November 20, 2025 • 45 mins
Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Bloom Money. Nina’s problem is this: How do you build an app to help immigrants manage their money?
On today’s show, Nina talks about bringing a saving and lending practice into the 21st century, navigating regulators who’ve never seen anything like it, and what global traditions can teach us about the future of money.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
By twenty twenty, Nina Mohunty 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,
(00:44):
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 (00:57):
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. It
just speaks to anyone. 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 was
(01:18):
going up to you know, nurses. 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
(01:38):
Sunny in Philadelphia where He's got the red string. And
I remember one day waking up and just looking at
this wall, and because I had just moved back to
the UK, I didn't have anything on my walls. It
was like a barely furnished flat and I didn't have
room for art on my walls because it was covered
(01:59):
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 xyz And so that was my
decor and that was ultimately what pushed me to start
my business Blue Money.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
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
(02:49):
me she hopes to build on this thousand year old
tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So the problem that I kept coming across is people
that are new to a country find it very, very
difficult to actually integrate into the financial system. And there's
a number of reasons for this. People might struggle to
get access to credit because they don't have a credit score,
(03:22):
and especially in the US 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
(03:42):
need car insurance most places. And if the financial system
doesn't know who you are, because there's no pay per
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
(04:06):
don't know what is available to me, and I struggle
to access other financial products. Okay, and when I do,
if I get to that stage where I know what
I want. I want a car loan. I can't because
I don't exist, I don't have a credit score. So
I'm going to just have a someone say well, computer
(04:29):
says no, there's no car loan available for you.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So okay, So this is the landscape that you're walking into.
What do you decide to do?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yes. 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
(04:59):
groups of people would come together and pull their funds,
often with 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
(05:21):
one person at a time within that group.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
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 yes, So so tell me specifically,
(05:50):
like how does erosca work? Right, old school before you
come along, old school.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
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 (06:03):
But this is true story. This is a truth just
so story. It's actually happening.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
This is actually happens. This is a true story. My
grandmother lived in a small village and she would choose
people from the village who she would see at market,
who she would see at the temple, who she knew
were trustworthy, to come together into this group. And she
would determine a set sum of money. So to make
(06:32):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:15):
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
(07:37):
so every month that would rotate until each person over
that ten month cycle had an opportunity to use that
one thousand rupees. 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
(08:01):
Taiwan and in China as well. We call it hui
which means association or hui kind of coming together in
an association. 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
(08:22):
working at the US Embassy in London. I met a
Jamaican man. He said, Oh, we do something just like this,
and we call it Pardna or Pardna hand. And then
I 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
(08:45):
was Somali 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.
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
(09:07):
generations for a thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Right, there's literally I saw a study that found evidence
of this in like Song China, which is truly like
a thousand years of mixture, 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
(09:32):
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 (09:43):
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 money, but also
(10:06):
just society in general. And there's a I believe he's Dutch,
a man named Hirtz Hofstetter, and he had this framework,
the hofstad Is framework of culture, and where every culture
has a different flavor to it. Obviously, but some cultures
(10:28):
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 (10:53):
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, yeah,
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
(11:15):
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
warm and fuzzy but also plausible virtue of the ROSCA.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I absolutely think this. 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,
(11:57):
there's a lovely facade 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.
(12:19):
But I definitely think that you're right that there's something
in trust or the lack of trust, especially if you
live in a country where maybe you do not trust
financial institutions, you do not trust your government for whatever reason.
I think that's probably why it's so prevalent in those areas,
more so than it is in the West.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, so you discover the rosca and you're gonna and
then what you're gonna build a rosca app I mean,
that's basically the move at that point.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
What really intrigued me about the rosca and as someone
who had seen it right with my own parents ing
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
(13:12):
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
(13:33):
across cultures. What was very interesting to me is everyone
has their own name for it.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, give me a list. You did a few, Like,
how many can you give me? If you just go
in one breath? Oh gosh, okay, on your marks, get
set ready, go, We've.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Got Tannine Mexico Consocio in Brazil. Partner or partner Han
in Jamaica, money Box in Saint Lucia, hegbad Ayuto in Somalia,
Ajo in Nigeria or is Susu depending on your tribek
Limba in Congo, Tontine in any Francophone African country. We've
(14:15):
got Committee in Bangladesh and Pakistan, panlu Wagan in Philippines,
Aisan in Malaysia, Hui or Hue in China, and Taiwan
Jungam in South Korea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
The list goes on very good. And I can say
I'm talking about video you were not reading now, you
were looking like up at the ceiling. That was truly
off the top.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yes, off the top of my head. 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. Depending on
(15:02):
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 Rosco's 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 join the
(15:25):
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. Right.
