Ohad Samet is the Co-Founder and CEO of TrueAccord, a company using machine learning, behavioral economics and empathy to reimagine the debt collection process.
TrueAccord is a fantastic example of fintech’s most fundamental promise: using technology and a fresh perspective to create outcomes in financial services orders of magnitude better than traditional approaches, at a fraction of the cost.
Ohad is a seasoned fintech founder and executive. The first company he worked for was acquired by PayPal, where he worked for three years before founding a company that eventually exited to Klarna. He served as Chief Risk Officer at Klarna for three years before founding TrueAccord.
In this conversation, Ohad, Lex Sokolin and I discuss the ability of machine learning to create empathetic customer experiences, AI’s ability to be creative, expectations about COVID-19’s impact on consumer borrowers and the economy as a whole, and TrueAccord’s performance vs. traditional solutions.
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Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Ohad Samet and Lex Sokolin.
Full transcript:
Will Beeson:
Ohad Samet, welcome to Rebank.
Ohad Samet:
Thank you for having me. How’s everybody doing?
Will Beeson:
Doing great. And we have Lex Sokolin also. Hey Lex.
Lex Sokolin:
Hey. I continue to feel socially isolated.
Will Beeson:
Well that’s probably why we’ve stepped up the recording schedule to close to twice a week.
Lex Sokolin:
Yeah, no. I really need this. This is important to me.
Will Beeson:
Well, I’m glad we were able to connect with Ohad. I think I first came across Ohad’s story and TrueAccord in 2014, which feels like a long, long time ago now. And I remember when I first heard about TrueAccord thinking that this was the future of the world and how everything was going to work, it seemed like such a forward thinking approach to business. [inaudible 00:02:39] tell us the whole story. But fast forward six years and it still feels just as futuristic to me. It’s a huge pleasure, Ohad, to connect with you. I think you’re really a visionary founder and someone who’s been working on a massive problem using amazing tools. So Ohad, just quickly for context, can you introduce yourself and talk a bit about TrueAccord?
Ohad Samet:
Yeah, for sure. I started working in startups a decade and a half ago now. Always in machine learning for FinTech. First company I worked on was called Fraud Sciences. We did machine learning for fraud prevention in eCommerce. I was one of the employees who got acquired by PayPal in 2008. So, I worked for PayPal and then left. A few of my projects turn into companies. One of them was called Analyzed. It did machine learning for consumer credit underwriting. And that one got acquired by Klarna.
Ohad Samet:
And through that I became Klarna’s Chief Risk Officer, at the time Klarna pay after delivery company and now a global powerhouse in payments, was focused on the European markets and needed help with fraud prevention and underwriting and so on. I learned when I was there that historically, we would just focus on underwriting or making the fraud decision and so on. But there is a whole world in servicing.
Ohad Samet:
Because, especially you would credit granting the current snapshot when you underwrite the consumer. It’s about the current snapshot in the foreseeable future of their finances. But the longer the credit line lives, the longer external shocks in come into play or just things that happen in people’s lives. And if you don’t service debt, either performing or non-performing, you just don’t meet your numbers.
Ohad Samet:
And I approach it like any other problem that you would approach as a founder, as a technology executive, I tried to incorporate technology and found my vendors very resistant. This was the first time that I heard a common saying, “People collect from people.” Meaning only humans can do this. And I knew it to just not be true because a subject matter, expert based machine learning or expert based systems has been around for a while. At that time we’re already starting to do a better job than experts on the vast majority of cases. It just felt like a problem that like other problems that I’ve seen solved with machine learning could be solved.
Ohad Samet:
So when it was time for me to start another company, I looked around at the ideas that I had and just rethinking debt collection seemed like a very exciting direction. And it felt like while consumers in the market in general, were moving away from the old way of doing collections. I mean, consumers weren’t picking up the phone, regulators didn’t like the way collections was being done and were going to regulate that away. That was in the early days of the CFPB.
