anonymized finess finance. Right, This is like, no, no,
I don't want community finance. I just want finance.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
I just want finance.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
I want culturally resonant and I you know something we
understand and the behavior is done.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
But I actually but it is kind of an anti
communal vibe, right. It's like, I want my business to be.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Paradoxically exactly that. And nowadays it's fascinating 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, and that
tells us that that person probably was seeing if they
could trust us and if the money was going to
(34:22):
end up where it was supposed to before bringing in
their social group. So it was one of those things
where we launched with it, and yeah it didn't just
go gangbusters, but it taught us a lot about the
underlying behavior of our community. One of the things that
we found over and over again when we spoke to
(34:43):
customers is Okay, I have this money now, and I
don't know what to do with it. So I end
up sending more home and it ends up being like
a bonus for everyone back home, or I end up
buying something that ends up being useless and not something
that I actually need, and it's a waste of money.
So I want to know where I should put this money.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
And so now with.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Technology, what we can do is say, hey, Jacob, you
received five hundred pounds, why don't you put half of
that into a money market fund and actually grow your money?
Why don't you put it into a pension pot and
again have your money work for you and the.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
People are right there in your app when they get
the money right like that.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And so now we can just direct that flow of
funds and say, yeah, put it in this money market fund.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
Great.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yes, of course they're socioeconomic and geopolitical differences between us.
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 and help them build
financial resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is.
(35:54):
That's ultimately what we're driving towards.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Not to be crass after that high minded idea, which
I am a fan of, but like in that universe,
do you get essentially a commission from whatever money market
fund you're sending the people to, Like, what's the business
model for that time, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Exactly, So would be very much like your betterments of
the world, where you charge a management fee of some
sort and then we would just take that percentage off
the assets of your management.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
So in that universe, they're like coming to the blue
map to look at their money market fund exactly, and
you're not the money market fund, but you're You're where
they sort of.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Deal with exactly, and 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. You're going to have to send
money home, that's great, but why don't you also put
some aside for you or down the line.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
You know, my dad bought.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
A plot of land in India and built a house
for my late grandparents and his siblings. It's very common
for people from immigrant backgrounds to buy a plot of land,
build a house and that sort of thing. Well, imagine
a world where at Bloom you can also like manage
the flow of your funds so that the builders get
(37:18):
paid and everything, and you know, you have the money
to a mortgage to buy that plot of land, right,
And there's so many different directions that these things can
go where. It's very specific to straddling countries, if not continents, right,
But being of diaspora means that you are often one
(37:40):
foot on one continent and one foot on the other.
And so where the place that they can come? And
that's that's the grand vision.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Are you going to come to the US?
Speaker 4 (37:54):
I mean I am coming to the US. I'm an
American citizen.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Bloom It's an interesting one. Bloom money is serving immigrants,
and of course the United States is the largest market
for that to be a success. I think what I
find exciting about Europe is that we are largely becoming
a region of immigration across the European continent. And it's
(38:24):
something that people don't realize, or they do through a
political lens, but not through a financial services lens, and
so there's a huge opportunity. Whereas in the States it's
kind of written on the tin that we're a country
of immigrants, like that's literally how we started. And so
it's a bit more of an obvious problem, which means
there's a lot more players in the space. No one's
(38:46):
doing exactly what we're doing, but there's a lot more folks,
you know, specifically serving Latinos, right, So does.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
That mean you're going to Europe next?
Speaker 3 (38:57):
That is the plan, 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.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
So watch this space.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. Okay, Oh gosh. If
(39:42):
you could join a money club with any three people
living or dead, who would they be?
Speaker 4 (39:50):
I would join with.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Hmm, I would join with Emily Pankhurst.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
We love a suffragette queen. I would join with.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Benezir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi and there's me. So maybe I'll
add one more.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Uh. These are political political leaders who.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Happened to be and Mohammed Yunis, who is, like I guess,
the interim leader of Bangladesh right now, but he was
the founder of the Grimen Bank in Bangladesh and.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Has very much experimented.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
With roscas and how they can be used in developing countries.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
So yeah, those would be my few people.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
I feel like those people would all be good for it.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, I feel like.
Speaker 4 (40:48):
They'd be good for the money as well.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Although Emily Pankhurst, I don't know, she got up.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
She was, you know, pamphleting.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Women weren't allowed to have pockets because we would give
pamphlets out, you know, out stuff for death.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It's amazing how many women's pants still do not have pockets.
