Transcript
Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show, where we explore early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.
And happy anniversary to us because we’ve been out in the world for a year.
So, thanks so much for tuning in to Money Isn’t Everything.
Today on the show, we’re in for a real treat.
I’m in conversation with Shrinath Renganathan.
He used to work at Google, but now he’s out in fintech as a co-founder of a company called Starlight.
It’s a fintech company that partners with credit unions to help their members unlock government benefits.
This is an even more important perk during this period of intense economic uncertainty right now.
He sees the offering as a solution for what is the next right product for the majority of Americans.
We talk about how the middle class is shrinking, the pervasiveness of needing financial assistance, the pressures on financial institutions to remain relevant in a digital age, and how GenAI helps the startup keep tabs on changes with programs.
Here’s our conversation.
Shri, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.
Thank you so much for being on the show today.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me, Mary.
So good to see you after Fintech Meetup.
I know.
Well, I was just going to start there.
We were just, not too long ago, at Fintech Meetup, and I was checking out your business card.
I wanted to comment on your tagline, which is, “Bank customer growth by unlocking benefits.”
I think that is so interesting and not usually what is led with in terms of bank products marketing.
So let’s get into that.
Let’s explore that.
Tell me what you’re doing and also why you started there with peppering value into the product by revealing or making known what these benefits are.
Yeah, absolutely.
And thanks for that.
I think it’s a good play on the words of what we’re actually trying to do, which is, I think there are a lot of households who are facing financial stress.
Maybe a useful piece of context is that I’m speaking to you from Blue Ridge Labs, which is part of Robin Hood Foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofit foundations in New York City.
They have a small program where they bring technologists to work on social change problems and think about how to reduce poverty and be part of the solution.
I spent about a decade at Google, got my green card, and was very motivated to work on a challenge that I think was very important, which is, how do you help the average American improve their financial health?
I didn’t know the answers.
I also was like, I can’t sit with a whiteboard and figure this out.
So let’s go talk to the community.
This program is very well designed, where they bring fellows and encourage you to actually spend every day, hundreds of hours, talking to low-income households about their challenges, learn about their needs.
A consistent theme we saw was, obviously, one, budgets are hard, expenses are hard.
But two was running into the right person at the right time who knew about a certain program that helps you with assistance in utility bills, or this other program that helps you with heating, and how do you get food assistance if you need it?
A lot of these little things are lost in the hallways of people talking to each other.
If they get the right support, their budgets actually get better.
They actually get healthier.
They move out of stress to being sustaining, to almost improving their financial lives.
We said, how can we repeat that interaction and do that more frequently?
Can technology be an enabler of this?
We also realized, more practically, that if I show up and said, “Hi, I’m Shri from Starlight. Can we chat?”
They’re like, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
There’s a trust and credibility factor.
So we started talking to local institutions about how to find a way to unblock that.
We sort of started with nonprofits who do financial coaching, and then found credit unions were very missionally aligned.
That grew into a much larger understanding of where we see ourselves as almost a solution for what is the right next product for 60 to 70% of Americans, which is that they need financial assistance.
In times of need, they’re going through a tough time.
We find that for them, surface it to them, guide them through it, and in the process they become better, long-lasting customers for the banks and credit unions we work with.
Well, I have a lot of thoughts with this because I also know it can feel really daunting.
First, you’re in a financial hardship, so you’re having all the emotions tied to that.
But then also going through the process of finding these things, applying for these things.
I feel like it’s tough, right?
It’s tough to even find where to go or the steps involved.
But I’m curious, when you were having these conversations, were you surprised at all in any of the things that you were hearing as threads of, hey, this is my particular challenge here?
Yeah.
I’d say a couple of things we heard a lot.
One was, I think people are already very smart and savvy with their money because if you’re living on a tight budget, honestly, you’re actually pretty good at managing your money because if not, you can’t run your family.
So that’s the one, I would say, biggest misnomer that I think is really important to address, is that often low- to moderate-income households are really effective at managing their money.
