As part of our commitment to transparency and impact, Tala commissioned a new global study conducted by impact measurement firm 60 Decibels in the spring of 2025. The report, which surveyed nearly 850 repeat Tala customers across Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines, provides a powerful, data-driven look at how access to digital credit shapes financial lives over time.

The results clearly show the need for accessible financial tools is universal, and when people have the power of choice, they build more resilient and empowered lives.

1. The Universal Challenge of Financial Access

The struggle to access credit is not confined to emerging markets. In the U.S., 49 million adults lack conventional credit scores and about 15% of households have no mainstream credit, leaving them shut out of the financial system. This reality is mirrored in the experiences of our customers. About half of Tala’s borrowers reported having no prior access to a loan similar to ours. 

2. From Financial Stress to Healthcare Access

Financial emergencies and healthcare costs are deeply intertwined, creating a widespread vulnerability that many Americans share with our customers. While 59% of Americans lack savings for a $1,000 emergency, the U.S. healthcare system itself creates instability, leaving 11% of adults unable to afford or access quality care.

This is where financial access becomes a tool for overall well-being. With Tala, our customers are building remarkable resilience; a powerful 80% report an improved ability to cover an emergency expense. Specifically on healthcare, we see a life-changing impact: 55% of our borrowers in Kenya and 41% in Mexico now report an increased ability to seek medical care when needed. Being ready for an emergency gives people peace of mind, and having a fund or access to affordable credit can provide the agency people need to care for their health and build a more secure future. 

3. The Tangible Impact of Financial Control

Beyond managing emergencies, true financial control manifests in day-to-day well-being and an improved outlook on life. According to the study, a staggering 82% of borrowers reported an improvement in their overall quality of life because of Tala. This feeling of progress is validated by a decrease in financial stress, which 81% of our customers reported.

The impact on women is particularly profound and shows that those in the global majority share a similar desire for financial confidence and influence as their American counterparts. In the U.S., while 94% of women believe they will be personally responsible for their finances at some point, only 48% feel confident in their financial abilities. Our data shows that when women in the global majority are given the right tools, they act on this same desire for empowerment with incredible results: 80% of Tala’s women borrowers report increased self-confidence because of our loans, and 59% report gaining more influence in household decision-making. This newfound agency creates a powerful ripple effect, empowering women to improve not only their own lives but the well-being of their families and communities.

4. The Universal Entrepreneurial Spirit

The drive to build a business is a powerful, shared ambition globally. In the U.S., small business owners often rely on personal assets and consumer credit to finance their businesses and are more likely to be denied credit than non-owners. This challenge of securing capital is also a hurdle for entrepreneurs in the global majority. For these business owners, Tala provides a vital path to growth. Globally, 34% of Tala borrowers used their loan for business purposes, with Kenya leading at 40%. Tala is providing a direct investment in their vision, and the results speak for themselves:

• Increased Earnings: A remarkable 87% reported an increase in business earnings.
• Improved Outlook: 82% said their business outlook improved as a result of their loan.
• Investing in Growth: The most common use of business loans was buying inventory (82%), showing a direct path from credit to commerce.

The financial lives of our customers and many Americans are reflections of a shared journey. The desire for a safety net and the ambition to create a better life are universal challenges and aspirations. By building a financial platform that addresses these fundamental human needs, we are creating a more inclusive and connected global digital economy for everyone.

Methodology

Commissioned by Tala, 60 Decibels conducted 847 phone interviews with Tala’s digital loan borrowers in Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines between April and May 2025. The borrowers were randomly selected from a sample of Tala’s borrower database. 60 Decibels is a global, tech-enabled impact measurement company that brings speed and repeatability to social impact measurement and customer insights.

The post A Shared Journey: How the Financial Struggle of the Global Majority Is Also an American Story appeared first on Tala.

From conducting communications research to exploring AI applications on our New Ventures team, the crew immersed themselves in our work and tackled complex problems while getting to learn from some of the brightest minds in fintech. 

We sat down with Annika Iyer, Chloe Aviolo, and Stephen Cisz, to hear about their Tala internship experience, including the projects they worked on and the lessons they’ll be taking with them.

What initially drew you to Tala, and how has your understanding of our mission evolved since you started your internship?