(15:45):
It tells me you're good for the money.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yes, that 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. You are
just reducing trust to the neighborhood. You're not going to
invite somebody who's gonna get a thousand bucks right now
(16:07):
and pay you back a thousand bucks over the next year.
You're not going to invite them if they are sketchy.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
No. Absolutely, And 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
(16:33):
are 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
(16:55):
tol tine as they call it in Francophone Africa, and
so people are underwriting their community.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
That credit score, gossip at the salon.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
It's the original, 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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Right, So okay, well you've got the thousand years. 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 3 (17:31):
Not easily, I'll tell you that much. I think 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,
(17:53):
and I've got a lot of pleasure out of building
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
(18:17):
invited them to try this web app. And what we
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
(18:38):
was collected and it was sent out to me when
it was time to receive the money. And so now
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
(19:03):
was actually very very challenging because there aren't many people
that looked 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,
(19:25):
it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending,
where it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
So it does feel a little bit like peer to
peer lending. That is not an That is not an
unreasonable thought, it's not at all.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
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. Then I had to go and face
(20:00):
the venture capital industry, and that was probably the most
daunting thing I've ever done to this day. Still. 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 dime a dozen in the
Silicon Valley. But it's very different just driving past and
(20:24):
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 pounds to do it. Right. But
I did that and it was very very daunting, very
very difficult. But it was one of those things where
(20:44):
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. And then from there we were off
to the races.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So how does it work? What's the thing you have now?
And how does it work?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, So the Bloom 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
(21:44):
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.
(22:06):
You 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 in
a private circle. That means you are in full control.
And this is the most faithful reproduction I guess of
what we have done for a thousand years. So it
(22:28):
can be my friends and family, it can be the
people at the mosque, whoever, right.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
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 (22:47):
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 issue 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
(23:07):
and the money is automatic 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 (23:21):
So a lot of you're basically the rails.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
You're the pipe exactly. 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, oh, I need to
get cash out or all those drama.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
That comes with that, and what do you charge?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
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
(24:00):
most of our volume is actually through what we call
community or public circles. And this is where people will
join fleet strangers in a circle. And that has been
fascinating to me because as someone that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Is wild, that's most of your business.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I would say ninety five percent of our circles are
pure strangers coming together in circles.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Is it like a well, what happens if somebody gets
all the money the first month and then bails and that.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Is exactly it. 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
(24:56):
coming back and 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 (25:11):
I mean I wouldn't let them back even if they asked,
if they cut it round and then said can I
come back? I don't think you should say yes.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
So we've not let anyone back in what we have
a rehabilitation program where people can start to like pay
back smaller sums because there.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Is or you can let them join, but they're the
ones who get paid last in the cycle. 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 (25:46):
We don't have insurance. And we make that very clear with.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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 (25:55):
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 (26:11):
Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn't.
Is that the secret of the contract, It truly is.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Because first we tried doing biometrics, so people would do
a selfie or you know, use face ID, or they
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.
(26:37):
You're a signature like on your phone phone 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, and yet
(26:59):
we have a ninety eight 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 (27:18):
Yeah, And just to be clear, this is people who
are just randomly assigned to a circle.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
They don't know the other people, they're not from the
same community, they don't live in the same neighborhood, whatever, exactly.
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 (27:37):
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 (27:47):
Especially in a you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
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 see 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
(28:13):
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 (28:21):
In the way that so far started out doing just
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 (28:32):
And so what we keep seeing is that people want
to have a good record.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Uh huh, you're their credit score. You're the immigrant credits.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
We're the immigrant credit score. And we have the largest
data set in the UK on immigrant communities and their
financial behavior at present.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
How big is it? How big is it?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
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 (29:04):
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 do not let in?
Speaker 3 (29:13):
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 backend 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 (29:30):
How often does that happen?
Speaker 3 (29:33):
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
(29:54):
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,
is a behavior that people are already doing and we're
(30:14):
just formalizing it and digitizing it, and so it's something
that longer term will actually show us more valuable insights
into the financial behavior of our customers.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
What was something you tried that didn't work.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
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
so I was like, great, here it is the apps
out were regulated, let's go, and no one was transacting.
(30:51):
It was I felt like I was running into a
brick wall, like, come on, why isn't anyone moving money?