It's shocking to me.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
It is actually shocking, and I it's actually one of
the things that I look for from a fashion perspective
when I buy dresses.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Even I'm like, yes, pockets, pockets, it's.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
A useful technology. Pocket everybody, what's one thing written on
a post it note in front of you right now?
Speaker 4 (41:29):
Slow it down, Calm it down. Pressure breaks.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
And 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, like, applying
pressure through speed doesn't always help things, and sometimes it
breaks things and keeps a deal from happening because people
(41:56):
feel pressured.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
So slow it down, calm it down.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It's funny. I was thinking it was going to be
like make dentist appointment.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
I mean, I've got those too, but they're far less
they're far less deep Jacob.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I need you to I need you to think, Yes,
how did your parents talk about money when you were
a kid.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Definitely from a scarcity mindset. We were a family that
my father would like keep plastic bags and we very
much would like, you know, back in the nineties when
they used proper plastic for ice cream tubs, like those
would become tupperware for us to use until that thing
broke down. But I think it was always a scarcity mindset.
(42:44):
There's never enough, and everything was about scrimping and saving.
And my prom dress was thirty dollars from like I
think it was rass Or Marshals, and you know it
was I was always just taught that there was never enough,
and that has unfor actually affected me as an adult
because what is enough? And what is enough in your
(43:07):
emergency fund? What is enough to have in savings? What
is enough to have in your investment account? And it
becomes very difficult when you're trying to enjoy life as well.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Can you just go out to dinner and not worry
about it? Can you just order the fucking app Yeah, just.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Get the fucking latte, you know, like it's okay exactly?
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean I don't want to stereotype, but
I do feel like it's a classic immigrant vibe, Like
my grandfather was an immigrant, and that's how I always
that's how I came to understand that vibe. Yes, like
it's just people for a thousand years didn't have enough,
and so being in this world where it's like we're
(43:49):
doing great, that's not natural no to be to my family.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
I think it's something that to this day, my dad refuses,
our girl at home is full of just like crap
that doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, I have a box of cords that I'd like
to show you.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
And my dad he's got this one vacuum cleaner that
he bought from Costco. This thing caught like probably weighs
more than I do.
Speaker 4 (44:17):
And he refuses.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
I was like, I'm taking this to the dump, like,
no one is gonna buy this. He's like, no, I'm
selling it for two thousand dollars. I said, Dad, you
bought it for two thousand dollars from Costco and.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
This thing doesn't even work. You've got a Dyson. What
are you doing? But it really like this hoarding mentality,
when you.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Felt like you never had enough, it really sticks with
you so I'm trying to break the cycle now and hope,
hopefully I won't pass it down to any future children
I may have.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, it's complicated though, because like I sort of like it, Yeah,
at some level, you know what I mean. Like it's
a balance, right obviously, Like people do spend all their money? Yeah,
people do, you know, live beyond their means and so
you can in your head is hard. Equanimity is exactly everything.
Speaker 4 (45:06):
Moderation.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
There we go. Ninomo Hunty is the founder and CEO
of Blue Money. Please email us at problem at pushkin
dot fm. We are always looking for new guests for
the show. Today's show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel
(45:29):
Hunter Chang. That was edited by Alexander Garrison and engineered
by Sarah Bruguer.
Hey, what's going on? It's Dexter and today we got
an episode of another show that I think you're going
to be into. It's called What's Your Problem? So What's
Your Problem is hosted by former Planet Money hosts Jacob Goldstein,
and it asks entrepreneurs and engineers about the problems they're
trying to solve to make the future a better place.
The episode you're about to hear asks if an app
(00:20):
can help immigrants manage their money. Nina Mahanti is the
CEO of Blue Money, and she's taken the informal saving
and lending traditions that immigrant communities have relied on for
generations and trying to make them work inside a financial
system that wasn't built for them. She's built an app
where strangers can still lend each other money through trust,
but using software to formalize everything. So here's the episode.
(00:43):
If you dig it, you can find more stories about
the global problems that really smart people are trying to
solve on the What's Your Problem podcast on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get into the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
By twenty twenty, Nina Mohunti had been working in fintech
in financial technology for several years. She'd worked at MasterCard.