Annika Iyer, MBA Intern: I fundamentally believe that digital and financial access are critical to improving livelihoods and resilience at both the individual and community levels. I knew I wanted to work for a company bridging the divide in access and thus was drawn to Tala’s core thesis: data fuels a virtuous cycle that can sustainably expand access and improve social outcomes. 

A big unlock for me was realizing that our role is to serve as an enabler that unleashes the power of marginalized individuals. At Tala, ‘Power to the People’ isn’t just a slogan, it’s embedded in its mission. So many companies talk about solving problems for underserved populations, but lasting change can only come from within those communities themselves. Tala understands that its role is to equip and empower, not to impose. 

Chloe Avioli, Communications Intern: As a student with a finance background, I was initially drawn to Tala by its unique blend of social impact and business. Beyond just empowering the global majority, I saw how Tala’s mission is deeply embedded in its internal values, collaborative culture, and shared goals among employees. By the end of my internship, I had a much more holistic view of not only Tala’s mission statement, but also the dynamics that drive the company from within.

Stephen Cisz, New Ventures (AI) Intern: After discovering Shivani’s 2016 TED Talk, I reached out to a Tala employee in my university network to learn more about the company’s unique approach to unlocking access to credit for those who have been historically underserved. During that initial conversation, I was immediately inspired and drawn by the company’s mission to make financial services smarter, faster, and more accessible worldwide.

Since starting my internship, I’ve come to better understand the power and importance of data as an equalizer for the global financial system. I’ve also become more reflective in my own work. Instead of completing tasks as fast as possible and moving on, I make time to assess my decisions – taking stock of what’s working, what isn’t, and how I can improve things moving forward. It’s made all the difference!

Can you describe a typical day at Tala and share more about a specific project you’ve been working on?

Annika: As an MBA intern, I worked on a range of projects spanning strategy, operations, and product. My primary focus was on market research, diligence, and strategic planning for Tala’s expansion efforts over the next year and beyond. 

On a daily basis, I was interfacing with many different teams across the organization to better understand Tala’s differentiators that drive success for customers in new markets. I really enjoyed getting to know and work with so many people of different backgrounds and areas of expertise. I felt like a sponge trying to soak up as much information as possible! 

Chloe: I spent my internship working on a number of different research and competitive analysis projects designed to help Tala refine its communications. From social media to thought leadership and company values, I explored how other leading brands were presenting themselves externally and synthesized a comprehensive set of recommendations to help shape future strategy.

Stephen: There really wasn’t a typical day at Tala, and that’s exactly what I loved about my internship. Each day presented new opportunities and challenges, and I was excited to tackle them head-on. A key part of my role involved leveraging emerging software and technology to analyze the firm’s data. It was incredibly rewarding to see how this work directly contributed to helping Tala better serve its customers. 

How has working in your specific department given you a unique perspective on Tala’s overall operations?

Annika: Credit and lending have historically faced criticism for practices that can feel exploitative or misaligned with the needs of the communities they serve. What surprised me most about Tala is the foundational belief that individuals are inherently capable, resourceful, trustworthy, and deserving. It’s one thing to articulate this philosophy, and another to build an entire culture around it. Before joining, I hadn’t seen a for-profit company fully embody and operationalize this kind of values-driven approach.

Chloe: Working in communications gave me a great window into the strategic thinking behind a company’s internal and external presence. I not only learned about Tala’s business model, but also developed a profound appreciation for the dedication and hard work that goes into making its mission a reality!

Stephen: I was fortunate enough to work on a team where there was no judgement or second-guessing – only trust and constructive feedback to build on the perspectives of one another’s work. This rang true across the whole organization. 

Everyone at Tala, regardless of level or function, acts as one strong team working together to further the same mission. It was inspiring to see such a clear level of alignment and shared passion. 

How do you see your internship at Tala helping you achieve your future career goals, and what skills have you developed that you’ll carry forward?

Annika: Coming from Mastercard, which sits more on the enabler end of the financial services spectrum, it was incredibly valuable to gain experience operating within a fintech company. I’ve now seen firsthand how partnerships across the financial services ecosystem can unlock the ability to sustainably reach the majority of the world’s population. 

More practically, this internship helped sharpen my strategic thinking, stakeholder communication, and market evaluation skills. I’m excited to keep building on this experience as I head into my second year at MIT Sloan and beyond! 