It’s just that their topline isn’t large enough.
That’s one I would say is very important, that I kind of think about a lot and keep grounding myself on that fact.
You need to provide the right information, but with agency and empowerment, people can self-solve for what they want.
Then the second piece, which is a bit surprising to your earlier question, is people are able to distill what’s useful for them or not if you provide the right information at the right time.
They can be overwhelmed.
Programs are complex.
Eligibility and systems aren’t really well designed because it’s written by lawyers, not humans.
So how do you make it approachable?
Then I think when you’re facing financial stress, your ability to process information is harder because you are just in a state of panic, and your brain and your processing capacity is different.
Being able to use social proof about, like, “Hey, there are about 45,000 households who’ve used this when they were stressed in the last year. You’re not alone.”
That feels very supportive.
Then language and disambiguating complexity is really important.
Because you look at a giant PDF of 15 pages about a program, you’re just like, I don’t want to read this.
So that was honestly kind of fun.
People are like, if you give them the right information, they’re like, “Yeah, I got it. Cool. Thanks. That worked, and I got 100 bucks off my bill. That was excellent.”
People are able to do it.
People are able to get it.
Then it started to almost be like, okay, now what can tech do here?
I think with the changes in the way GenAI has made it easier, we can actually process and track hundreds of programs, 500-plus programs in every state, correctly.
Know where they are, when the eligibility is, when it turns on, when it stops, when the rules are changing.
That’s kind of become the thing that we realized as uniquely valuable because we met a lot of smart, awesome folks at credit unions and banks who are doing the work on the front lines, but they’re like, “I can’t keep up with all these things.”
So I know there’s something out there, but I can’t really tell you where to go.
“Shri, you might find assistance out there. Go look it up, but I can’t tell you where to go.”
They were already kind of trying to do it, but not effectively.
Right.
I’m still imagining the language.
Okay, so when you’re partnering with a credit union and they have all this data, and various degrees of being able to access it, I know the industry struggles with their data.
But how?
That’s like the understatement.
Oh my God.
That’s probably my biggest lesson about this industry that I’ve learned in the last two years, is the data challenges they have.
It’s good.
Yeah.
Well, let’s talk about that a little bit.
What was the most shocking thing to you from the credit unions or banks, their ability to understand their data or look at it, really?
I would say there’s a standard, every organization has their own data journey, their ability to use data at some level.
Some of the really interesting small credit unions have a really good understanding of their membership because they just have a really strong pulse in the market.
So, surprisingly, really small ones are sometimes really capable.
Then really large ones are very capable.
There’s a continuum in the middle where it’s variable because some of them are actually struggling to say, hey, who are my members who are struggling?
Can I find them?
Are they coming to me?
Who are they turning to?
Are they going to a payday loan?
Are they going to a digital small-dollar loan program?
What are those gaps?
Some of them have the ability to know that, and some are just unable to even track that or keep up with what their members need.
Okay.
Okay, so wide range.
I’ve heard about credit unions who aren’t even aware of the age of their members, which is very surprising to me, but I guess the reality of it all.
But I am curious.
Okay, so when a member, it’s clear there’s a need here, what is the, how does it work with your recommendation?
What is that language?
Because it’s such a delicate area.
Like, “Hey, you need help.”
The language, I feel like, is very critical here.
Walk me through that a bit.
Yeah.
And I’d say this has evolved a lot from when I started this to now.
I think we’ve seen a lot of learnings from the frontline teams we work with.
The credit union executives we work with have spent 20, 30 years in the community, and they understand the local context and relevance.
So often they’ve guided us on the language we use because it’s not, “Hey, here’s assistance programs and here’s money for you. Go get it.”
It’s a lot more like, “Hey, you’ve been working hard, contributing to these systems for years through your taxes, through your participation in civic society, and now you’re going through a tough time.”
The language is more about a financial bridge that is available, and it will actually help you improve your long-term sustenance.
The second piece that’s very interesting is the way it comes to you depends on the level of data the credit union has.