Ohad Samet:
So regardless of the industry wanted to change, it had to change. And so if we could build something that would be better than the way the industry did it, collect better, but do that also with high customer satisfaction, we’d be able to capture a large percentage of the market and really drive change both from a business perspective but also a societal change. Treat people better, treat them like customers, retain relationships and so on.
Will Beeson:
I think the reason that TrueAccord is such an amazing story and one that resonates so deeply is because you’re effectively using technology in a sense, in its purest form to do a job that traditionally humans have done and only humans have done. And that traditionally has been a challenging job and one that I think, broadly speaking, has kind of been an unpalatable both for individuals for the industry. What we’re talking about here is individuals who haven’t paid their debts and those debts need needing to be tracked down and collected.
Will Beeson:
You not only bring technology to bear here, but I think very importantly, and I think we can get into this, through technology, you create a more aligned, more positive, more constructive relationship between lender and borrower and actually trigger a bit of positive human psychology around helping individuals want to pay their debt back as opposed to continuing to fight, hide, seek to escape.
Will Beeson:
Which solves a hard problem in financial services, which is this fundamental misalignment in many senses between lender and borrower and it does it in an elegant way which prioritizes the humanity of the borrowers. I wonder if you could talk to specifically that question of empathy created through technology and why technology enables you to create that level of empathy whereas the human to human relationship didn’t.
Ohad Samet:
Yeah. This is a great question indeed. It’s the crux of why our solution works. I tell my team often, you can work in startups for decades and never work on capital D disruption. A company that really does something that really disrupts things that lives rent free and the head of its competitors that changes something fundamentally. And I’m happy that TrueAccord is something like that. I mean, dry cleaning is important and ad optimization is important. Those are things that happen in the world.
Ohad Samet:
But we’re focused on really making a difference and we’re proud of the work that we do. And we also, and this is one saying from Jeff Bezos that stuck with me, were also willing to be for very long time. I think we’re seeing a resurgence in understanding why we do what we do and why it’s important now among the tech community and the investment community. It’s not that no one has got it. I mean, we raised venture funding and we have a lot of clients and we’re pretty big.
Ohad Samet:
But it’s gratifying to see the thinking changing and people are starting to accept that this is an important piece of the puzzle. This is a long setup to talk about the issue. And the issue is that there’s a misperception of people in debt. Not to put you on the spot, but I think even in how you describe this now, there’s a little bit of a misperception. We often think of consumers in debt specifically or people in debt in general, even if it’s an SMB as one of two things, villains or victims, right? If they’re victims, they’re being harassed by the debt collectors, they should be left alone. It’s a horrible experience. And if they’re villains, they never intended to pay, they’re hiding, they are unscrupulous or in some way had a bad intent from day one or they have bad intent right now.
Ohad Samet:
And the reality is that debt is a mechanism that is very prevalent in our economic reality. It is something that every consumer is exposed to. And when consumers don’t pay it is often because of an externality, a divorce, losing their jobs, someone sick in their family, especially in the US where the healthcare system is so different than anywhere else. They had a personal issue that they didn’t anticipate. And many times when they don’t pay it is because they just don’t know how to approach the problem. They’re being attacked by multiple calls, by multiple contacts, they don’t have an easy way to match their cashflow to their actual obligations. The UX is pretty bad.
Ohad Samet:
We think about this as you go to your doctor and the doctor says, “Hey guy, you are overweight and you have to start working out or your cholesterol is going to kill you.” And you go to the gym and then the gym there’s the gym trainer and the job of the gym trainers to help you get your act together and come daily and work and lose weight and be healthier and so without alienating you. We think of ourselves as that gym trainer, right? We don’t judge you and we don’t want to alienate you and we want to work with you and want to help you work towards that goal.