Chloe: My internship at Tala strengthened my skills in competitive analysis, writing, and presentation. I’ve learned that strong communication is so important, and it’s a skill I will carry forward in my career.

Stephen: My experience at Tala this summer has given me more than I could’ve imagined! In my studies at Cornell, I am constantly looking at the intersection of how statistical analysis drives public policy outcomes. As part of Tala’s New Ventures team, I was able to apply that classroom knowledge towards actually solving real world problems. 

I developed valuable skills and learned to use tools and platforms like Python, SQL, Snowflake, Jupyter, Notebook, and Lookr – some of which were completely foreign to me before the start of the summer! I can definitively say that I’m far more confident in my ability to spot trends and formulate hypotheses from large data sets thanks to the team’s mentorship and guidance. 

If you could give one piece of advice to a future Tala intern, what would it be?

Annika: Take time to reflect on why you chose to work at a company like Tala, especially one operating in emerging markets. Challenge your assumptions, be curious, and use the experience to test what truly energizes and excites you about a role!

Chloe: Ask questions and be curious! Internships are designed to help you learn and grow. Even if a certain project doesn’t seem exciting at first, lean into it and you might end up really liking it and learning a lot.

Stephen: Tala is a place where you can really make a difference. Your work will be challenging, but it’ll give you the opportunity to meaningfully apply your skills to solve real world problems. 

My biggest piece of advice would be to be intentional about the process you use to complete a task. Ask questions, learn from others, incorporate your own intuition, and remember to reflect on the outcomes!

Inspired by their stories? Follow Tala on LinkedIn to stay informed about all our career opportunities, including future internship programs.

The post A Summer of Impact and Innovation: Reflections from Tala’s Interns appeared first on Tala.

By Shon Shampain, Director of Mobile Engineering

It’s fair to say that the introduction of the tractor as a farming tool in 1892 absolutely transformed the industry, with its output increasing exponentially. In a virtual instant, manual plowing was relegated to history.

This is very similar to what’s happening in code development given the advent of AI as the days of manually coding are waning. Engineers are now being asked to perform in a different manner that supports a higher output.

While there’s a lot being said about what’s happening in software engineering with respect to AI, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of misinformation circulating.

The Current State of AI Development

On the one hand, there are companies operating software without any AI involvement. In my opinion, they really can’t be expected to survive long term unless they are incredibly niche applications, which is very similar to boutique farming these days.

Then, there are companies doing the lion’s share of their development with AI. These early adopters have figured out the procedures necessary to support their development chain.

Left in the middle are the vast majority of companies that are still figuring things out, and introducing AI as best they can. Regardless of where they are in their journey, any company utilizing AI has realized that software engineers are critical in the process.

Up until a point, there will always be a developer calling the shots. They are the driving force behind the technology, so it’s critical to understand that using AI effectively involves creating leverage for a single developer to be able to create multiples of their previous output. This kind of leverage doesn’t really have a cap at the moment, and it’s why you hear that some companies are no longer hiring junior developers—because the seniors have found the leverage.

The senior staff that remain will have evolved to a new way of operation. As philosopher Ken Wilbur puts it, you “transcend and include.” You transcend to a higher level, but this higher level includes the core of your being that got you here in the first place. It has to be this way. Without core engineering skills, there is nothing to evolve around.

A New Chapter in Software Engineering

The new paradigm is one where most of the work is spent in one of the three main aspects of AI usage, those being: selecting the correct engine, managing the context, and working with the prompt. Gone are the long hours of carefully crafting meticulous code. Sure, some small amount of coding will still be required, but it is less and less every week because the work is one step removed.

Previously, code was generated directly. Now, code is generated from prompts that are generated directly. In a very real sense it’s similar to going from a coding role to an architecture role.

We learned quickly at Tala that sharing information regularly provides the best return on investment with regard to getting everyone up to speed. Engineers tend to like to solve problems by themselves and present work when it is known to be correct, but what’s interesting about AI is that the real speed comes when it’s collaborative.

To advance our knowledge on prompt engineering, we first had to set up the right infrastructure. We created a repository for prompts that are indexed to feature stories, a documentation page detailing meta prompting techniques, and a rich company culture that celebrates sharing both our victories in our AI journey, but more importantly the struggles.

