By: Shivani Siroya, CEO and Founder
Today, I spoke at Eric Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit in San Francisco where I had the chance to weigh in on the future of fintech. It was an opportunity to reflect on how Tala has evolved and grown over the last decade – from a company that started with a mission of delivering financial services to customers with limited access to the emerging digital economy, to a company that has built a vertically integrated financial services platform powered by a deep moat of proprietary data and scaled AI infrastructure.
And it was a chance to look ahead. To understand the scale of what we’re building, here are some stats:
- Over 10 million customers served to date
- $6 billion in credit originations to date
- 92% repayment rate
- Credit decisions in <2 seconds
- And, once approved, cash disbursements in <3 minutes (for most customers)
- Operations across 3 continents
Most significantly, we’ve proven that serving a population that nobody else has dared to serve creates significant impact and financial value — Tala has reached an annualized revenue run rate of $300 million as of Q1 2025, building on a 3-year revenue CAGR of 35%.
For anyone who knows me, you know that I am simply obsessed with data and economic systems — leveraging new data in unexpected ways has been my life’s work, from my early career as a banking analyst to my time with the United Nations Population Fund. I founded Tala with a simple thesis that rings true to this day: there is an enormous amount of alternative data that can be leveraged to serve billions of people around the world.
The reality in financial services is that most legacy institutions — and even many fintechs and neobanks — remain stuck in outdated and static ways of understanding people. They rely on dominant tools like FICO, a score that was first established in 1989. To prove our thesis, Tala decided to tackle the credit system holistically — combining the intelligence of a credit bureau, the payments execution of a fintech and the relationship expertise of a bank into one integrated solution.
And rather than focusing on “typical” indicators of creditworthiness — like payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, credit mix, and any new credit — we built an entirely new approach based on our customers’ mobile footprints and the proprietary data they generated through their relationship with Tala. Through this data, we identified patterns and used them as proxies for consistency, liquidity, and responsibility. Today, more than 10 years later, our credit models are trained on billions of data points across 3 distinct geographies — and our data moat is rapidly expanding as our customer base grows.
Through our strategic scaling of data and AI/ML infrastructure, we have created a dynamic global financial platform that has the potential to serve any person in any country — and that will enable massive volume and scale over the next few years. We have deliberately chosen a multi-region expansion strategy to prove the power of our technology and data. And we have a talented team in place to lead us forward.
- Kelly Uphoff is entering her fourth year as Tala’s CTO, applying her expertise building Netflix’s recommendation engine and leading a technology team with deep expertise in generative AI, causal inference, and customer engagement.
- We’ve welcomed Nicolas Cabrera as our new Chief Product Officer, whose experience across fintech, crypto, and payments — including most recently Lightspark, where he introduced Universal Money Address (UMA) — make him a phenomenal addition to our leadership team as we look ahead to Tala’s future vision.
- And, in the last year, we’ve welcomed Mike Olson as COO and Damier Xandrine as Chief Legal Officer to help steer us through this period of dynamic growth.
As we move towards the next horizon, I am inspired by the opportunities to rapidly replicate our infrastructure across diverse markets, diverse customer bases, and new products – something we are avidly working on and uniquely positioned to leverage because of the depth of our proprietary data. Each new technology wave — from the ubiquity of mobile phones and the internet to crypto and now to AI — has provided Tala with a new set of tools to understand and reach what I believe to be the largest untapped TAM in consumer fintech — the 4 billion people around the world who don’t have equal access to the existing financial system — the population that we at Tala call the Global Majority.
The Tala team has a ton of momentum, and it is my hope that our fintech peers are as inspired and excited by the future as we are. Our vision feels more urgent and more vital than ever before given today’s macro and political insecurity — and I’ve always believed we can make more progress working with others than on our own.