Ohad Samet:
We want to do that in a way that will make you actually successful through technology and through the ability to give you that customization and tools to feel agency in the process of dealing with your debt. That’s the overarching approach of how we think about this that is different than what we’ve seen before. And when you look at the traditional industry the reason they have a hard time doing this is misaligned incentives. Many times dismiss conception that I was talking about, how would you perceive people in debt is prevailing in the lending teams themselves.
Ohad Samet:
They feel that people who don’t pay them don’t pay them intentionally. That drives sometimes what they expect of their partners in servicing the non performing debt. And there needs to be a back and forth saying, “Look, here’s the data and why this works.” So there’s a lot of convincing that we need to do. Sometimes that you don’t need to be aggressive in order to collect. And here’s the data.
Ohad Samet:
And the other element is that traditional collection agencies are basically telemarketing campaigns. They hire people for low base, high commission, they give them a list of phones. They call us those phones a lot. And their goal is to get the consumer on a cold call and convince the consumer to pay as much as possible on the call. Or they don’t meet their goals, the collectors don’t meet the goals and they don’t hit their targets. And maybe they don’t make enough money to feed their family that month.
Ohad Samet:
You can understand the best circumstances, this is not a good model. This is a model that encourages aggressive behavior and encourages abuse and is high friction. And indeed towards the end of every month, you see the number of complaints spike because collectors who are stressed about not making their goals start harassing consumers on an individual basis. And that is the issue. Backward technology, legacy systems, misaligned incentives, they all create a really bad ecosystem that you need a lot of energy to inject yourself from and to rethink. This is what we bring.
Will Beeson:
A really compelling story from the social dynamics and the product perspective. And I want to generalize it kind of one level up. Into a question that I think was very bright maybe a few years ago and I don’t know if it ever got resolved. You’ve been a machine learning AI practitioner and finance for quite a while now, earlier than many. And so for sure have encountered this question, which is, can AI be creative, can it be emotional? Can it do the work of emotional labor? And a lot of folks over the last decade have said things like, “You can use technology and digitization to automate processes and make things more efficient, I.E. Deterministic systems. But that’s not going to replace the human relationship between a financial advisor and their clients or a lender and the borrower.”
Will Beeson:
And there’s this barrier for human work. Arguably, the space your in requires more emotional labor than any of these other traditional examples, and yet it sounds like the core of the engine is multidimensional math and algorithms. And so can you tackle and maybe chew a little bit on this question of, do you think that AI and machine learning will be, in a general sense competing with people for these sort of like very human jobs? Or is there something different about who’s creating it or how you approach it that puts that question to the side?
Ohad Samet:
I think it really depends on the sector. I think we’ve seen people talk to Alexa on their Google home like a family member. So, I think it’s actually conceivable. I would not say that our application is similar to that. Specifically for us, look, we have a call center. It’s mostly a customer service center, meaning we don’t call people aggressively. It’s mostly about people call in or email in. They handle about 4% of our overall resolutions, meaning that people action to resolve their cases on their platform.
Ohad Samet:
That’s a percentage that obviously is shrinking, has shrunk over the years, continues to shrink. So there’s definitely a human element where someone is saying, “I need to talk to a person. I need help from a person. I need to be handheld through the process.” They talk to people who are well compensated and specifically trained to help them with their situation.
Ohad Samet:
But the reality is that for the vast majority of cases, at least in our world, and I think financial services in general, people don’t really want to talk to people. They want to feel understood, they want to feel like they have agency, meaning they can control what’s going on. They want to be contacted through their channel of choice and to the time of choice on their time of choice.
Ohad Samet:
More than 25% of our engagements are times when you’re not, from a compliance perspective, allowed to have a call center contact people. Late nights, weekends when people are free to think about it. They want to do it from their device of choice. More than 85% of our traffic is from mobile devices and tablets. They want to be in control and specifically in that they don’t want to be judged.