Build it and they will come. 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
(31:12):
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 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
(31:34):
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 that we got was I
don't have enough friends.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
And that was so so 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. That's not
(32:10):
enough for me. 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. And I kept hearing
this over and over and over. I heard a lot
of people say, I don't want to be in a
circle with my friends and family because I don't want
them to know.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
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 And.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
One of our team members, Asha, she comes from an
usher 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. And that was
fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
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, I just want findance.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
I just want finance. I want culturally resonant. And I
you know, it's something we understand and the behavior is done.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
But I actually but it is kind of an anti
communal vibe. Right, It's like, I want my business to
be my business.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
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
(33:45):
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's it didn't
just go gangbusters, but it's 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
(34:06):
spoke to 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
(34:28):
put this money. And so now with 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.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
And the people are right there in your app when
they get the money right like that.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And so now we can just direct that flow of
funds and say, yeah, put it in this money market fund. Great. 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
(35:14):
resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is.
That's ultimately what we're driving towards.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
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?
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, 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 (35:48):
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 where they
sort of.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
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 gonna have to send money home.
That's great, but why don't you also put some aside
(36:16):
for you or down the line. You know, my dad
bought a plot of land in India and built a
house for my late grandparents and his siblings. 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
(36:39):
manage the flow of your funds so that the builders
get 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,
(36:59):
But being of diaspora means that you are often one
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 (37:13):
Are you going to come to the US?
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I mean I am coming to the US. I'm an
American citizen. 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
(37:40):
largely becoming a region of immigration across the European continent.
And it's 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
(38:04):
so it's a bit more of an obvious problem, which
means there's a lot more players in this. No one's
doing exactly what we're doing, but there's a lot more folks,
you know, specifically serving Latinos, right, So does.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
That mean you're going to Europe next?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
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. So watch this space.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. Okay, Oh gosh. If
(39:05):
you could join a money club with any three people
living or dead, who would they be?
Speaker 3 (39:13):
I would join with Hmmm, I would join with Emmeline Pankhurst.
We love a suffragette queen. I would join with Benezir
(39:33):
Bhutto in the ra Gandhi. And there's me, so maybe
I'll add one more. Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
These are political political leaders.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Who happen to be and Mohammad 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 has very much experimented with roscas and how they
can be used in developing countries. So yeah, those would
(40:07):
be my few people.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I feel like those people would all be good for it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, I feel like they'd be good for the money
as well. Although Emily Pankhurst, I don't know, she got up.
She was, you know, pamphleting. Women weren't allowed to have
pockets because we would give pamphlets out, you know, about
stuff for dead.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
It's amazing how many women's pants still do not have pockets.
It's shocking to me.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
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 even I'm like, yes, pockets.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Pockets, it's a useful technology. Pocket everybody, what's one thing
written on a post it note in front of you
right now?
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Slow it down, Calm it down, pressure brakes and that's good. Yeah,
that's just a reminder for me to not just speak
too quickly when I'm actually speaking to people. But also
just the course of business, like, applying pressure through speed
(41:14):
doesn't always help things, and sometimes it breaks things and
keeps a deal from happening because people feel pressured. So
slow it down, calm it down.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's funny. I was thinking it was going to be
like make dentist appointment.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
I mean, I've got those too, but they're far less
they're far less deep. Jacob, I need you to, I
need you to.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yes. How did your parents talk about money when you
were a kid?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
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 use 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
(42:07):
minds that 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 unfortunately affected me as
an adult because what is enough and what is enough
(42:30):
in your 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 (42:41):
Can you just go out to dinner and not worry
about it? Can you just order the fucking app.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, just get the fucking latte, you know, like it's
okay exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
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 yeah,
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
(43:13):
doing great, that's not natural. No family.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
I think it's something that to this day, my dad refuses.
Our garage at home is full of just like crap
that doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yeah, I have a box of cords that i'd like
to show you.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
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. And he refuses. 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 this thing doesn't even work.