At this point she was working at Klarna, the buy now,
pay later company, and she was working for them in London,
and she started paying attention to what seemed like a
big underserved market for financial technology immigrants. There were, of course,
(01:21):
lots of tools for immigrants to send money home right,
lots of tools for remittances, but it didn't seem like
anyone was creating financial tools to help immigrants save money
in the UK where they were for themselves.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
So I went down the rabbit hole and I spoke
to anyone that was speak to me. People often say
that I have the personality of a golden retriever.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
So just speak to anyone.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I was going up to people and saying, you know,
bus drivers on their cigarette bricks and asking them, how
are you managing your money? And I was going to
cleaners and offices, and I.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Was going up to you know, nurses.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I was literally someone was taking blood and I was
asking them about how they're managing their money. And these
all became translated over time into post it notes that
started to populate my wall, and it very much looked
like that meme from Always sunny in Philadelphia where he's
got the Red String. And I remember one day waking
(02:21):
up and just looking at this wall, and because I
had just moved back to.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
The UK, I didn't have anything on my walls.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
It was like a barely furnished flat 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. 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. And so
(02:51):
that was my decor and that was ultimately what pushed
me to start my business Blue Money.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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. My guest today is Nina Mohunti, the
founder and CEO of Blue Money. 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, literally a thousand years, and she told
(03:26):
me she hopes to build on this thousand year old
tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
So the problem that I kept coming.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Across is people that are new to a country find
it very, very difficult to actually integrate into the financial system.
And there's a number of reasons for this. People might
struggle to get access to credit because they don't have
(03:57):
a credit score, and especially in the and increasingly in Europe,
your credit score determines a lot about what you can do,
oftentimes if you can rent a place from a private landlord,
for example, where you can get a job, So these
are all things that are really important. It affects your
ability to get insurance, right and if you're driving, you
(04:19):
need car insurance most places. And if the financial system
doesn't know who you are, because there's no pay por
trail of you in this country, you're basically invisible to
the financial system. And that's what I kept hearing over
and over and over when I spoke to folks, which
was I'm here, I have a bank account, but I
(04:43):
don't know what is available to me, and I struggle
to access other financial products.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
And when I do, if I get to.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
That stage where I know what I want, I want
a car loan, I can't be because I don't exist.
I don't have a credit score, so I'm going to
just have a someone say well, computer says no, there's
no car loan available for you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So okay. So this is the landscape that you're walking into.
What do you decide to do?
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
One of the things that kept coming out of these
conversations was the presence of informal financial systems. And this
was really intriguing to me. I come from an immigrant background,
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 pull their funds, often with
(05:41):
their own social group. 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 pull their
money and kind of increase their affordability for one person
at a time within that group.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Let's talk about this in some detail, because this is
a very specific thing, right. It has an academic name. Right,
it's called the Rotating Savings and Credit Association absolutely ROSCA
to its friends. Yes, 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, so so tell me specifically,
(06:26):
like how does erosca work right, old school before you come.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Along, old school.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
The way that this is work, 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.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
But this is true story. This is a true just
so story. It's actually happened.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
This is actually happens. This is a true story. My
grandmother live 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, who she knew
were trustworthy, to come together into this group, and she
would determine a set sum of money. So to make
(07:09):
the maths easy, let's say one hundred rupees, okay, and
let's say there were ten women that were coming together.
So these ten women would agree to put a hundred
groupees into a pot every month. So my grandmother would
go around and she would collect the one hundred rupees
(07:29):
from all ten women, and that pot would suddenly have
a thousand rupees in it, and one woman would be
given that one thousand rupees to have for the month
so they could spend it. However they wished they could
buy a new sorry, they could, you know, sacrifice something
(07:51):
at the temple. They could put it towards their child's
tuition for school, whatever they wanted to do with it.
The next month, they would all come together, or rather
my grandmother would go and seek them out and gather
that one hundred rupees from each person, until all ten
had put one hundred rupees in, which meant there was
a thousand rupees for the next person to use. And
(08:14):
so every month that would rotate until each person over
that ten month cycle had an opportunity to use.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
That one thousand rupees.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
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. We do this in Taiwan and
in China as well. We call it hui which means
association or hui kind of coming together in an association.
(08:47):
But in India we call them chip funds or kiddies.
So I thought it must be an Asian thing. And
then I remember when I first moved here to working
at the US embass in London, I met a Jamaican man.
He said, oh, we do something just like this, and
we call it pardna or pardner hand. And then I
(09:11):
spoke to my friend who's British Pakistani and she said,
we do this too, we call it committee. And I thought, okay,
well that's still asia interesting. Then I met someone who
was so molly and she said, we do this too,
we call it hegbud. And then I met someone who's
Mexican and said, we do this too, we call it tanda.