Ohad Samet:
So when we talk about machine learning and how it’s implemented, how it learns from the experts, first, our basic assumption is we’re not trying to trick people or manipulate them into paying their debt. We are trying to give them the best user experience possible for them to act on their innate desire to pay their debt. Which is by the way, shared by everyone. Nobody wants to be in debt. Again, this goes back to the villains versus victims dichotomy, which is absolutely incorrect. People don’t want to be in debt.
Ohad Samet:
So we start from giving them the best user experience and we customize it based on their responses. And yeah, machine learning has proven again and again that it is much better than humans at providing data driven, scalable, repeatable treatment for the vast majority of happy path use cases. Somebody wants to set up a customized payment plan if somebody wants to negotiate and so on, these are things that can be understood and structured and be delivered in a consistent way to a vast majority of people.
Ohad Samet:
And the other thing that we say, heartbeats, we have a patented engine that then makes all these decisions, doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get hungry, doesn’t get angry, it doesn’t fight with it’s a significant other and that takes it out on the first person they talk to in the office. It doesn’t get rattled on the phone if the person in debt who themselves can be very aggressive and in a distraught situation trying to deal with debt, tells them something out of line. And we keep forgetting this as humans, we have biases and we have our pitfalls. And that is why machine learning is able to replace a vast majority of human to human interactions that are around financial exchanges. Absolutely.
Will Beeson:
I mean that’s just a bright point because, I don’t want to analogize necessarily, but I think this is one of the points that’s massively misunderstood and there’s a kind of a Luddite reaction against AI either because people are afraid of the more bespoke or white glove or sort of emotional work that they do and they don’t want to lose their roles or they just think of it as a machine that’s calculating and so everything’s just like, if this then that, type of function. And the scalability of machine learning approaches into all sorts of these emotional tasks, we’ll see more and more of it. Just one more question on this point, which is you mentioned the 4% of the contact center and also you’ve mentioned that VCs and other constituents are understanding the theme more. What has been the progression over time of people really grokking that this is a meaningful approach? Like what’s the trend?
Ohad Samet:
I haven’t really plotted out necessarily a trend because I don’t view my job as a CEO as just spending time with investors all day long and trying to optimize in my evaluation and raising more money. I think a CEO’s job is different. I don’t have my finger on the pulse, but I can tell you that every time I went to the markets and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about raising money, here’s how we’re doing.” The reaction has been broadly more and more accepting. Maybe it’s a TrueAccord thing, right? Maybe it’s about being the leader in a segment, people saying that it’s true that a leader in each segment pulls ahead because it attracts the most funding, it attracts the best talent and so on. I think that’s true and we’re seeing that.
Ohad Samet:
But having said that, there has definitely been an immediate shift post COVID. I think the watershed moment was the first stay at home order in San Francisco. I think overnight almost, it felt like now we would go into a virtual room in this case and say this is what TrueAccord does and people would just nod and say, “Yes, we absolutely understand what’s going on.” And I think one, it’s a change of public perception of our situation and now looking at a recession.
Ohad Samet:
And two, an interesting thing with recessions is that they mostly introduce people who have never been in debt to being in debt. Versus pushing the subprime population deeper in debt because people in subprime consumers have always been in their own mini recession. I think that also hits closer to home and people start understanding that it’s something that’s relevant to maybe them or to a family member or so on. You talked about the empathy. I think the empathy has spread more and I think it’s very healthy in general.
Will Beeson:
Can you, Ohad, talk a little bit… You mentioned Covin 19, you mentioned the current situation, can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing immediately and how you expect this to impact your business?
Ohad Samet:
Yeah. From what it looks like from the outside and just the reading reports in the industry, it seems like the vast majority of lenders gave very aggressive payment vacations to debtors, to consumers who hold lines with them, while at the same time really limiting credit as much as possible. The third element here is that stimulus checks came in and people have actually used them to pay debt. I mean we’ve seen an explosion in debt payments in the past month and I expect that to continue for a while more. Especially because unemployment is more than 100% replacement of minimum wages in many States in the US. So I expect that to continue to some extent and I think lenders have seen that as well. So everyone is kind of in a wait and see situation.