(43:53):
You've got a Dyson, what are you doing? But it
really like this hoarding mentality when you 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 few your children I
may have.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Can it's in your head.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Is hard, Equanimity is exactly everything.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Moderation. There we go.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Ninamo Hunty is the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
Just a quick note, Whats Your Problem is gonna take
a break for the next couple of weeks and then
we'll be back with more episodes of the show. 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 Hunter Chang, who was
(45:01):
edited by Alexander Garretson and engineered by Sarah mcgharrett. I'm
Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another
episode of What's Your Problem.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
U
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
By twenty twenty, Nina Mohunty 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,
(00:44):
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 (00:57):
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. It
just speaks to anyone. 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 was
(01:18):
going up to you know, nurses. 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
(01:38):
Sunny in Philadelphia where He's got the red string. And
I remember one day waking up and just looking at
this wall, and because I had just moved back to
the UK, I didn't have anything on my walls. It
was like a barely furnished flat and I didn't have
room for art on my walls because it was covered
(01:59):
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 xyz And so that was my
decor and that was ultimately what pushed me to start
my business Blue Money.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
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
(02:49):
me she hopes to build on this thousand year old
tradition to eventually create an international financial powerhouse.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So the problem that I kept coming across is people
that are new to a country find it very, very
difficult to actually integrate into the financial system. And there's
a number of reasons for this. People might struggle to
get access to credit because they don't have a credit score,
(03:22):
and especially in the US 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
(03:42):
need car insurance most places. And if the financial system
doesn't know who you are, because there's no pay per
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
(04:06):
don't know what is available to me, and I struggle
to access other financial products. Okay, and when I do,
if I get to that stage where I know what
I want. I want a car loan. I can't because
I don't exist, I don't have a credit score. So
I'm going to just have a someone say well, computer
(04:29):
says no, there's no car loan available for you.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So okay, So this is the landscape that you're walking into.
What do you decide to do?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yes. 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
(04:59):
groups of people would come together and pull their funds,
often with 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
(05:21):
one person at a time within that group.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
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 yes, So so tell me specifically,
(05:50):
like how does erosca work? Right, old school before you
come along, old school.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
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 (06:03):
But this is true story. This is a truth just
so story. It's actually happening.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
This is actually happens. This is a true story. My
grandmother lived in a small village and she would choose
people from the village who she would see at market,
who she would see at the temple, who she knew
were trustworthy, to come together into this group. And she
would determine a set sum of money. So to make
(06:32):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:15):
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
(07:37):
so every month that would rotate until each person over
that ten month cycle had an opportunity to use that
one thousand rupees. 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
(08:01):
Taiwan and in China as well. We call it hui
which means association or hui kind of coming together in
an association. 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
(08:22):
working at the US Embassy in London. I met a
Jamaican man. He said, Oh, we do something just like this,
and we call it Pardna or Pardna hand. And then
I 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
(08:45):
was Somali 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.
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
(09:07):
generations for a thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Right, there's literally I saw a study that found evidence
of this in like Song China, which is truly like
a thousand years of mixture, 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
(09:32):
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 (09:43):
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 money, but also
(10:06):
just society in general. And there's a I believe he's Dutch,
a man named Hirtz Hofstetter, and he had this framework,
the hofstad Is framework of culture, and where every culture
has a different flavor to it. Obviously, but some cultures
(10:28):
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 (10:53):
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, yeah,
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
(11:15):
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
warm and fuzzy but also plausible virtue of the ROSCA.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I absolutely think this. 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,
(11:57):
there's a lovely facade 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.
(12:19):
But I definitely think that you're right that there's something
in trust or the lack of trust, especially if you
live in a country where maybe you do not trust
financial institutions, you do not trust your government for whatever reason.
I think that's probably why it's so prevalent in those areas,
more so than it is in the West.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, so you discover the rosca and you're gonna and
then what you're gonna build a rosca app I mean,
that's basically the move at that point.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
What really intrigued me about the rosca and as someone
who had seen it right with my own parents ing
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
(13:12):
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
(13:33):
across cultures. What was very interesting to me is everyone
has their own name for it.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, give me a list. You did a few, Like,
how many can you give me? If you just go
in one breath? Oh gosh, okay, on your marks, get
set ready, go, We've.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Got Tannine Mexico Consocio in Brazil. Partner or partner Han
in Jamaica, money Box in Saint Lucia, hegbad Ayuto in Somalia,
Ajo in Nigeria or is Susu depending on your tribek
Limba in Congo, Tontine in any Francophone African country. We've
(14:15):
got Committee in Bangladesh and Pakistan, panlu Wagan in Philippines,
Aisan in Malaysia, Hui or Hue in China, and Taiwan
Jungam in South Korea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
The list goes on very good. And I can say
I'm talking about video you were not reading now, you
were looking like up at the ceiling. That was truly
off the top.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yes, off the top of my head. 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. Depending on
(15:02):
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 Rosco's 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 join the
(15:25):
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. Right.