If you’ve already been doing a ton of proactive work, like you send me a birthday alert, you tell me an anniversary notice and you wish me on my anniversary, and then I get a message from you about proactively helping you, it feels more normal.
If you’ve not taken that journey of proactivity for other parts of the credit union, then Starlight being the first time you’re doing proactive has to be very sensitive.
So it becomes a function of how willing are you to be precise and targeted, or you can be very broad.
You can be like, “Hey, we have a new product. Come check it out.”
Depending on the credit union, it might be like, they see it as just an extension of their product suite.
They’re like, “We have a checking account. We have a savings account. We have a credit card. We have a credit builder. And now we have white-label Starlight,” which could be called, for example, Benefits Navigator.
Then the credit union will be like, “Oh, we have a navigator that helps you. You should talk to it.”
Then they send the link to you.
It links out to Starlight.
We understand a bit about your context.
You’d be like, “Mary lives in this ZIP code, has this household structure, this household income.”
Then we actually go say, “Here’s all the programs at your county level that we can find for you.”
You can then get guidance, support, all the nudging and assistance that you need.
Then we kind of make sure it feels to you, at least, that the credit union is the one bringing you all this as a product solution that serves you in your time of need.
You know, that’s really interesting because I also always feel like, when there’s, I live in LA, so the most recent disaster were the fires, and usually the local banks will just update, here are your things you can do, and it’s just a tab on their website.
This is much more personal.
But I hear you on, if this is the first contact, watch the language with what you’re recommending because I could just imagine that rubbing the person the wrong way.
But still, you’re in need.
I want to show you, we’ve got to unpack because clearly there are wild moves going on in the government right now.
You mentioned earlier about funding.
So it’s changing what benefits, what grants.
But you also mentioned how GenAI is helping you keep tabs on what’s available.
So tell me about this tension.
Tell me how you’re thinking about it with these changes that are seemingly coming at a faster pace.
Yeah.
I’ll say that the simplest and most honest thing is, we’re in states that are blue, we’re in states that are red, we’re in states that are purple.
We’re in all states in terms of varieties of states, in terms of political landscape.
We work with people across a political spectrum, in terms of the institutions and the organizations we work with, because I think what’s important here is that the household is what you’re centering and making sure we’re serving the households in need and giving them the programs they deserve.
There are kind of three facts that we together are trying to combine with what Starlight does.
One is access and availability, which is clarity of who’s eligible for a program and telling them proactively.
In New York City, you’ll see at the subway station sometimes signs which will be from a government agency saying, “Hey, you should sign up for this program.”
It helps you if you’re taking care of an elderly person in your house, and there’s some assistance available.
Or there are ways that other programs are being messaged through flyers and postcards in the mail that I get.
In some way, we’re almost a better way to distribute it to the right person at the right time.
And guess who understands a lot of your local context?
Your household income, your household expenses, and your identity, which are all at your financial institution today already.
So the credit union has a lot of context about you, which, with their consent, you can actually use to support them.
Now, on the government side, they’re worried about fraud.
They’re worried about process complexity and operational burden.
They’re also worried about getting money into the hands of the right people so they don’t become a burden on the state in the long term.
So if we do a good job of navigating all three at the same time, which is provide access, also improve the quality of data that we submit, and eventually also help with the workflow and the operations.
We’ve done a test here in New York City with a local nonprofit where we actually improved the volume of applications they got and also got more people money that they needed, which was waiting to be sent out.
But the nonprofit was like, “We’re staff constrained to actually do a good job on this.”
We were able to augment that.
That, I think, is the playbook for where we see this going in the future.
It’s almost that if you can solve for quality and fraud, and also workflow and operations processes, while improving access and awareness, then you kind of have a really strong bipartisan argument for why this is the way.
You’re almost using a giant ecosystem, which is the financial institutions, and helping them with a financial problem, which is assistance when people need it.
Yeah.
Well, what have you uncovered?
Are you seeing popular trends of, oh, people are applying through this through your startup?
Are you seeing threads yet on, these are things that people want most, qualify for most?
