Introducing “Credit Conversations” — Highlighting Human Stories Behind Credit

The credit problem is a fundamentally interesting one because it involves a market that is incredibly unequal and blatantly opaque.

In countries rich and poor, access to credit is a fundamental cornerstone of social mobility. No matter your age, gender, language or nation, credit is the key driving force to boosting prosperity. From a newlywed couple looking to settle down and buy their first home, to an aspiring entrepreneur looking to start a small business, virtually every human on the planet depends on credit. It is the gateway to financial inclusion and ultimately financial freedom.

Credit is also a deeply personal topic, affecting social mobility and financial access.

We are pleased to introduce a new series, Credit Conversations.

As part of Bloom’s mission to open source our learnings and interviews as part of the Bloom Economic Research Division, we are especially proud to take a much more personal angle on the space.

This new series, “Credit Conversations”, will be more than numbers and data. We will be going on the ground, across the world, highlighting deeply personal stories that reflect a raw and holistic view of credit.

This series will feature interviews with people on their diverse experiences and life journeys, raising awareness of how credit impacts all of us. To bankers and those in power, credit should be more than just numbers.

Our mission, Bloom’s mission, is to bring these stories to the forefront and fix the global challenges we face as a society.

In many economies, generations of people are governed by a dark underworld of illegal lending — a pseudo-economy often ran by gangsters and fraudsters. For these 3 billion people, the idea of accessing enough credit to buy a home or start a business is a pipe dream.

In the United States, one of the most developed economies on the planet, millions of creditworthy borrowers are denied the right to own a home, start a business, or reach financial stability thanks to artificial scoring limitations imposed by central organizations.

We would like to highlight the personal stories of our community to share the humanity surrounding credit. To kickoff our series, we would like to feature our guest Nolan, a senior professor of engineering at a prominent California university. He immigrated from India and started teaching at the university in 1995. With unique insights from his journey, he shares with us his deeply personal experiences and unique perspective on credit.

Nolan describes his hope for Bloom and what it can accomplish as “I hope [Bloom] can give power to customers to monitor and control their creditworthiness. Right now the credit scoring process is not in my hands; it’s in someone else’s hands.”

Please read the full post of our first interview in the series here: https://bloom.co/blog/credit-conversations--interview-with-a-professor/