488. Tamara Laine

Email: bidemiologunde@gmail.com

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde sits down with Tamara Laine, founder and CEO of MPWR, to explore how AI, alternative data, and mission-driven fintech can expand credit access for gig workers, women, and underserved communities. How do we rebuild a credit system that was never designed for today's workforce? What does ethical AI look like in real financial decisions, and how can founders scale businesses that create both profit and lasting impact?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Thank you for joining me once again on another episode of the Big Picture Podcast. I have a special guest from Boston. Over to you.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

So good to be here. I'm thrilled to talk about technology and the intersection of humanity and technology.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

Nice, nice. So you hmm, where do I even start from? Was there a specific moment you realized that the traditional credit system does not understand gig workers or non-traditional earners?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

I mean, I wish I would have understood this earlier because I was, you know, a freelancer and gig worker in my early career, didn't really realize how the system wasn't, you know, how I wasn't operating in the system. The system wasn't operating for me. Um, when I really discovered the kind of vast difference between how W-2 earners and kind of the traditional economy is treated within the financial system. And the new economy was what I call it, which is gig workers, creators, Gen Z. Um it it was a stark, you know, shock to my system to say, whoa, this is how this is how it's happening. This has to change. And I mean, then you let the numbers be for themselves when over half the labor force is made up of this community of people. Um, you realize, wow, not only does this have to change, but what a missed opportunity. Right. Like this, this is something that is is huge. And people who are starting to work in that will see like this, the new economy is what we really need to look towards.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Right, right. So that led you to create or found empower spelled M P W R. Um, what's what's your simplest answer if someone should ask you, well, what is empower? How would you describe that in very simple terms?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Well, I started with I wanted it to be empowered because I wanted to be empowered your money. But what is empower in the most simple terms? We are an agentic ecosystem for lenders to create um products and services and service the I say the new economy. It's really for everyone, but it helps them service the new economy.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Nice, nice. Thank you for that. And for me, coming from an immigrant background, I had to learn not so many things, but I had to learn some key things about the financial system in the US. So I came initially as a student in grad school, and of course, every grad student is broke. And I had to learn a few things about not rushing to get credit cards, and then I had to learn everything about the credit score system, and then I had to learn about well, not missing payments would help you in the long run, both short and long run, much more than how much you hold to the credit card companies. So I was like, hmm, okay, and then I had to learn all about the minimum payment thing, and I was like, okay, what if I make slightly more payments every pay period? ETC, e to see. So what is the hidden cost of being credit invisible? So there's something I was reading about when I was reading about you, and you talked about being misscored, basically getting the wrong score, and being outrightly credit invisible. So, what does those two things entail? And what is that hidden cost of miscoring and just being invisible in general?

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Well, let's just say being credit invisible, um, the the thin file borrowers, it's a trillion dollars in the economy that's being missed, right? So what or more? You know, like it's it's a little bit hard to calculate, but like those, those are some of the estimates. Um the hidden cost to a person who is unable to get credit or capital is I mean, that's the difference between being able to start a business and not. That's the difference between being able to get a house and not, right? We're not talking about, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have something? The difference between having good credit and not in some of these cases are completely life-altering things. Um, I've spoken to massage therapists that are, you know, independent contractors who weren't able to get home loans. And these are people that are making good money. So these aren't, you know, even risky bets. This is just a miscalculation of someone's worth and how they work now. So the cost of it is great on the individual level. The cost of it is tremendous on the economic scale of missed opportunity. Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

