I think wars in the future will be about who's better at computer science. It will be programmers vs programmers, and computer literacy will become the new military service and a national security interest
I was astonished about the rapid expansion of the list of cyber warfare forces in recent years and by the incredible mass of cyber warfare capabilities of the United States.
Did you have any personal experience on this? We get this a lot, specially from investors, but so far have very manageable levels of loan losses with $1.5m already lent. We haven’t seen that even during COVID-19
Having a low credit score is the main reason people are not eligible for credit cards. One of the reasons people have low credit scores is because of not paying.
Now, why is it that they do not pay? not because they're bad people with bad intentions. It's because they gradualy accumulate debt until they cannot repay anymore.
Let's say you meet the requirements for a credit card, but you have a low salary. Then, you go to the supermarket, and pay your groceries in monthly installments because you cannot afford them. You know this will work only temporarily but the choice is to not have anything to eat. So many people just go ahead and do it. They trade a present problem with a future problem.
Eventually, they fail to pay for food they bought 6 months ago and their credit score goes to nothing, they get blacklisted, and their credit card gets killed.
In Latin America it is not rare at all to hear about people making $400 a month that are $40,000 in debt.
In Mexico and other countries in LATAM, there are huge department stores that have built their own banks to give their customers credit to purchase on the store. Combined, these stores have ~20 million customers and are some of the largest banks in Mexico.
Our solution it's focused on these customers, who already have some sort of credit but find paying their purchases on installments easier, more affordable and transparent than getting with a credit card.
We are enabling other merchant that aren't as big or don't having the ability to offer financing to offer this option to the customers.
Yes, exactly. It’s just like that but think as if SEARS had built the bank itself. It’s crazy but here literally two of the largest banks were created this way
We hope it will. At least we will try :) There are some specific things about Brazil that are materially different to our experience but will be exploring other countries
Thats why I asked actually. I did some startup business in Brazil. The economy was very vibrant and responded really well to new services.* However their banking system and payment systems were antiquated and closet. So have your eyes set on disrupting PAGSEGURO.
Yeah. Something we've discovered is that merchant fraud is more common with smaller businesses, so that's a challenge. There's also a natural concentration of merchants. Like Affirm drives 30% of their revenue just from Peloton. We will see something similar.