In our sessions where we share our experiences, it’s inevitable that two or more people come across the same struggle, find the same answer, or decide to pursue different angles. Sometimes we’re able to find improvements in our process during unexpected moments that tend to cluster together.

A great example of this came from taking Figma design directly to Kotlin code. Our group was hand coding UI up to a particular point in time before some team members discovered tools that could automate the process while maintaining our coding standards and design guidelines. Almost overnight, we were able to cut down the time it takes to complete a high quality UI story––a once major task—by 50-75%.

The Quest for the Whole Codebase & the Mental Hurdle of Prompt Management

Working in a corporate environment generally involves a static set of AI engines to choose from. This means that selecting the proper engine is usually a one time effort, or at least a task that doesn’t happen very often. The real challenges for the AI engineer have to do with managing the context and working the prompt.

The context and how to manage it are an aspect of the game that has to be continually monitored. A public facing LLM has an incentive to encourage limiting the context as much as possible, both in terms of reducing the computation necessary in any query and to mitigate data privacy issues as much as possible. This is in direct conflict with most users who want AI to have as much context as possible.

The holy grail is getting the whole codebase into the context, as well as all relevant business documents from Slack conversations to design documents and feature requirements. Needless to say, most companies are still quite a far ways off.

Our efforts to get our whole codebase into the context has been limited by the significant discrepancy between current content limitations (typically a few thousand tokens) and the size of our codebase (often hundreds of thousands of lines of code).

Some vendors advertise complete project awareness, but the numbers suggest they must be cutting corners by swapping things in and out of context space. While this might work in some instances, we’ve seen subpar results in others.

In response, we’ve pursued a more programmatic approach where we control the loading of the context as we navigate the codebase. It’s been a game changer for tasks like refactoring, sweeping for specific coding patterns, or upgrading coding standards across all files, but loading files and information into the context is still a time consuming, manual process.

Similarly, prompts are an ongoing situation that developers have to deal with. The end goal is always to stay with a prompt (repeat the question, modified, over and over) until you get the exact output you want, then share it with your team so it can be re-used. This is one of the biggest challenges companies face.

Fortunately, it is more of a mental hurdle than a technological limitation. To overcome it, developers need to be encouraged to fully make the change away from analog coding and jump aboard AI development. Every time a developer stops working with a prompt and fills in the details of some code by hand, the process stagnates.

The Goals Ahead

AI is also helping the Mobile group in other ways that are not specifically related to the direct coding experience. For example, we are hooking up actions on GitHub to have AI perform code reviews after our developers share their thoughts. This is both to double check that we haven’t missed anything, and to ensure that our coding standards and architectural patterns are adhered to.

Our ultimate goal in the Mobile group is to set up an expert system where we can link documentation, Slack threads, feature stories and the codebase all together. Due to the limitations on loading context with current AI engines, this likely involves us creating a custom indexing mechanism among the data that we consider relevant to the question at hand, and then interfacing with AI properly through an API call. It’s ambitious, but being able to link all aspects of business data together would be a game changing development.

The post The AI Paradigm Shift Changing Software Engineering appeared first on Tala.

For too long, financial access has been determined by rigid, outdated rules and static ways of understanding people. Since its founding, Tala has been redefining how to deliver financial services to a global population. Tala’s AI-driven technology strategy—which layers real-time decision architecture on top of proprietary data from our customers’ behavior and preferences—has allowed Tala to personalize credit terms and improve customer experience to a degree that we don’t believe is being done in financial services. 

Today, we’re introducing our newest AI model that doesn’t just analyze customers’ past behavior, but actually predicts what loan terms will help customers succeed, on a personalized basis. Think of this new capability as a recommendation system; much like how Netflix customizes content recommendations for each profile in an account based on prior viewing patterns. 

Tala InSight is a groundbreaking, patent-pending decision model that uses causal inference to optimize individual credit limits. The model marks a turning point for the financial services industry by challenging the long-standing assumption that credit score alone should be the determinant of credit limit. Instead, Tala’s new approach identifies the causal impact of changing a customer’s credit limit—awarding each borrower the amount of credit most likely to help them succeed. 

Through AI and now causal inference, Tala InSight will allow us to identify the credit terms that actually help each of our customers grow and then deliver a credit solution for them in real time. 

What makes Tala InSight different: from correlation to causation 

Traditional lending models rely heavily on correlation: if a borrower has a higher credit score, they’re more likely to get approved for larger loans. But correlation doesn’t explain why some people succeed while others don’t. That’s where causal inference comes in.