So for some context, um, if you a lot of the people listening to this are probably knowing about you for the first time, so you're actually an Emmy winning journalist. So not to not to, you know, you're you're being humble about it. I've read about you and I I know some of the things you've done. What in your reporting days trained you to become an entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Oh gosh, I feel like all of it trained me to become an entrepreneur as a journalist. You know, um, I was a journalist that was out in the field a lot. And so it meant that I had to go get, I had to find stories, I had to deliver stories, I had to do things out on my own, um, turn them, create them into a package and deliver it so that people would take action. Um, and so that in itself, being highly independent and being like taking a project, if you think of a story as a project from beginning to end, um continually over and over again, I mean, that's that's what you do as an entrepreneur. I think one of the superpowers it gave me to lead as an entrepreneur uh was the ability to talk to anyone and to find people that I needed to get in touch with and get in front of them and get them to speak with me. Because now as an entrepreneur, that is one of the most valuable things that you know you can you can have or you can do. Um, as an entrepreneur, you're usually the one-man sales team until you start scaling and that ability to say, I need to, you know what, this is the person that I think is gonna help. And then to actually reach them. I mean, when it's come to getting mentors and advisors for my companies or advice on something, that single skill, it's a skill, the single skill that I learned by doing that has helped me immensely.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Nice, nice. And that's something I can definitely relate to because I've learned so much talking to different guests from different backgrounds. And one common theme, one of the common themes is you have to be able to sell yourself in the form of the ideas you have so that you can convince people to buy into your vision and either fund an idea you have or give you advice along um the direction you want to take, and so on and so forth. So thank thank you for sharing that. And along those lines, what are some habits that you had to unlearn along the way?

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Oh, that's a great question, uh question. Habit that I had to unlearn along the way. Um I think I don't know if this is quite a habit, but it's a mindset that I had to unlearn or twist how I thought about it. Um, and it's interesting, I was just thinking about this. So in my early, in my 20s and my my early 30s, you know, failure or being wrong was such a big deal. It was like a earth-shattering thing to me and my ego. Um and it would take me a long time to get over. It caused a lot of stress, a lot of, you know, reaction, and and even, you know, getting upset with other people who maybe gave me feedback. Now I see failure or being wrong as part of the journey. It's it's not something that upsets me anymore. It's just something that I expect along the way if I'm trying to do something really hard. And that's changed the way that my stress reaction, right? That's changed the way that I interact with people, that's changed the way that I take risk. Um, because it's a it's such a healthier perspective on how you grow as a human, how you grow with your network, how you grow with your business. If you expect everything to be perfect, and if you expect not to upset anybody along your journey, and if you expect never to step and fall, um, then you aren't taking the risk that you need to get to the big dreams that you have. That's just the reality of it. So if you change your mindset, the journey is so much better because you're gonna slip, you're gonna fall. The only difference is if you're if you've got that risk or like um what it's scarcity mindset, you're not gonna take the big risk to win big.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

Wow, wow. If you have a scarcity mindset, you're not gonna take the risk to win big. Wow, that is so profound. And I have a painting in the house that says mindset is everything, it has a picture of a cat, but then the cat's shadow is a lion. Yeah, so basically describing the fact that well, the cat thinks it's a lion, and well, the cat is a lion. So yeah, exactly. So you've covered um ethical AI, and when you covered ethical AI, what are some of the things you learned that most people still misunderstand about AI in high-stakes decisions, especially high-stakes financial decisions?

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Oh, loaded question. Uh let me let me think about this for a second. So, what what is it that most people don't understand with high stakes decisions and AI at the moment? Hmm. Well, one, uh one, I think people see so there are totally different stages of AI. There's different levels and tiers of AI, right? You have your your LLMs, which are really, you know, they're incredible, but they are search engines. They're smarter search engines. Um, and then you have your kind of like introductory agents, which those are the ones that people are getting that like write my emails, schedule things on my calendar. Um, and then you have, well, I I say agentic AI, right? These are agents that can do multiple tasks. And so I think what people are really, and this doesn't really get to the high stakes question yet, but where I'm trying to change a mindset is um just because you're using perplexity does not mean that you're leveraging AI. Right. And so when you think about what you're doing with your your technology and how you're letting AI help you, um, you have to start thinking of it as it should be taking tasks and automating things, right? And right now it's gonna be a combination of tasks and automation in order to really make it seem like there's something taken off your shoulders. Um, but when it comes to like financial, financial decisions with AI, because we're we're gonna we're moving towards that, right? We're moving towards AI being in everything. And obviously, I'm creating AI for lending and lending service. Um you have to be so certain about compliance and regulations. It should just be at the top of your mind. And a lot of people ask me, like, how do you feel about you know regulations and AI? And I'm I am one of the proponents that says, good, you need them because that way startup founders know the parameters that they need to create in. Uncertainty is terrible for in innovation. Uncertainty is terrible for funding. That, you know, like being in a the state of uncertainty really hampers the startup community. And so I'm in a highly regulated space. And so that helps me create age like AI agents that actually solve a problem and help people in a way that is safe and secure. And that's how we should look at some of these things that could be transformative in your life, right? If something has the capability to handle some of your finances, finances, it should be regulated and secure, right? Because you don't want to be in a place where something bad can happen. And so if it's something that's critical to your ability to thrive, you need to be making sure that you're incredibly safe about who you're placing that, you know, gift of your finances, of your time, of your health, right, into. Um, there's a really interesting study that came out about healthcare, um, how people interact with LLMs and health-related questions. And I think I might get the statistic wrong. So double check me on this. So I'm just gonna give you kind of the the big picture on it. Was um what they found was the LLMs were not correct in every decision that they made. What was good was that people felt comfortable to ask the question to the LLM where maybe they wouldn't have asked someone in person. So even though they weren't getting the right answer, um they were being proactive about trying to solve a problem. And what they found then was that these LLMs be need to be more proactive about pointing people into the the direction of how to get an answer, not just, you know, giving a false answer and then kind of letting it be, right? Um so so that's the sort of thing we need to really be thinking about. There's not exact answers yet, but we're in a new frontier of really critical things and very critical issues like health and finances being now on the table for um for people to try and fit into their life. I ramble a little bit again there, but I hope that's not a good idea.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