(09:34):
And so the more I sought it out, the more
I realized that in the global majority, most of us
are doing this, and we have been doing it for
generations for a thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right, there's literally I saw a study that found evidence
of this in like Song China, which is truly like
a thousand years max. You're one thousand, right, So there
is this interesting question of why, right, Like, this is
a kind of technology, Right, It's like a bottom up
financial technology that I think pretty clearly has been sort
(10:08):
of independently invented in different places over time, Right, So
like what is it about it that makes people keep
figuring this out and keep doing it?
Speaker 3 (10:20):
So that is something that has plagued my mind for
years now, not least because I'm building my business around it.
But yeah, one of the things that I think about
often is our different cultural attitudes towards.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Money, but also.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Just society in general. And there's a I believe he's Dutch,
a man named Hirts Hofstetter, and he had this framework,
the hofstead is framework of culture and where every culture
has a different flavor to it. Obviously, but some cultures
(11:05):
are very individualistic and some cultures are very collective. 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.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So there's this broad context of like, okay, a more
communal vibe leads you into this kind of thing. I mean,
I could also imagine like it's a kind of savings, right,
it's a kind of savings. It's right there in the name.
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, Like
the idea that the that the bank is not going
(11:51):
to go under and that if it does, there's a
reliable government insurance, yeah, which is in fact the case
now in the US and much of the developed world,
is obviously not the case for most of world history.
So like that seems like quite a whatever, a less
worm and fuzzy but also plausible virtue of the ROSCA.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
I absolutely think this.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
But if we really drill down, I mean, in the States,
we have credit unions, right, or community banks and that
sort of thing, and that's just a more macro version
of a ROSCA, Right, It's a group of people coming
together with some sort of affinity. We all live in
the same area. Or in Edinburgh, there's a lovely facade
(12:37):
of what is now a clothing store, but it says
the Laundry Workers Bank, and it was people who worked
at the laundry together that came together to form effectively
a community bank. And so it's something we've been doing
but have lost sight of over time. But I definitely
think that you're right that there's something in trust or
(13:00):
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. I think
that's probably why it's so prevalent in those areas, more
so than it is in the West.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Okay, so you discover the roscam and you're going to
and then what you're going to build a rosca app.
I mean, that's basically the move at that point.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
What really intrigued me about the rosca and as someone
who had seen it right with my own parents doing
and my grandparents doing it, was one it exists in
almost every culture, uh non Western culture, I should specify.
And what was interesting to me about that is just
(13:48):
like remittances and money transfer, it's something that every culture does, right.
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
and so similarly it was a behavior that was replicable
(14:10):
across cultures. What was very interesting to me is everyone
has their own name for it.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, give me a list. You did a few, Like,
how many can you give me? If you just go
in one breath? Oh okay, you get set, ready go.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
We've got tanline Mexico, Consocio in Brazil, Partner or Partnerhan
in Jamaica, money Box in Saint Lucia, hegbad Ayuto in Somalia,
Ajo in Nigeria or is Susu depending on your tribe,
Kelimba in Congo, Tontine in any Francophone African country. We've
(14:52):
got Committee in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Poluagan in Philippines, Aisan
in Malaysia, Hui in China, and Taiwan Jungyim in South Korea.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
The list goes on very good. And I can say,
I'm talking on video you were not reading now you
are looking like up at the ceiling. That was truly
off the top.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yes, off the top of my head.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
It's my party trick now, So I mean people will
be like, I'm from here, what is it called? And
I have to try and figure it out. And then
more importantly, and going back to the original problem that
we were discussing, is people are moving huge sums of money.
(15:38):
Depending on who you speak to. There's one startup that's
done the math and they think globally there's three hundred
billion dollars moving through roscas globally. But it's something that
people take with them, especially immigrant communities when they move
to a new place. Because they are new, they know
their community. They seek out their community first. They might
(16:00):
join the community circle or club as we might call it.
And what is fascinating and so valuable about this is
if someone is putting in one hundred dollars or one
hundred pounds or one hundred euros every month and they're
paying in on time, that's actually really great financial behavior.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
It tells me you're good for the money.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yes, that's that's a good credit right. I mean fundamentally,
you you select people. When your grandmother was doing this
choosing people for her club, she had a credit score
in her mind, right, Like exactly, you are just reducing
trust to the neighborhood. You're not going to invite somebody
who's gonna get a thousand bucks right now and pay
(16:44):
you back a thousand bucks over the next year. You're
not going to invite them if they are sketchy.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
No. Absolutely, And some of my favorite interactions I speak French,
and so where I live in London is called Lewisham,
and there's a lot of West African folks here, a
lot of Francophone West Africans. And there's a hair salon
where I go to get my eyebrows done. There's a
lovely Sri Lankan woman that does that. But there are
(17:10):
these Ivorian women doing braiding hair, and I started speaking
to them about it, and they're speaking in French, and
I don't think they realize that I speak French. And
they were basically just talking shit about the various people.