Yeah.
It’s a great question.
I’d say it’s been quite interesting.
It varies by state and varies also by the demographics we serve.
But a couple that jump out a lot, there’s a lot of interest in childcare assistance.
I think working families are struggling a lot today.
So that one has been a big one.
Utility assistance is one people haven’t really thought about as much.
I feel like a lot of folks might know about food assistance, like SNAP, but they might not know as much about programs for utilities.
Or they might not know about, especially, emergency disaster relief is a big one that we’ve seen, like FEMA assistance.
People also sometimes don’t know about down payment programs that are available to help people get into their first home.
The housing crisis is very real, and it’s a nationwide problem.
So there are some that we’ve seen that gravitate to certain populations and surface a lot.
Yeah.
I do feel like it’s still very mystifying, what’s out there.
Almost to the point of, well, I guess you could use ChatGPT now, but it’s like, what do you even search for to know what you qualify for?
Yeah.
I mean, you probably know this, but there are 50 federal and 500 state agencies who administer programs, right?
So they have no reason to actually talk to each other.
None of them refer to the other one.
So you might get one and not know about the rest.
No.
You know, you’re bringing me back.
I had to lay off my first job, and I was just fresh in New York City.
I had worked less than a year, and I was like, oh shoot.
What the heck do I do?
It’s so tough.
It’s so tough.
But I remember, I think one of the benefits I got from my employer was, can you go to career counseling?
I remember that conversation.
There was a group, but they were like, you can go.
I was getting dismissed from it because I was just like, I’m crying or whatever.
It’s just wild.
No.
I think that’s actually probably, what you mentioned there in a very interesting way, is something we’ve had several credit unions, because a lot of them are SEG- and employer-tied, who have brought up the fact that they’re like, “Oh, our employer is going to do a round of layoffs. Can we actually partner with you and think about how this could be part of the solution?”
We haven’t figured out how to do that at scale because we don’t get inside the employer systems and don’t understand employer benefits.
But it is something that has come up a few times where we realize that this problem is far more common than we realize.
Especially in the modern economy with gig work being the norm, W-2 employment not being guaranteed, and layoffs being high.
Someone who’s financially savvy and perfect today in your credit union, you don’t think about them needing Starlight.
In a year, they could need Starlight and need assistance for three months until they get on their feet again.
So the number of people who need help has just expanded drastically in the last decade.
Yeah.
I see that.
And I just, probably the industry would like, knows it but maybe doesn’t know it at the same time.
But I’m curious too because you’re basically, this is adding in more value.
So it’s also highlighting the need for a credit union to offer members more than what they’re offering.
One of the premises of the show is we’re always exploring, you’ve got to do more than just park people’s money to stay relevant.
I guess one segment I do is “That’s What You Said,” and I heard you say this, I think it was on a podcast that I’m pulling this from.
You said, “They’re banked, but they are struggling.”
I think that is such an important point.
I just wanted to bring it up to be like, how are you thinking about this industry-wide challenge of the credit union or bank having to prove they have value to their members or customers in this way?
Yes.
Yeah.
It’s a great question.
I would say, underlying this, and I think you mentioned this briefly, the middle class is shrinking.
Bain did this amazing article just showing this across every city, whether it’s the Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, or rural.
The same story is occurring all over America.
The middle class has shrunk drastically.
So the perception of the fact that basically every credit union today has to find a business model that includes serving the average American who is struggling financially today.
When you look at the product offering, especially for some credit unions whose history might have been high six-figure corporate white-collar jobs, and then that company or factory closed, now they’re community chartered, now they’re serving the average American there.
The salary average is now $47K, more similar to average America, not six figures.
They have to adapt their products, their offering, their solutions.
They need to offer not just Starlight.
They need to think about small-dollar loan programs.
They need to offer high-yield savings for very small dollar amounts.
I saw a credit union once who had a $10,000 minimum on a high-yield savings.
On the flip side, one of our partners has a bank account that’s 10% until your first thousand.
How about we encourage the savings, right?