No, no, no, no, no. I was able to actually grasp because it's something I personally struggle with regarding how we should start incorporating, of course, everyone now is incorporating AI into their lives, whether they want to or not. It's right there. Your phone now has capabilities. You go to Google, and Google is giving you an AI-based answer first, and then you have to scroll all the way down to start seeing the answers you are used to seeing on Google. And your doctor's office is the same thing. It's getting to the point where doctors are now asking you, well, based on this scribe assistant, the doctor just entered all your symptoms into the doctor was going to prescribe one type of antibiotics for you, but then the AI assistant is recommending a different one that is gonna be more impactful in code because, well, AI is assisting the doctor. So all of this is getting to the point where, to your point, we should treat this as a wise grandma who is going to give us advice that we actually need to make us more efficient, more productive, not just give us the shiny new answer that would keep us using the app. Because most of these platforms they want to keep you using the app. You ask a question at the very bottom, is telling you, Well, should I provide a PDF? I'm like, no. I just needed an answer. Now you're asking me, do you want me to provide a slide deck or a PDF?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, but you want parameters on it, right? You want safe, you want some safety. You want, like, I am obviously a huge proponent of freedom of speech because that's what I fought for for a long time in my career. But with great responsibility, uh, or sorry, with great um freedom comes great responsibility. And so as we create technology, we need to have that responsibility on our shoulders to make sure that we're creating it so that people can thrive.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

Right, right. And one more thing in your storied career is the fact that you've actually investigated trafficking cases.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Which is something we may or may not have in common. And uh yeah. So along those lines, um of course, we all know trafficking cases sit at the very intersection of vulnerability, systems, how systems fail entire groups of people, and so on. How did that phase of your career shape your view of financial inclusion? Because we all know money is one way to control victims.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

So, such a a great and also loaded question, because I feel like we could be here for a long time. So let me first start with um trafficking is a really broad problem. So there's there's human trafficking for labor, there's human trafficking for sex, there's human trafficking for um, you know, there's children exploitation. Um there's there's all sorts of human trafficking. Um, and all of it is absolutely terrible, and all of it does come down. There's an economic undertone to it. But when we think about it here in the US, we just think usually of sex trafficking. And so what we need to do is we really need to broaden our spectrum of what human trafficking is. Um, the expose that I did focused on New York and it focused a lot on sex trafficking and child exploitation. We didn't focus so much on um the labor implications of human trafficking. So that's why I kind of wanted to caveat like there's so much to this to talk about. Um, but when we when we look, I I talk to a lot of survivors, and there's different reasons, and there's there's different, everyone has a different story, but there is a commonality of um financial crisis that underlies a lot of the cases. And um and there's also again, I'm trying to, I'm not I'm trying to underst to relate that there are individual cases for everything, but um when we talk about the the global victims that that are the majority, it's coming out of systems of oppression. And so how do we how do we create new systems so that that's not the case that people may feel like they are pushed into situations that are unsafe and unhealthy so that they can make money, right? By either force of situation or um or thinking that they're being you know tricked into something that turns out to be untrue. Um that's a struggle, that's something that I still struggle with, right? I would say the reason that I started MPower when I started thinking about it was how do I get a excluded group of people into the financial system? Because if you can get into the financial system, um, your opportunities explode, right? You get better rates for borrowing money, you get better rates for for everything. So, and that's what brings prosperity is the ability to access money for cheaper rates. Um so that's that's why I started it. How do we change these global systems? That have oppressed people and communities globally. Oh my God. I don't know. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 23:07