And they're like, we don't like so and so she
never pays in on time, she's not allowed into are
(17:32):
tol tine as they call it in Francophone Africa. And
so people are underwriting their.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Community's credit score, gossip about the salon salon.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
It's the original way.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
And it's like, we know that she doesn't pay on time,
she doesn't go to church, she's not going to be there, whatever.
But these are things that people have been using to
underwrite each other for thousand years plus, right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
So okay, well you've got the thousand years. It's it's
time for you to start your company in this narrative. Now,
how do you start a company, you know, around this idea,
around this practice.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Not easily, I'll tell you that much. I think.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
The interesting thing is I have worked in the fintech
industry financial technology for so long now, and it never
occurred to me that I would be a founder myself
or the entrepreneur in charge. I'm very good at building things,
and I've get a lot of pleasure out of building
(18:34):
interesting products. And so I built a no code app
and I said, let's just see if this thing works.
And so I invited fifty women. I do a lot
of work with various migrant groups and specifically women, and
invited them to try this web app. And what we
(18:58):
found was there was one hundred percent payment right, everyone
paid on time. And people said to us, this is great.
I didn't have to go get cash out. I didn't
have to send my child with the cash down to
the auntie's house for collection. It was great, like it
was collected and it was sent out to me when
it was time to receive the money. And so now
(19:20):
what do I do, because I have to go and
get regulated. I can't just be, you know, moving large
sums of money around and not be regulated. And so
I started the process of explaining to the Financial Conduct
Authority what EROSCA is and why it exists. And that
was actually very very challenging because there aren't many people
(19:43):
that look like me that work in the innovation department
of the FCA. Right, 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, and you start to ask questions like, well,
it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending,
(20:05):
where it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
So it does feel a little bit like peer to
peer lending. That is not an that is not an
unreasonable thought.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
It's not at all.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And even even crowdfunding, you could argue that, yeah, actually,
in a way, it is crowdfunding and it rotates fine.
So we really had to make the case that this
is neither peer to peer lending nor crowdfunding, but its
own special thing.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
Then I had to go and face the.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Venture capital industry, and that was probably the most daunting
thing I've ever done to this day.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
Still.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
I'm from the Silicon Valley and you know, I grew
down the street from Apple and you know there, I mean,
venture capital firms are a.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Dime a dozen in the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But it's very different just driving past and then going
into actually pitch to these folks to say, here's this
problem that I want to solve, here's why I want
to do it, and here's why you should give me
a million.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Pounds to do it right.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
But I did that and it was very very daunting,
very very difficult. 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 and so it just requires a little bit more
of that upfront investment.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
And then from there we were off to the races.
Speaker 6 (21:42):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So how does it work? What's the thing you have
now and how does it work?
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Yeah, so the Boom app is pretty straightforward. It's an
app where you download it, you register, you go through
Know your Customer or KYC, 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, and then
(22:20):
you go to the homepage and you're able to either
create a circle, so we call them Bloom circles to
homogenize the name across cultures. You can either create your
own circle and choose how much you want to put
in how often, so you can do it weekly, bi weekly,
or monthly, although monthly is the most popular. Cadence, you
(22:43):
choose how much, how many people, and then your start date,
and from there you can share your circle and say
here's the code, join my circle, and then a private circle.
That means you are in full control. And this is
the most faithful reproduction, shouldn't I guess of what we
have done for one thousand years? So it can be
(23:05):
my friends and family, it can be the people at
the mosque whoever.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Right, So in this case this is just replacing like
having to take cash to whoever every month, correct with
an automated system. And so how does the money actually flow?
Like does everybody have to have a bank account? Are
you a bank?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So everyone has to have their own UK based bank
account because we're based in the UK. And then they
have to have a UK issued debit card, so we
don't let people use credit for this particular financial activity.