That’s CFCU in Michigan, was one of my favorites.
They are doing the work, thinking about, how do I serve a community in need and offer the right products?
There are innovative credit unions, small and large, who are doing the work.
And they’re, to your point, way beyond the money.
They’re not just parking money.
They’re thinking about, one of the credit unions I’m working with, I just got off a call with them today.
They have full-time staff members doing something similar to Starlight, and they were like, actually, we want to augment their work with what you do because you have to almost have walked into the branch and found Mary on that corner, and she knows the answer for what organization could help you.
But if Mary’s not there that day, who’s going to tell you where to go?
It’s almost like a digital version of a really well-informed frontline staff member, serving everyone in the community.
That’s why they come and bank with you.
They give you their direct deposit because you do all these other services that actually augment their entire financial life.
Then the savings and the credit and the loan will come.
But there’s more than that you have to offer in today’s world to stay relevant.
Especially historically, you might have been like, I do wealth management, I do trusts and estates, and that’s good.
But what are you doing for the day-to-day, everyday life of someone who’s living and has less than $400 in savings?
How do we help them kind of boost that?
I am so glad you illustrated that example of a credit union having that $10,000 minimum to hit the high-yield savings account.
Among my careers of the past, I had to track different products.
But I do think one thing I learned is a larger portion of consumers think that a lot of savings accounts do require that amount to even open it.
But there are plenty of other options.
I don’t think they’re well branded for the most part.
Yeah.
And I mean, I would add, if you put on the lens of just the households we’re serving, their options to them, the Chime two-day advance and their branding of it is such a great example.
Every credit union knows this challenge, and they can probably work on it.
Some of them have done it.
They do two-day advance payroll as well.
Some credit unions do that today.
It’s not just Chime.
But that idea of getting your paycheck early or helping you with that small-dollar loan for a low price so you don’t go to the payday loan.
A ton of great mission-oriented credit unions have been doing this.
Some of them have been doing it for 20 years.
I met with one here out on the East Coast that has had a small-dollar loan program for 22 years.
I’m like, you’ve been doing it before the rest of the world knew the word.
It could have been easy because it would have been more manual.
Yeah.
And they did it all manually.
They were literally creating essentially a savings account that was a locked savings, which then allowed you to contribute back into it, and then the loan would get written back to the book.
I met with the person who built it.
They were a senior exec now.
They were talking about how they’ve actually run this entire process, and it was very manual with a bunch of ledgers.
It actually helped you build your credit.
Now you have 15 fintechs doing credit building similarly.
But also, sometimes this movement has actually got a lot of innovation in it, and the mindset is so deep that they have the relationship with the households they’re serving.
So they’re building the right products naturally.
Yeah.
It’s coming from a place of deep relationship building.
I love that.
I really love that.
This is a little step of the question journey we’re on, but I think what’s striking about what you’re doing is the bigger categories.
Help people save money, right?
The things that I see more common in fintech would be, show me all your subscriptions and we’ll highlight the ones you should cut to save money.
Sometimes you’ll see a cell phone deal through the credit union member.
But this is a different category.
To me, it’s illustrating all the different ways you can help save people money.
Then on the flip side, I think I saw in your press releases a partnership with Steady because the other side of this is help people find more income as well.
Yeah.
How do you see, I mean, both things are so important.
But any advice to the consumer who’s like, hey, I need this assistance, but I also need income?
How do I navigate these things at the same time?
It’s a great question.
I would say that, honestly, we’ve been very focused on the expense side and how do we grow disposable income, is my broader framing.
The big thing, to not bite off too much, I think we went to partners we like and then worked with them, like Steady.
I think there is a huge piece around workforce growth.
Recently, just about a month ago, with really good feedback from a couple of the credit unions we’ve been working with, they were like, “Hey, here are the typical organizations we refer members to who do want to do other things beyond what we do.”
One of them gave us a 30-organization list.
They’re like, “These are all the local ones in Central New York that we work with.”
We said, hey, why don’t we start surfacing?