Ohad Samet:
But this is not going to continue forever. Unfortunately, we’re in the middle of a recession. I wish that was not the case. As we reopen countries, we will discover that demand has really receded not because people were at home, but because they feel a lot less confident about their financials. And people have lost their jobs and that is going to severely impact our ecosystem in general. For us, what we’re going to see this first and foremost is in a shifted digital with our current clients.
Ohad Samet:
I can’t talk to specifics with clients but we’re definitely hearing, “Hey, my call center based servicers and so on are just in very low capacity. It’s impossible to manage a large call center working from home we’re very difficult. We’re going to divert more volume, more work to you.” Which is step number one, part of their business continuity plan. Step number two, as those planned vacations start to roll off in Q3, we’re starting to see a lot of demand for early stage treatments to help consumers think about default management and how to stay ahead of their credit lines that are performing.
Ohad Samet:
And probably call it to three to nine months from now, we’ll start seeing an explosion. And a post charge off servicing and collections. And all the while we’ll see consumers asking for help dealing with multiple debts with other aggressive collection agencies and stuff like that. We try to touch each and every one of these aspects of the consumer’s experience in dept collection.
Will Beeson:
This is quite the opportunity for you guys. It’s like the lender who launches in a bull market and then deals with the downside of a recession. The situation is kind of the opposite for you guys. You’ve been operating in a benign environment, largely I think since you launched. And this is potentially a phenomenal opportunity make a huge impact not just for your customers, but for, as you say, an increasing number of people who are working hard to repay debts.
Ohad Samet:
Look, our North star metric is according to the CFPB, 77 billion consumers each year in the US that debt collection touches, that are impacted by debt collection, what percentage of those consumers interactions do we touch, as TrueAccord, through one of our products? Our goal of course, is to reach 100. We want to be able to facilitate people peace of mind and ability to handle their debt when they’re ready in a way that works for them and gives them agency and makes them successful. We’re certainly not in 100%. But even before COVID hit, investors would ask me or people would ask me, “How are you thinking about the growth of the company?”
Ohad Samet:
We’ve been growing at a very good clip because we’re not 100% of the debt market or debt collection market. And even in high times, people unfortunately fall into debt because stuff happens. Life happens to us. If you ask me, I would rather not have COVID, I would rather not have a recession. If I could snap my fingers and make this all go away, I would. But given that it’s here and people need help, absolutely. We’re available, we’re growing, we’re helping one more financial institutions, consumers that come directly to us, to deal with this incredibly unpleasant situation.
Will Beeson:
Can you talk a little bit about the, you mentioned one of the key metrics you track, but some of the other metrics you track and how your performance compares to some of the traditional approaches to debt collection?
Ohad Samet:
Yeah, absolutely. And without getting too technical in early stage collections you think about your cure rates, meaning what percentage of people just pay their amount in default, the outstanding amount and go back to just paying on their performing loan or credit card. You also measure roll rates between buckets. Meaning what percentage of people are just continuing to later and later delinquency and eventually into charging off their accounts.
Ohad Samet:
And there we’ve seen tremendous success. I mean a 50% drop in roll rates. Meaning just basically 50% of the people who previously would go into later delinquency have not and 20% to 30% improvement in cure rates. So vast majority of these people have been going back to paying their debts on time. That’s pre COVID. I think that’s going to change now, but generally just that’s just compared to business as usual with some of our clients that have worked with us there.
Ohad Samet:
In stage collections. We compete with those traditional servicers. The two ways that we’re measured is one, in what’s called liquidation rate. The dollars collected out of dollars placed, post charge off. And the complaint rates, how many people complain? Interestingly, not on NPS or C-SAT, although it’s something that we measure. And in the liquidation rate, we’ve seen liquidation rates 50% higher and sometimes seven times higher than the benchmark. Meaning if a regular collection agency would collect a 10%, we would collect 15. If they would collect a 50%, we would collect 75.