But what they do is they connect their debit card
(23:44):
and the money is automatically collected on the set date
each month or whatever the cadence is, and then we
take your bank details and when it's your turn to
receive your payout, we send that straight into your bank account.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
So a lot of it you're basically the rail you're
the pipe exactly.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
We are the pipes. 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 and
someone says.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Oh, I need to get cash out or all those drama.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
That comes with that, and what do you charge?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
So we try a transaction fee of four percent 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. But
what is really interesting is when you're in the bloom circles,
you have the option to do a private circle, but
(24:37):
most of our volume is actually through what we call
community or public circles. And this is where people will
join complete strangers in a circle. And that has been
fascinating to me because as someone that.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Is wild, that's most of your business.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
I would say ninety five percent of our circles are
pure strangers coming together in circles.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Is it like a well, what happens if somebody gets
all the money the first month and then bails?
Speaker 4 (25:09):
And that is exactly it.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So we have had bad actors, but you know what
is fascinating is we've had people take the money and
then run, and in this instance that will mean they'll
stop topping up their account or they'll cancel their card
or whatever. But what is very fascinating is the people
that have cut and run end up coming back and
(25:34):
we've been made whole. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I mean I wouldn't let them back even if they asked,
if they cut it run and then said can I
come back? I don't think you should have.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So we've not let anyone back.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
In what we have a rehabilitation program where people can
start to like pay back smaller sums because.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
There is or you could let them join, but they're
the ones who get paid last. In exactle, I guess
that's insurance. Wait, let me ask just to be clear,
like is there any kind of insurance 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 present?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
We don't have insurance, and we make that very clear with.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Is it a contract, Like is the person committing fraud
or anything if they take the money and bail, are
they just a bad person?
Speaker 3 (26:31):
So well, both there is a contract and so they
actually have to sign it. And that has really come
in handy and it says a lot about signatures in
today's digital world to me.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn't.
Is that the secret of the contract, It truly is.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Because first we tried doing biometrics, so people would do
a selfie or you know, use face ID, or the
would do their touch, you know, thumbprint, and they would say, oh, well,
I didn't sign anything. That's not me signing, even though
they've used their biometric And so we actually have a
step now where you have to sign with your finger, your.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
A signature like on your phone, just on your phone.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
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 And so we do
not make people whole, and we make that very clearer
in our terms and conditions when people are joining circles.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
And yet we have a ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Percent payment rate and so very rarely are people cutting
and running, and even if they do, they tend to
come back and kind of feel guilty about it. And
I think that says something about this social cohesion, right.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, And just to be clear, this is people who
are just randomly assigned to a circle. Correct, they don't
know each other's not from the same community, they don't
live in the same neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
Whatever, exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
That's really interesting. I guess it's hardening in a way.
I think I would have predicted worse behavior. Yeah, I
think that's good news, right in.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Today's society where you're you're very skeptical of humanity and
and you're looking for the good but expecting the worst, perhaps.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Especially in a you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way exactly.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
And I think though, one of the things that kind
of helps us is we both we have a care
and a stick. So what we've been doing is actually
taking this data that we were collecting. Let's say that you,
Jacob have paid in every month on time. We are
building our own underwriting algorithm and saying Jacob's good for
the money. This is fantastic, so that we can eventually
(28:50):
go into lending and say, uh, huh, hey, Jacob, you've
got a perfect bloom credit score. We're going to lend
to you now.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
In the way that so far started out doings this
very narrow, like, oh, we'll lend money from alumni to
college students, and now they're just like a giant financial institution.
You're that, but for immigrants exactly that.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And so what we keep seeing is that people want
to have a good record.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Uh huh, you're their credit score. You're the immigrant credits,
we're the.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Immigrant credit score.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
And we have the largest data set in the UK
on immigrant communities and their financial behavior at present.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
How big is it? How big is it?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
So we're still tiny. We're thirteen thousand customers. We're very
very early stage. But the very interesting thing is no
one else has thought to do this before.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
And by the way, how many people do you reject
up front? How much of your you know, high payment
rate comes from figuring out beforehand who did not let in?
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Usually they wouldn't even have made it to be able
to join a circle. 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.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
How often does that happen?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Maybe one percent of the time. 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 because we can kind of take all of this
other data access around us and you know, you might
have a record good or bad elsewhere, but we can
(30:30):
connect those dots and then ultimately our goal is to
work with you know, the transunions. The experience the echo
fax is to actually help people build their credit scores
using bloom circles. Though it's not actually a credit product,
it is a behavior that people are already doing and
we're just formalizing it and digitizing it, and so it's
(30:54):
something that longer term will actually show us more valuable
insights into the financial behavior of our customers.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
What was something you tried that didn't work.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I'll be honest, it's the private circles. When we first launched,
we launched with private circles, and you know, in the
startup land, they say build it and they will come.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
So I was like, right here it.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Is the apps out were regulated.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Let's go and no one was transacting.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
It was I was I felt like I was running
into a brick wall, like, come on, why isn't anyone
moving money?