We do our work to get federal, state, and local programs, but what about these other nonprofits that do interesting things that are not related to what we do, but they’re still very valuable to households?
We started adding that.
Now we brought that to a couple more credit unions, and they really liked it.
So now we’re building out almost a second feature in the product, which is, what are the references we can make to local organizations?
One of them might be a workforce program.
It might be a council for aging and a local aging center to help your senior get some assistance in a certain program.
It’s a workforce program that helps you upskill for free, funded by the city, to help you get a better-paying job.
So how do we start being part of that conduit?
How do you, again, the basic piece being grow disposable income and find different ways to accomplish that goal?
The utility example is very interesting.
All the major utilities in the U.S. have programs to help low-income households independent of government.
They have to do it because they are monopolies, typically regionally.
If they do a rate increase, it might hurt the low-income households.
So they’ve designed programs.
But those programs are administered sometimes with money left on the table.
We had a call with someone recently who said they’d not spent the money in 2024, and they had over $10 or $15 million that didn’t get used.
We’re like, we know the struggles of every household in America, so how does this imbalance happen?
It’s a lot about information asymmetry.
If you can solve that with technology, you bring that information to the right person at the right time.
Of course they’re going to get it, and they’re better off.
Then they become much more sustainable to actually be part of the bank or the credit union and actually get toward better savings, which is deposit growth, or loan risk reduction if you already lent to them.
Shri, how did you land on making this the problem you wanted to focus on?
It’s a great question.
There’s a smile.
No, it’s a tough question.
I mean, I think it is.
I know.
Yeah.
It’s more because I just saw this as something where I think I can bring a lot of my skills to bear and then be useful in the way I build a business that has a strong mission alignment.
To me, I spent over a decade at Google building new products there.
They’re very much at the intersection of ads measurement and proving the efficacy of marketing.
But in a way, the system is basically delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
If you swap out the ad unit, which might be a shampoo to the right person on YouTube, to the right benefit to the right person at the right time, it improves their financial health as well.
So I saw this understanding of data relevance, targeting, and measurement that’s kind of valuable.
Then the other piece of it, which is more from a personal motivation, from civic interest, is that I think a lot of the challenges that well-minded civic institutions face is that they’re unable to execute on smoothness and simplicity because of being hamstrung a little bit from being inside government or inside state or federal.
Being on the outside, we’re actually allowed certain freedoms, which are powerful to build and say, look, I am not going to solve for a retiree who doesn’t use a digital device.
I would recommend they go to the local nonprofit, and I’ll just hand off to them and say, good luck.
But I can solve really, really well for the working poor who’s working two jobs and needs help, and they’re digitally savvy and they’re extremely good at scrolling and handling digital services.
So working for them is very important.
I can pick the person I want to serve, do a really good job for them, deliver a ton of value.
If we end up unlocking, there’s about $100 billion a year that goes unused, about $140 billion.
So if we can put some of that money into the pockets of a low-income household, it’s economically better because it ripples through the economy more often.
You give a tax break to the rich, it might stay with the rich for a while and doesn’t actually circle through the economy.
But low-income households, sadly because of their struggles, actually end up spending it, and it circles through the economy a bunch of times.
It might be increased spending at their local grocery.
It’ll be better deposits and better loan repayments.
We saw this with COVID.
I’m not making this up in the sense that the math is there.
It’s very clear because we saw the COVID stimulus led to two major things.
We saw deposits rise, and we saw it rise almost for nine months after the stimulus checks, and then it slowly depleted away because the money doesn’t last forever.
Then we saw delinquencies go down by 300 basis points, three percentage points.
All the big three, major financial institutions, Wells Fargo, Research Center America, they’ve all kind of found the same stats with their own proprietary data sets about where the money went.
So we know this happens.
If we increase the speed and velocity of the right programs arriving at the right person, then you kind of can find a slow solve for getting people out of sustenance financially to improving their financial lives.
It’s good for business because it boosts financial activity.
It boosts Walmart basket spend.
It moves your CVS basket size.
