Fintech Impact

Jason Pereira talks to Rohit Mittal, CEO of Stilt. The company is an online lender that specifically targets immigrant and unreserved populations who have very specific challenges when trying to obtain debit and credit.

Episode Highlights

• 0.32: Stilt is a Fintech company focused on immigrants. When immigrants move to a new country, they don't have a credit history or credit score and it's very difficult for them to access financial products.
• 1.11: We are continuing to serve the immigrant population and recently we also launched a new product called Onbo, where we leverage all the infrastructure that we built at Stilt to help other companies serve their target markets, says Rohit. 
• 6.17: When we started the company, we said immigrants are not an exception, they are actually the policy for us. So, we build everything in our company focused on immigrants, says Rohit. 
• 7.52: All immigrants are stretching for is content that's helpful to them and they come to our site or blog pages and then they apply for a loan and then we apply underwriting model built specifically for this market, says Rohit.
• 8.40: Rohit talks about the efficacy of how his risk model working thus far because what he is saying is we can’t get access to Fico score but let’s compile other data into basically a different version of that.
• 10.31: The banks have the biggest balance sheet and so they do the most lending and they are still stuck in their old ways and it's very difficult for them to bring in new data sources to serve a new population. 
• 13.15: Immigrants first get to know about us in a non-financial context. They look at our content, they get to know about the company, they know we are legit, they become familiar with us and when they need financial products then they come to us and apply for a loan, says Rohit. 
• 14.48: We are seeing this infrastructure of lending that we have built is actually valuable to other companies who want to launch a lending product, says Rohit.
• 19.06: Rohit explains what happened in the modeling process or what data in the modeling process ended up being important?

3 Key Points

1. Rohit answers how he had discovered a problem in the market and decided to fix it and how Stilt was launched?
2. Different companies have used different types of underwriting methodologies to serve the customer segments that they are going after.
3. There are traditional lenders who want to expand their running capacity and there are people looking for other markets other under service verticals. Rohit talks about his target market.

Tweetable Quotes

• “The core of the idea to build Stilt just started with our personal experience of not being able to find an apartment in New York mainly because of my credit history.” – Rohit
• “The credit bureaus and the credit scoring agencies are also incorporating new data sources although but they're doing it very slowly as compared to Fintech.” – Rohit
• “You can actually launch a lending product in a few weeks with the infrastructure that we used to build Stilt instead of building everything again on your own.” – Rohit

Resources Mentioned

• Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn
• Woodgate.com – Sponsor
• LinkedIn - Rohit Mittal