(15:45):
It tells me you're good for the money.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yes, that 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. You are
just reducing trust to the neighborhood. You're not going to
invite somebody who's gonna get a thousand bucks right now
(16:07):
and pay you back a thousand bucks over the next year.
You're not going to invite them if they are sketchy.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
No. Absolutely, And 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
(16:33):
are 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
(16:55):
tol tine as they call it in Francophone Africa, and
so people are underwriting their community.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
That credit score, gossip at the salon.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
It's the original, 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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Right, So okay, well you've got the thousand years. 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 3 (17:31):
Not easily, I'll tell you that much. I think 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,
(17:53):
and I've got a lot of pleasure out of building
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
(18:17):
invited them to try this web app. And what we
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
(18:38):
was collected and it was sent out to me when
it was time to receive the money. And so now
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
(19:03):
was actually very very challenging because there aren't many people
that looked 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,
(19:25):
it feels a little bit like peer to peer lending,
where it feels a little bit like crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
So it does feel a little bit like peer to
peer lending. That is not an That is not an
unreasonable thought, it's not at all.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
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. Then I had to go and face
(20:00):
the venture capital industry, and that was probably the most
daunting thing I've ever done to this day. Still. 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 dime a dozen in the
Silicon Valley. But it's very different just driving past and
(20:24):
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 pounds to do it. Right. But
I did that and it was very very daunting, very
very difficult. But it was one of those things where
(20:44):
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. And then from there we were off
to the races.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So how does it work? What's the thing you have now?
And how does it work?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, So the Bloom 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
(21:44):
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.
(22:06):
You 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 in
a private circle. That means you are in full control.
And this is the most faithful reproduction I guess of
what we have done for a thousand years. So it
(22:28):
can be my friends and family, it can be the
people at the mosque, whoever, right.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
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 (22:47):
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 issue 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
(23:07):
and the money is automatic 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 (23:21):
So a lot of you're basically the rails.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
You're the pipe exactly. 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, oh, I need to
get cash out or all those drama.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
That comes with that, and what do you charge?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
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
(24:00):
most of our volume is actually through what we call
community or public circles. And this is where people will
join fleet strangers in a circle. And that has been
fascinating to me because as someone that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Is wild, that's most of your business.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I would say ninety five percent of our circles are
pure strangers coming together in circles.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Is it like a well, what happens if somebody gets
all the money the first month and then bails and that.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Is exactly it. 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
(24:56):
coming back and 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 (25:11):
I mean I wouldn't let them back even if they asked,
if they cut it round and then said can I
come back? I don't think you should say yes.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
So we've not let anyone back in what we have
a rehabilitation program where people can start to like pay
back smaller sums because there.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Is or you can let them join, but they're the
ones who get paid last in the cycle. 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 (25:46):
We don't have insurance. And we make that very clear with.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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 (25:55):
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 (26:11):
Because people think it means something even though it actually doesn't.
Is that the secret of the contract, It truly is.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Because first we tried doing biometrics, so people would do
a selfie or you know, use face ID, or they
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.
(26:37):
You're a signature like on your phone phone 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, and yet
(26:59):
we have a ninety eight 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 (27:18):
Yeah, And just to be clear, this is people who
are just randomly assigned to a circle.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
They don't know the other people, they're not from the
same community, they don't live in the same neighborhood, whatever, exactly.
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 (27:37):
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 (27:47):
Especially in a you know, anonymized, distant, digitized way exactly.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
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 see 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
(28:13):
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 (28:21):
In the way that so far started out doing just
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 (28:32):
And so what we keep seeing is that people want
to have a good record.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Uh huh, you're their credit score. You're the immigrant credits.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
We're the immigrant credit score. And we have the largest
data set in the UK on immigrant communities and their
financial behavior at present.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
How big is it? How big is it?
Speaker 3 (28:53):
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 (29:04):
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 do not let in?
Speaker 3 (29:13):
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 backend 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 (29:30):
How often does that happen?
Speaker 3 (29:33):
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
(29:54):
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,
is a behavior that people are already doing and we're
(30:14):
just formalizing it and digitizing it, and so it's something
that longer term will actually show us more valuable insights
into the financial behavior of our customers.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
What was something you tried that didn't work.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
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
so I was like, great, here it is the apps
out were regulated, let's go, and no one was transacting.
(30:51):
It was I felt like I was running into a
brick wall, like, come on, why isn't anyone moving money?