Ohad Samet:
And complaint rates have been a fraction, probably less than 1% of the number of complaints that the traditional agency would get. And when we say complaints, I mean it’s even someone sending an email and saying, “I didn’t like the way this email sounded.” We take this very seriously. Really, customer care and user experience are top of mind for us. So it’s been tremendously successful across the board. And with COVID, it’s going to really accelerate.
Will Beeson:
One, one way to think about what you’re doing. And this is maybe a little bit boiling the ocean, but I kind of think about, there’s lots of premium services to help wealthy people deal with their financing and with their finances and planning, trust structuring, all that stuff. And that’s where wall street was focused. The first wave of FinTechs brought a lot of that down to the mass affluent or the retail segments where you’re looking at lower minimums but still primarily planning for the future and retirement and how best to get to a goal and stuff like that.
Will Beeson:
And then now, we also have folks like they’re different companies but Chime and Moneylion and all this sort of like embedded credit stuff, which is helping people who are still liquid but are trying to extend their spending power, maybe when they shouldn’t. And you’re helping people who are in more trouble than that, so who are sort of one credit quality step down from there. I guess I have two thoughts.
Will Beeson:
One is the social problem that the average American has whatever it is less than two weeks of savings or $400, I’m not sure what the number is. And then the corollary that the answer from most providers has been credit. Just give people more ways to borrow and that’s going to be the answer. What is the magic sauce for sort of solving the broad economic issue? Is it financial literacy? Is it planning? Like what do you do because it’s a really difficult issue.
Ohad Samet:
It is. Look, first, to clarify something when you look at what the previous recession basically created or really boosted up the debt consolidation industry. Anyone from Funeral Financial, through Lending Club, Prosper, all of these loans went to debt consolidation. And when you think about who took those loans, those were not 570 credit score, payday lending, or maybe they were borrowing from payday lending as well, people without a job or so on. We’re talking about people at 650, making 50,000 to 75,000 a year trying, to consolidate their loans.
Ohad Samet:
Credit and debt are a lot more prevalent than people think and debt collection impacts a lot more people than people think. It’s just there’s a lot of shame connected with it. I like a saying, I forget who said that. I think it was Justin Kan, lately at Atrium. He said, “First time founders obsess about product, second time founders obsess about distribution.” I’m not a first time founder and so I obsessive about distribution and I think that a vast majority of the issue here is that there are many, many good ideas for helping consumers deal with debts, not through borrowing more, but through thinking about their budget, through thinking about what to pay first and last, how to measure cash, how to interact with collection agencies, what to do when they get a summons, how to protect from a garnishment.
Ohad Samet:
A lot of issues that we don’t necessarily think about on a daily basis and that actually some very smart people have tried to help with and their problem is that none of these business models, because we’re talking about consumers who owe not a lot of money can support paying tens of millions of dollars to Facebook to acquire consumers at scale. Distribution is the issue. How we reach those consumers with those great ideas is a big issue. And that is where we enjoy an advantage because as counter intuitive as it sounds, TrueAccord is now a brand for consumers and debt.
Ohad Samet:
Consumers in debt who are faced with servicing by TruAccord, they’re not happy because they’re in debt and it’s a horrible situation to be in, but they can research us online and they can say, “Oh, these guys are serious. These guys have 4.8 stars on Google, believe it or not.” They will likely treat me fairly and I should engage with them. And that starts from them saying, “Well, if I have a dollar, I’m going to pay TruAccord and not those two other, excuse me, jerks who are harassing me on the phone.”