Causal inference—a set of methods that rose to mainstream attention after economists David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens won the Nobel Prize in 2021—focuses on identifying the true effect of an action. In Tala’s case, the question isn’t just: “What kind of customers succeed?” but “How can personalization help individual customers grow over time with Tala?” 

Tala InSight simulates these counterfactual scenarios across its global customer base using billions of proprietary data points gathered over 10+ years of mobile financial behavior. By doing so, it determines which specific credit limit causes the most beneficial outcomes for each borrower—whether that means increasing, maintaining, or even lowering a loan offer.

This represents a major step-change in credit modeling: a personalized, assumption-free approach that adapts to each customer’s real-world behavior and goals.

Early results: lower default, higher customer value 

The impact has been immediate and measurable. Most impressively, Tala customers across all credit profiles are taking out larger loans and defaulting far less. As a result, Tala InSight is delivering a 10% increase in three-month Customer Lifetime Value compared to Tala’s prior score-based policy—an extraordinary lift for an already scaled product.

This result is a testament to the power of personalization: when customers receive the credit that truly works for them, they are more likely to succeed. This means improved business performance for Tala and the right product at the right time for our customers.

A breakthrough in financial access

Tala, to our knowledge, is the first company in the world to deploy causal inference at scale in the service of financial inclusion. Tala InSight is the result of a cross-disciplinary team with deep expertise in machine learning, behavioral economics, and applied statistics. By combining high-quality behavioral data with advanced statistical infrastructure, Tala is building a modern credit system designed to help people succeed for the long term – not just provide a solution for one point in time. 

The credit decisioning use case is just the beginning. Our goal is to apply assumption-free, personalized causal thinking across all aspects of the Tala experience to unlock even greater customer and business value. 

At Tala, we’re not just building financial products; we’re building a more inclusive and equitable financial future. By harnessing the power of advanced data science and machine learning, we’re proving that personalized, data-driven lending isn’t just a theory—it’s a reality that’s changing lives and setting new standards for the entire industry.

The post Tala Unveils Breakthrough AI Model Using Causal Inference to Expand Financial Access appeared first on Tala.

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.

The post The 2025 State of Tala: Building a Global Financial Infrastructure Company  appeared first on Tala.

As Chief Product Officer, he’ll oversee product strategy, with a focus on product innovation and solutions that combine Tala’s deep proprietary data moat with AI, blockchain, and other emerging technologies. 

Tell us about your background!

I was born in France and have been fortunate to build my career across three continents, including Europe, Australia, and the U.S. 

I’ve built my career as a product strategy leader focused on financial innovation—delivering breakthrough solutions at the intersection of AI, crypto, and next-gen payment infrastructure. I’m passionate about transforming financial systems to be more inclusive, efficient, and accessible for people around the world.

Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to help scale product teams from the ground up and  take two companies public—experiences that taught me a lot about building with intention and navigating rapid growth. 

Whether it was democratizing access to data and payments at Westfield Labs, reimagining how people use everyday digital assets at Bakkt, or improving how money moves across borders at Lightspark, I’ve always been drawn to complex challenges with the potential for real-world impact.

What specifically drew you to Tala? 

I was drawn to Tala by its mission and the fundamental belief that a person’s financial potential isn’t defined by how much money they have in the bank, but by what you can unlock when you invest in that potential. The company’s pioneering use of alternative data and underwriting has been a powerful force for global financial inclusion, and I see a real opportunity to build on that foundation.

I also really resonated with something I’ve heard Shivani (Tala’s founder & CEO) say a few times. “Crypto is often associated with the global elite, but we believe its greatest potential lies with the global majority.” With that in mind, I’m eager to apply my expertise and background in creating new ways to identify customers, unlock access to liquidity, and leverage modern technologies to expand people’s access to financial services.

Do you have a unique philosophy or approach to building products that you’ve carried throughout your career? 

I’ve always approached product development with a deep sense of curiosity and openness. The best ideas often emerge from unexpected places—so I prioritize cross-functional collaboration, staying plugged into emerging technologies, and learning from how others are tackling complex problems. Innovation is rarely a straight line, and I believe the most impactful solutions come from a willingness to listen, test, and explore.