Build it and they will come. 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
(31:12):
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 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
(31:34):
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 that we got was I
don't have enough friends.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
And that was so so 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. That's not
(32:10):
enough for me. 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. And I kept hearing
this over and over and over. I heard a lot
of people say, I don't want to be in a
circle with my friends and family because I don't want
them to know.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
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 And.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
One of our team members, Asha, she comes from an
usher 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. And that was
fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
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, I just want findance.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
I just want finance. I want culturally resonant. And I
you know, it's something we understand and the behavior is done.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
But I actually but it is kind of an anti
communal vibe. Right, It's like, I want my business to
be my business.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
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
(33:45):
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's it didn't
just go gangbusters, but it's 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
(34:06):
spoke to 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
(34:28):
put this money. And so now with 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.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
And the people are right there in your app when
they get the money right like that.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And so now we can just direct that flow of
funds and say, yeah, put it in this money market fund. Great. 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
(35:14):
resilience and wealth for themselves wherever their new home is.
That's ultimately what we're driving towards.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
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?
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, 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 (35:48):
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 where they
sort of.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
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 gonna have to send money home.
That's great, but why don't you also put some aside
(36:16):
for you or down the line. You know, my dad
bought a plot of land in India and built a
house for my late grandparents and his siblings. 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
(36:39):
manage the flow of your funds so that the builders
get 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,
(36:59):
But being of diaspora means that you are often one
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 (37:13):
Are you going to come to the US?
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I mean I am coming to the US. I'm an
American citizen. 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
(37:40):
largely becoming a region of immigration across the European continent.
And it's 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
(38:04):
so it's a bit more of an obvious problem, which
means there's a lot more players in this. No one's
doing exactly what we're doing, but there's a lot more folks,
you know, specifically serving Latinos, right, So does.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
That mean you're going to Europe next?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
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. So watch this space.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. Okay, Oh gosh. If
(39:05):
you could join a money club with any three people
living or dead, who would they be?
Speaker 3 (39:13):
I would join with Hmmm, I would join with Emmeline Pankhurst.
We love a suffragette queen. I would join with Benezir
(39:33):
Bhutto in the ra Gandhi. And there's me, so maybe
I'll add one more. Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
These are political political leaders.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Who happen to be and Mohammad 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 has very much experimented with roscas and how they
can be used in developing countries. So yeah, those would
(40:07):
be my few people.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I feel like those people would all be good for it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, I feel like they'd be good for the money
as well. Although Emily Pankhurst, I don't know, she got up.
She was, you know, pamphleting. Women weren't allowed to have
pockets because we would give pamphlets out, you know, about
stuff for dead.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
It's amazing how many women's pants still do not have pockets.
It's shocking to me.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
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 even I'm like, yes, pockets.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Pockets, it's a useful technology. Pocket everybody, what's one thing
written on a post it note in front of you
right now?
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Slow it down, Calm it down, pressure brakes and that's good. Yeah,
that's just a reminder for me to not just speak
too quickly when I'm actually speaking to people. But also
just the course of business, like, applying pressure through speed
(41:14):
doesn't always help things, and sometimes it breaks things and
keeps a deal from happening because people feel pressured. So
slow it down, calm it down.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's funny. I was thinking it was going to be
like make dentist appointment.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
I mean, I've got those too, but they're far less
they're far less deep. Jacob, I need you to, I
need you to.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yes. How did your parents talk about money when you
were a kid?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
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 use 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
(42:07):
minds that 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 unfortunately affected me as
an adult because what is enough and what is enough
(42:30):
in your 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 (42:41):
Can you just go out to dinner and not worry
about it? Can you just order the fucking app.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, just get the fucking latte, you know, like it's
okay exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
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 yeah,
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
(43:13):
doing great, that's not natural. No family.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
I think it's something that to this day, my dad refuses.
Our garage at home is full of just like crap
that doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Yeah, I have a box of cords that i'd like
to show you.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
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. And he refuses. 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 this thing doesn't even work.
(43:53):
You've got a Dyson, what are you doing? But it
really like this hoarding mentality when you 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 few your children I
may have.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Can it's in your head.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Is hard, Equanimity is exactly everything.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Moderation. There we go.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Ninamo Hunty is the founder and CEO of Blue Money.
Just a quick note, Whats Your Problem is gonna take
a break for the next couple of weeks and then
we'll be back with more episodes of the show. 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 Hunter Chang, who was
(45:01):
edited by Alexander Garretson and engineered by Sarah mcgharrett. I'm
Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another
episode of What's Your Problem.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
U
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