Ohad Samet:
And it continues into them saying, “Well, I like this experience so much. Maybe TrueAccord can help me with the other facets of my financial existence.” And we’re not the only ones in this position. There are others that maybe have that exposure to consumers who can use help, but we’re definitely one of the only ones, maybe the only one whose DNA is centered around helping consumers deal with debt from a process perspective and a relationship management perspective. And so, we think that our ability to help consumers and reach them at scale without having to pay Facebook to communicate with them, gives us a competitive advantage just to build those relationships going forward and help consumers with a lot more than the individual debt they were servicing.
Will Beeson:
If we take a step back and think about the broader implications of COVID-19 and the recessionary environment that we’re entering. I know, Ohad, you I think prior to a recent CFPB restructuring, did some advisory work with them. I wonder what you’re thinking about, what you’re looking at as you see the approaches that the public sector is taking to helping support consumer and small business financial positions into this recession and what metrics you’re watching in terms of how this recession plays through and what the eventual impacts on consumers are.
Ohad Samet:
I don’t think anyone is going to argue with the assertion that this is going to be devastating for at least a couple of years and that nobody really knows the extent of the damage yet. We don’t know what’s going to happen once businesses open up. We don’t know how much of the drop in demand has been because of the stay at home orders and how much of it is because of the concern about contracting COVID-19 or becoming a lot more traditional and defensive with your finances. We don’t know any of that.
Ohad Samet:
And I’m thankful that I don’t need to make those decisions and public policy because a lot of them seem, to me, impossible. It makes complete sense to me that policymakers are being very defensive and trying to limit damages and limit negative evolutions while the waiting and seeing. For example, many States have stopped lawsuits and debt collection. I’m talking from my perspective, but stopping lawsuits in debt collection, stopping wage garnishments, a lot of motions that makes complete sense. While we try to figure out what’s going on.
Ohad Samet:
I would be hard pressed, I think anyone would be hard pressed to say, this is what’s going on or this is what will happen, other than say there’s a huge damage to the economy and as we start reopening, we’ll discover how bad it is. I personally am tracking loan provisions at large financial institutions, credit line utilization, credit line availability, new card issuance and default rates and roll rates across reports from public companies and other reports to just understand what’s going on? What’s their paying behavior like? How are consumers acting?
Ohad Samet:
We are only in the first act of this thing. We do not know what the second act or we don’t even know how the first act is going to end and what the second act is going to include. On the optimistic side, on the hopeful side, I think that from a startup or from a FinTech perspective, this shock will clean out a lot of distractions, a lot of focus on, in my opinion, unhelpful kind of lending or helping people spend situations and we’ll focus on smart people on helping people save, helping people manage their finances, helping people manage their debts. And I welcome that.
Ohad Samet:
I think we need more innovation there. I think we need to think about the suffering population in the US and how we help them. I think we need to figure out a check cashing. I think we need to figure out an alternative to payday lending that is more effective for consumers. I think we need to figure out a ladder of structured financial products that allow consumers to build credit and build their financial position. And just by virtue of many, many, many people unfortunately being in a situation where they do need help, I think we’re going to see a lot of innovation. And I’m really excited for that.
Ohad Samet:
I gave a talk about that a few years ago at Bank Innovation. I really recommend that people read the Unbanking of America, by professor Lisa Servon. She was also in the consumer advisory board. There’s a lot to be learned. There’s a lot to do and it’s exceptionally interesting. By the way, third resource, the FinTech newsletter from Andreessen Horowitz also a really good source to look at. There are smart people there, Alex Rampell, Angela Strange, that you want to listen to, thinking about this problem a lot and thinking about possible solutions.
Will Beeson:
Excellent. Well, Ohad, again a great pleasure to connect. You and TrueAccord do amazing work. Congratulations on everything you’ve built so far and all the best going forward. I think we’re going to look back in a few years and have watched you guys continue to rise. Lex, thanks for making time. Thanks for joining. Always good to connect.
Lex Sokolin:
Absolutely.
Will Beeson:
Ohad Samet and Lex Sokolin, thank you very much for joining us today.
Ohad Samet:
Thank you for having me.