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Build it and they will come.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
And they were creating accounts, and they were registering and
connecting their debit cards, but they weren't joining or creating circles.
And I started to speak to people and just call
customers up or email them and say, you know, we
see you've registered. What's keeping you from going the next
step and actually joining a circle? And we heard a
(31:57):
lot of excuses. 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, 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. So
some of it was timing. But the most common response
(32:17):
that we got was I don't have enough friends.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Huh.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
And that was so so.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Interesting to me because I pushed them on that what
does that mean? What do you mean you don't have
enough friends? 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. So they
might say, you know, I want to put one hundred
pounds a month in, but my sister can only afford
to do fifty. And actually that's not enough for me.
(32:47):
I want to be able to do it with six
people and have six hundred pounds at the end of
it to make it really worth my while, right, instead
of maybe three hundred pounds.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
And I kept hearing this over and over and over.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Want them to know. Yeah, oh yeah, right, I don't
want them to know. That's interesting, and it was fascinating.
I don't want them to know that I'm going to
get one thousand pounds one month, because that'll exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And one of our team members, Asha, she comes from
an Usha Yemeny 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.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
And that was fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
It's kind of that's really interesting. Some of it was
just my anonymized finess finance. Right, This is like, no, no,
I don't want community finance. I just want finance.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
I just want finance.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
I want culturally resonant and I you know something we
understand and the behavior is done.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
But I actually but it is kind of an anti
communal vibe, right. It's like, I want my business to be.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Paradoxically exactly that. And nowadays it's fascinating 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, and that
tells us that that person probably was seeing if they
could trust us and if the money was going to
(34:22):
end up where it was supposed to before bringing in
their social group. So it was one of those things
where we launched with it, and yeah it didn't just
go gangbusters, but it taught us a lot about the
underlying behavior of our community. One of the things that
we found over and over again when we spoke to
(34:43):
customers is Okay, I have this money now, and I
don't know what to do with it. So I end
up sending more home and it ends up being like
a bonus for everyone back home, or I end up
buying something that ends up being useless and not something
that I actually need, and it's a waste of money.
So I want to know where I should put this money.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
And so now with.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Technology, what we can do is say, hey, Jacob, you
received five hundred pounds, why don't you put half of
that into a money market fund and actually grow your money?
Why don't you put it into a pension pot and
again have your money work for you and the.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
People are right there in your app when they get
the money right like that.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And so now we can just direct that flow of
funds and say, yeah, put it in this money market fund.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
Great.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yes, of course they're socioeconomic and geopolitical differences between us.
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 and help them build
financial resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is.
(35:54):
That's ultimately what we're driving towards.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Not to be crass after that high minded idea, which
I am a fan of, but like in that universe,
do you get essentially a commission from whatever money market
fund you're sending the people to, Like, what's the business
model for that time, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Exactly, So would be very much like your betterments of
the world, where you charge a management fee of some
sort and then we would just take that percentage off
the assets of your management.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
So in that universe, they're like coming to the blue
map to look at their money market fund exactly, and
you're not the money market fund, but you're You're where
they sort of.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Deal with exactly, and 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. You're going to have to send
money home, that's great, but why don't you also put
some aside for you or down the line.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
You know, my dad bought.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
A plot of land in India and built a house
for my late grandparents and his siblings. It's very common
for people from immigrant backgrounds to buy a plot of land,
build a house and that sort of thing. Well, imagine
a world where at Bloom you can also like manage
the flow of your funds so that the builders get
(37:18):
paid and everything, and you know, you have the money
to a mortgage to buy that plot of land, right,
And there's so many different directions that these things can
go where. It's very specific to straddling countries, if not continents, right,
But being of diaspora means that you are often one
(37:40):
foot on one continent and one foot on the other.
And so where the place that they can come? And
that's that's the grand vision.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Are you going to come to the US?
Speaker 4 (37:54):
I mean I am coming to the US. I'm an
American citizen.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Bloom It's an interesting one. Bloom money is serving immigrants,
and of course the United States is the largest market
for that to be a success. I think what I
find exciting about Europe is that we are largely becoming
a region of immigration across the European continent. And it's
(38:24):
something that people don't realize, or they do through a
political lens, but not through a financial services lens, and
so there's a huge opportunity. Whereas in the States it's
kind of written on the tin that we're a country
of immigrants, like that's literally how we started. And so
it's a bit more of an obvious problem, which means
there's a lot more players in the space. No one's
(38:46):
doing exactly what we're doing, but there's a lot more folks,
you know, specifically serving Latinos, right, So does.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
That mean you're going to Europe next?