I mean So I mentioned how we may or may not have trafficking investigations in common. And that's part of my consulting for law enforcement agencies in 28 states across the US. And one common theme is well, most times these victims are transported long distances away from home, usually from a different country. And a lot of people think South American countries, well, they can come from as far away as Eastern Europe in some cases. And then they get to the US, and of course, they are not given access to any phones, not given access to even gift cards. Everything they do is at the mercy of whoever their handler is. And along those lines, they learn to, I guess, hustle cash for themselves. And of course, they don't have the good amount of paperwork to even have access to maybe even a payday loan or bank or even the online banks that you can do everything online. No. So it's one thing to have the community and society and whoever it is advocating for these victims. And law enforcement can only do so much because law enforcement is even focused on stopping the trafficking. Maybe there are entire, yeah, maybe entire agencies need to then step up and say, Well, these people are being trafficked. Sometimes they show up as people selling solar panels, but you don't think to see them as victims because you're like, okay, well, they're selling solar panels door to door. Some of those solar panel salespeople could be trafficking victims. But you wouldn't think to go that far because, well, they look well put together. They're wearing the polo shirt of the solar panel company. They're coming to knock on my door. I'm like, no, I don't need a solar panel. But sometimes they're trying to communicate something to you saying, help me, help me. But we're too because anyway, that's a rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Yeah, you I mean, you're right. And I that's where I started, and maybe I rambled a little bit. Um but that it's not, it's not the singular problem that I think most Americans jump to when you hear trafficking. It it is such a broad problem with so many different layers to it, that um it's so big. It is such a gigantic so and I'm glad that you're working on that because I mean I just did an investigation, right? Right. Um, and I do I do a little bit of consulting work around it, but I wouldn't say I'm I'm in it in the day-to-day, but my heart just you know, I it explodes for the fact of all these people who are permanently harmed by it. Um, and the, you know, my my expose that I did looked a lot at the people who are working to get people out and give them the financial freedom and give them the tools that they need, a driver's license, right? Going with them to take their driver's test. Um, those are all all these little things add up to helping other people. Uh financial empowerment is one of them. But like if there's there are many different things that go in workforce development, right? Training for a job so that they can become a nurse, right? Like there, there's just so many things that we can do if we think about it.

SPEAKER_02 26:47

Nice, nice. So um, for the sake of time, I want to quickly touch on um the model behind empower. And two things that I made a note to ask you. Um, first is alternative data. Um, what is alternative data? How do you deploy it? And how can it basically add value to your customers?

