Decoding Disruptors: Shivani Siroya, Founder & CEO of Tala

Welcome to Decoding Disruptors, a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast presented without interruption by Microsoft.Decoding Disruptors takes a deep dive into the minds of extraordinary women who have disrupted the narrative in their businesses, industries, and communities. Every conversation was filmed and is currently available at decodingdisruptors.com.This conversation is with Shivani Siroya, who built a near-billion dollar business on the back of a simple belief: people are trustworthy.After holding jobs with big investment banks and with the United Nations, Shivani recognized a global problem: almost a third of the world doesn’t have access to credit because they have no way to build a credit score.Without credit, people can’t get home loans, small business loans, life improvement loans. It’s difficult to progress personally or professionally.So she did something about it.Shivani founded Tala, a smartphone lending app designed to provide access to credit to two billion people who have historically been overlooked by traditional financial institutions.Taking advantage of increasing mobile phone use in emerging markets, the Tala app uses behavioral data on the phone – texting, merchant history, overall app usage – to build a credit profile.Based on the aggregated information, algorithms evaluate individual risk and provide instant loans to customers. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.