So it’s a very reasonable way to say that the increased economic activity has strong business value as well.
I just want to double-click on the, you were serving ads for shampoo, but then you can serve targeted ads for benefits.
That’s such a lovely switch because we do get hit all the time with, buy this, buy this, buy that.
So that’s really cool.
Just two questions left for you.
One just being broader than what you’re doing.
Pick whichever question you prefer, but it’s like, what do you think banks or credit unions get wrong about the audience you’re going for?
Or what do you think is the most promising thing in terms of improving financial health or financial outcomes through fintech versus something else?
Yeah.
I would say I think a lot of banks and credit unions are waking up to this, but especially in this credit union movement, we’ve seen sort of a bifurcation.
There are some credit unions who are so leaned in, so understand the population they serve, that they’re teaching us.
They’re like, “We know what you’re doing. We like it, but by the way, here’s how you should be building this.”
Their guidance is so deeply enriched because they’re deeply immersed in understanding what 60 to 70% of Americans are facing every day and how you should serve them.
One is, I think it’s easy for fintech to come in and think we know more, but often we’re learning a lot from our partners because they’ve got deep understanding of the community.
But we have the technology layer that can actually do the things they aspire to do and help enable them to do more.
So I think the thing that people get wrong is, it is sustainable and profitable to serve the bottom 60, 70% of America if you design the right alignment of incentives with you, the household you serve, and their success being your success.
I think some banks and credit unions have got it and some are still getting there because some are just like, we’ll just keep chasing more Google employees who make six figures.
But I’m like, there’s only a finite number, and that number is shrinking as this economy and AI and automation happens.
To me, the sooner you as a leadership team almost embrace the fact that you have to find a business model that sustainably can serve every average American decently, then the more the question becomes not maximize per-customer LTV, but cohort LTV.
Then you’re like, okay, how do I serve this entire cohort really effectively?
If I improve their financial health, how does that accrue to me?
Also, the goodwill and the trust and the retention means that you just grow overall value.
And these are not permanently in that state, right?
The Shri who graduated college and needed assistance is now making a lot more money and is actually valuable to you, and is going to come to you for your first auto loan, your car loan, your credit card, and your continuous spend.
So the mindset of when you catch someone is very important.
Serving someone when they’re down and struggling is probably the most valuable time that they’ll remember you.
I think that loyalty value is massive.
I think the credit unions and banks that get it and start thinking that way really invest in it and see the value in partnering with us.
Yeah.
That’s a really important part because it’s like, you’re down on your luck, and if someone’s willing to help, then you would be more loyal, in theory.
If someone wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way?
Absolutely.
Our site is GetStarlight.com.
My email is right there, and I’m excited to chat with folks.
You can also leave our email at the bottom of the comments and make sure people get to chat with us.
We’d love to talk to anybody who’s excited about helping save the world while building a sustainable business.
Yeah.
Just that.
Yeah.
I’ll drop your link in the show notes too.
Last question.
What’s the image on your phone’s lock screen?
Ooh, great question.
It’s a sunset in New York City, like two years ago.
I moved here about three or four years ago, and it’s just this beautiful sunset through the city that reminded me of why I moved here.
Oh, that’s wonderful.
That’s so beautiful.
What’s yours, Mary?
Oh, I will tell you.
My Maltipoo.
It’s always my Maltipoo, but in a range of looks.
He’s in Griffith Park.
Where is he right now?
He’s an older dog and he’s hiding in the closet.
The door is open, but he likes to hang out there.
That’s great.
Anyway, Shri, thanks so much for being on the show.
It’s been a delight to chat with you today.
Thanks so much, Mary.
This is awesome.
Okay, so one thing that really hit home is the importance of making benefits seem much more approachable during what is likely a very, very overwhelming time for an individual.
If you like this episode, you’ll likely enjoy our first episode with Ethan Bloch, who founded an automated savings app then called Digit.
I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
Otherwise, I will catch you in two weeks, where we’ll be chatting about auto tariffs through the lens of a fintech startup.
See you then.
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