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah. So um traditional credit scoring, right? It includes like how much debt do you have, how many credit cards do you have, do you have a mortgage, right? Um, student loans, it's it's very much debt related, right? Liabilities. Um, how long have you had that, right? So, like if you are an 18-year-old who gets a credit card and keeps that credit card for 20 years and uses it, your credit is going to be great. If you are an 18-year-old and decides, you know what, I'm not gonna get a credit card because I'm gonna stay within, I'm gonna live within my budget and my means, and I'm gonna save and I'm gonna invest. And I, you know, uh, and I'm going to work at a restaurant on the side for my rent payments. I'm gonna pay my rent in cash. You're credit invisible. You have made all the right choices, and you cannot get a mortgage. Right? Um, and so when we think about alternative data, I think about it as a way to truly see the the value of a person, right? We're gonna try and bring in as much information as possible to say how can we make a good decision. So alternative data includes uh utilities, it includes rent, it includes cash flow analysis, it includes um subscription payments, right? Um we look at we look at gig payments, we look at um, you can look at all sorts of things like ratings and um I'm I'm blanking on a few of the things that we look at, but it's it is more data. That's that's basically what it is. How much more data can we get? Oh, I I know what it is. I was talking with someone the other day. We're gonna bring in one of their credit signals for the creator economy, which is um uh creator engagement on platforms, right? So that you can see uh how people, you can you can look at how people are interacting, how they're scored, what their ratings are, what their engagement is, you know, and then you can analyze positive versus negative sentiment, things like that, um, to help creators get access to loans into um the the financial system. Because I mean, oddly enough, you could have creators making millions of dollars, but it's so inconsistent. That's usually a red flag when it comes to credit worthiness. So um in the age now that we are in data, data becomes so important to understanding someone. So we can do that. We can harness all this data and show consistency and show um, you know, economic growth and trajectory of where someone's gonna be to get a longer-term loan, things like that that just weren't possible before. And so I see it as such an incredible opportunity that like now we have the resources. Before you couldn't sort through this much data, right? That's why you had these simple forms. Now it's easy to pull in 40 sources of data, sort through it in minutes, and say yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Nice, nice. And the other um concept I was gonna ask you is the credit IP. So, what is the credit IP and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_00 30:24

So, credit IP is basically it's not a score, but for us, it's um an analysis that of someone's um credit worthiness. And so this is bringing in all these alternative credit sources or sorry, data sources, and creating that picture so that we can give probabilities and recommendations. In the future, what we're excited about is being able to have something that can, you know, be cross-border, um, to be something that you can carry with you so that you as a person own what that picture is, and then can say, hey, I'm you know, I'm going to London. And that same um information transfers over to different places. Because that's also one of the biggest problems now is that you know this coming here uh as a student, you could have been, you could have had two houses, you know, um, wherever you're you are from and come to the US and it means nothing. Um so there's gotta be a way, especially with the no, you know, we've got so many nomadic uh workers now, right? Who wanna live in Portugal and still work here in the US and are you know traveling six, seven months out of the year? And we work differently, we live differently now. Our credit should be different, our lending should be different, our banking should be different.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

Nice, nice. And to kind of start wrapping up here, I was gonna ask um, looking forward into the future, three to five years from now, what are some changes in credit decisioning that you think are inevitable?

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Oh gosh, I'm so into the the here and now right now. Because we're because this is leaps and bounds. This is leaps and bounds. I was talking to someone, you're gonna get just a side story before I answer the question. I was talking to someone who did credit risk modeling in the 80s and 90s, and they said in the 80s and 90s, what they were looking for were signals of if the couple was gonna get divorced, specifically so that they could cut off, because they knew that that signal was meant that um the man in this case would usually have bad spending habits. And so they would reduce credit lines, they would reduce, you know, the ability to access credit with that signal. And they said that was the only thing they were looking for. Before that, you know, women didn't even have the right to have a bank account. We are now fast forward into a whole new dimension of how we do credit, right? Like what we're doing is light years ahead of where we were. So with that in mind, where do I see it? I would say with credit, you know, the exciting thing will be the cross-border credit scoring, right? That I see as something very tangible. And within the next three to four years, potentially we could have. Um other than that, I think that would be probably one of the biggest things that has the most hurdles. Globally, access to data, especially financial data, is really, really hard country to country. So even in, you know, so like there's areas in Africa that have such a hard time with cross-border payments, right? Because the regulations, you know, you could be so close as neighbors, but you can't get money from country to country because the regulations of how you handle data and transfers um restricts it. So we have to start looking at that. We have to start working on a global level of how we change this because people work and live differently. And so um, you know, I I think it's gonna be amazing what happens over the next few years, but cross-border, whether it be payments, credit, are gonna be some of the biggest things that I think we will see change.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Nice, nice. Uh, this has been a really fun conversation. And thank you once again for coming on so late. Um, I know it's it's yeah, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

Uh I didn't ramble too much.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

No, no, not at all. I actually learned a few things, and of course, maybe later in the year we can set up another um session like this and have a more conversations regarding what you're the what you're building at Empower and so on. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Thank you. If you like this episode, please share it with a relative, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, an acquaintance, and so on. And then please leave a rating andor a review on your favorite podcast app. My name is Videmyolo Gunde, and this is the Big Picture Podcast. Thank you for listening.