At the heart of strong product leadership is clarity, focus, and execution. That means aligning teams around a clear vision, making smart trade-offs, and continuously validating what’s working—and what’s not. I’ve learned that great products are built not just through bold ideas, but through consistent, rigorous decision-making and a relentless commitment to solving real customer pain.

Equally important is being customer centric. You can’t build meaningful products without deeply understanding the context, constraints, and aspirations of the people you’re building for. That’s why I was especially inspired to learn that so many Tala employees live in the markets they serve. That level of proximity is rare—and powerful. It grounds the work in reality and purpose, and I can’t wait to learn from the team and help shape the next wave of impact.

What trends or technologies are you most excited about shaping the future of financial technology?

I’m really excited about the convergence of AI and tokenized assets. While tokenization isn’t entirely new, it’s starting to go mainstream, and the technology can empower individuals with more control over their assets and personal data.

I’m also happy to see the momentum around global infrastructure improvements, such as the disruption of Swift and the broader adoption of modern financial protocols.

This shift has the potential to bring the next four billion users into the global financial system with the same level of access and opportunity that many of us already benefit from.

The post Meet Nicolas Cabrera, Tala’s New Chief Product Officer appeared first on Tala.

At Tala, we’ve always believed that financial agency starts with radical trust in people’s potential, especially when they’ve been consistently overlooked by the legacy financial system we’ve inherited. 

For more than a decade, we’ve worked to turn that belief into action: building a global financial infrastructure company that unlocks financial access for millions of people around the world so they can thrive. Today, we’re proud to share new independent research that affirms just how powerful access can be. 

Real-World Impact

The peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the University of British Columbia, is the first to show that mobile phone data can be used to objectively measure financial health. 

Published in the Accounting Review – a leading academic journal in the fields of economics, finance, and accounting – the research also shows that our digital-lending has made a significant positive impact on the financial well-being of our customers in Kenya across various measures. 

Using fully de-identified and anonymized datasets, researchers conducted a causal inference analysis of mobile-phone-based indicators of financial wellbeing, such as monetary transactions and balances, mobility, and self-reported income and employment. 

Among the core findings: 

• The power of data: Mobile phone data can objectively assess financial well-being, especially for those without formal financial records.
• Digital lending drives measurable financial improvements: Access to digital credit led to improvements in borrowers’ financial well-being across all measures they explored.
• Income and employment: Self-reported monthly income increased by 20.8% and the likelihood of being employed or self-employed rose by 23.5%.
• Financial transactions and balances: Borrowers’ average transaction amounts increased by 14.9% and they showed improvements in their mobile banking balances.
• Mobility: Access to digital credit resulted in greater mobility, with borrowers traveling to 9.4% more cities.

The findings offer robust, data-driven validation of what our customers have told us anecdotally for years: when you meet people where they are, you unlock real lasting impact. To date, more than 10 million customers have been able to handle financial shocks, manage household expenses, and leverage our credit to start and scale businesses worldwide. 

Our founder & CEO Shivani Siroya has pointed out that everyone likes to say they’re driving financial inclusion, but it’s rarely measured at scale. And this research doesn’t just highlight Tala’s potential – it quantifies it and provides independent, empirical evidence that proves our approach is delivering meaningful change and fulfilling the promise of financial technology.

What’s Next for Tala

Tala’s mission is to unleash economic power of the global majority, and that includes improving people’s financial wellbeing. While Shivani never set out to build a credit lending company, it quickly became clear that credit was the most effective way to test her thesis on the power of data as the foundation of the infrastructure needed to improve the financial lives of the global majority. 

Today, we’re expanding our platform with AI and blockchain to create new value for our customers beyond credit, and we’re excited to deepen our presence in new and existing markets across Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.

With this research, we’re more confident than ever in Tala’s positioning to be the leading financial platform enabling financial agency across the globe. 

Learn More

Follow the link here to explore the full research report, and be sure to check out our most recent impact report to learn how we measure the financial-wellbeing of our customers year-round. 

Congratulations to coauthors AJ Chen, Omri Even-Tov, Jung Koo Kang, and Regina Wittenberg-Moerman, and huge thanks to our incredible Data Science Team whose work helped make this possible.

The post The Power of Data: New Research Links Tala’s Digital Lending to Improved Financial Well-Being appeared first on Tala.