Speaker 3 (38:57):
That is the plan, 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.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
So watch this space.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. Okay, Oh gosh. If
(39:42):
you could join a money club with any three people
living or dead, who would they be?
Speaker 4 (39:50):
I would join with.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Hmm, I would join with Emily Pankhurst.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
We love a suffragette queen. I would join with.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Benezir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi and there's me. So maybe I'll
add one more.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Uh. These are political political leaders who.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Happened to be and Mohammed Yunis, who is, like I guess,
the interim leader of Bangladesh right now, but he was
the founder of the Grimen Bank in Bangladesh and.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Has very much experimented.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
With roscas and how they can be used in developing countries.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
So yeah, those would be my few people.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
I feel like those people would all be good for it.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, I feel like.
Speaker 4 (40:48):
They'd be good for the money as well.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Although Emily Pankhurst, I don't know, she got up.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
She was, you know, pamphleting.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Women weren't allowed to have pockets because we would give
pamphlets out, you know, out stuff for death.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It's amazing how many women's pants still do not have pockets.
It's shocking to me.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
It is actually shocking, and I it's actually one of
the things that I look for from a fashion perspective
when I buy dresses.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Even I'm like, yes, pockets, pockets, it's.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
A useful technology. Pocket everybody, what's one thing written on
a post it note in front of you right now?
Speaker 4 (41:29):
Slow it down, Calm it down. Pressure breaks.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
And 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, like, applying
pressure through speed doesn't always help things, and sometimes it
breaks things and keeps a deal from happening because people
(41:56):
feel pressured.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
So slow it down, calm it down.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It's funny. I was thinking it was going to be
like make dentist appointment.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
I mean, I've got those too, but they're far less
they're far less deep Jacob.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I need you to I need you to think, Yes,
how did your parents talk about money when you were
a kid.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Definitely from a scarcity mindset. We were a family that
my father would like keep plastic bags and we very
much would like, you know, back in the nineties when
they used proper plastic for ice cream tubs, like those
would become tupperware for us to use until that thing
broke down. But I think it was always a scarcity mindset.
(42:44):
There's never enough, and everything was about scrimping and saving.
And my prom dress was thirty dollars from like I
think it was rass Or Marshals, and you know it
was I was always just taught that there was never enough,
and that has unfor actually affected me as an adult
because what is enough? And what is enough in your
(43:07):
emergency fund? What is enough to have in savings? What
is enough to have in your investment account? And it
becomes very difficult when you're trying to enjoy life as well.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Can you just go out to dinner and not worry
about it? Can you just order the fucking app Yeah, just.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Get the fucking latte, you know, like it's okay exactly?
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean I don't want to stereotype, but
I do feel like it's a classic immigrant vibe, Like
my grandfather was an immigrant, and that's how I always
that's how I came to understand that vibe. Yes, like
it's just people for a thousand years didn't have enough,
and so being in this world where it's like we're
(43:49):
doing great, that's not natural no to be to my family.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
I think it's something that to this day, my dad refuses,
our girl at home is full of just like crap
that doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, I have a box of cords that I'd like
to show you.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
And my dad he's got this one vacuum cleaner that
he bought from Costco. This thing caught like probably weighs
more than I do.
Speaker 4 (44:17):
And he refuses.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
I was like, I'm taking this to the dump, like,
no one is gonna buy this. He's like, no, I'm
selling it for two thousand dollars. I said, Dad, you
bought it for two thousand dollars from Costco and.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
This thing doesn't even work. You've got a Dyson. What
are you doing? But it really like this hoarding mentality,
when you.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Felt like you never had enough, it really sticks with
you so I'm trying to break the cycle now and hope,
hopefully I won't pass it down to any future children
I may have.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, it's complicated though, because like I sort of like it, Yeah,
at some level, you know what I mean. Like it's
a balance, right obviously, Like people do spend all their money? Yeah,
people do, you know, live beyond their means and so
you can in your head is hard. Equanimity is exactly everything.
Speaker 4 (45:06):
Moderation.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
There we go. Ninomo Hunty is the founder and CEO
of Blue Money. Please email us at problem at pushkin
dot fm. We are always looking for new guests for
the show. Today's show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel
(45:29):
Hunter Chang. That was edited by Alexander Garrison and engineered
by Sarah Bruguer.
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