We’ve updated the financial education in our app! Tala’s new Learn Center allows you to browse the latest articles on all things personal finance. Designed to help you navigate the credit process and everyday financial challenges, our content covers topics such as saving, business, loans, goal setting and more.

To view the new Learn Center, update the app to the latest version. Then click “Learn” at the bottom of your screen to start exploring today. 

The post Discover something new in Tala’s Learn Center appeared first on Tala.

Through the fund, Tala will offer specialized 0% interest loans directly to small businesses providing necessities, such as health-care, food, education, and related logistics. This is just the beginning for the Rebuild Fund. We are currently evaluating partnership opportunities and additional ways to assist customers and their communities by providing timely products and tools.

For more information on the fund and trusted safety resources on COVID-19, please visit the following sites: 

• Kenya COVID-19 Rebuild Fund 
• The Philippines COVID-19 Rebuild Fund 
• Mexico COVID-19 Rebuild Fund 

Interested in partnering with us on your COVID-19 support efforts or contributing to the fund? Tala’s advanced technology and infrastructure ensures that 100% of all contributions go directly to those in need – with no fees, no commission, and no hassle to the recipient. Please contact us at partners@tala.co for more information.

The post Tala launches COVID-19 Rebuild Fund to support vulnerable communities appeared first on Tala.

Simply click “Need help?” in the middle of your home screen. 

There, you’ll find all information about Tala, such as how to repay, cash out, address issues with your account, and more. You can also directly contact Tala’s customer care team. You’ll be able to view a complete history of all your previous conversations with Tala, even if you change phones. 

To access the new and improved Tala Help Center, you must update to the latest version of the Tala app!

The post Need help? Find everything you need in the app! appeared first on Tala.

By Rachel Brown, Product Manager, and Alex Tamoykin, Tech Lead.

In 2019, Tala’s Product and Engineering teams partnered to solve a number of complex problems for our business and our customers in emerging markets. In this article, we share how a new architectural design helped us drive sustainable growth for the company as well as solve one of our customers’ top pain points.

Architectural Design

The new architectural design we built involves SQS queues and AWS lambda functions. We decided to use this design because of several factors:

1. Resiliency. Each event has business value, so we wanted to ensure that no events are dropped under heavy traffic. Placing events on a durable SQS queue as they occur allows us to retain them as well as retry delivering them in case of a processing failure.
2. Elasticity. One of the main advantages of serverless technology is the ability to use resources on demand. AWS lambdas are only billed at the times when they are invoked.
3. Flexibility. Managing events in a queue and lambdas allows us to swap out each component easily, which opens up more possibilities for future use cases.

Case Study 1: Sending post-install data

Like many businesses, Tala’s marketing team uses digital advertising channels to introduce our product to new audiences. Early last year, the effectiveness of Tala’s Facebook and Google ads were being primarily measured by install events (i.e., users who download the app). We quickly identified an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of campaigns by optimizing ads for  post-install events rather than downloads.

The marketing team identified several high-priority post-install events, which we set up triggers for on backend services. When an event is triggered, a file is sent to an SQS queue. The lambda function then retrieves this information from the queue and passes it to our marketing platform API. This architecture is much more resilient and accurate than the team’s previous client-side event tracking solution.

Tala’s engineering team designed, built, and tested the new framework over several sprints. Our marketing team then ran a scaled Facebook campaign and realized a significantly higher return on ad spend when optimizing for post-install events compared to install events, in addition to maintaining 100% uptime and data accuracy.

Case Study 2: Preventing fraud

In emerging markets such as Kenya, the second-hand phone market is massive. Consumers are also sensitive to download and storage size due to device and data constraints. Because Tala uses device data (with user permission) to underwrite personal loans, the following is a common scenario:

• Person A installs app on phone and signs up for Tala
• Person A sells phone to Person B
• Person B cannot sign up for Tala on phone

Tala’s legacy device management rules, used to prevent fraud, were blocking tens of thousands of new users per month from signing up and were one of the largest drivers of customer support tickets globally. In addition, this problem had grown 3x in volume over the past 2 years and was expected to continue increasing exponentially the longer the company operated in a given market. 

In this situation, we launched a set of new device management rules and a lambda function. The lambda stored a large amount of event data in a predefined format in a Cassandra database. Doing some pre-processing of the data upfront allowed us to achieve constant database lookups to identify the device ownership instantly. We enabled new users to more seamlessly sign up for the app while decreasing customer support tickets related to device issues by 91%.

The post Leveraging AWS Lambda to drive product growth appeared first on Tala.

That’s how the Tala Community was born. We started with a small group on Facebook, but quickly learned that our community wanted more robust information on how to manage and grow their personal finances.

With that, we’re proud to announce the Tala Community platform — a new digital space where customers can access free financial education courses and learn from one another. We’ll be rolling this out to customers in the next few months.

Here’s a sneak peek of what the platform looks like: 

The post Introducing the Tala Community appeared first on Tala.

Quang Tran, Director of Product Impact & Insights

Following the results of an internally conducted impact study in Kenya, Tala launched a new in-house research division, Product Impact & Insights (PII). As the team continues to grow, Quang Tran, Director of PII and Tala’s former product team lead, explains where the idea came from, why it matters, and how PII is working to keep customers at the center of everything Tala does.

The importance of measuring (and defining) impact

At Tala, our passion isn’t just building a product, it’s about solving a problem for the globally underserved. In order to better understand the difference we make in our customer’s lives, and identify the areas where we need to grow, we conducted a study last year on Tala’s impact in Kenya — our longest-standing market. Now, as our team continues to grow, we want to share what we found, why it matters, and how it’s helping us design life changing products for the financially underserved.

The study was a joint effort between myself, then a product team lead, and Tala’s data analytics lead, Shannon Yates. At the start, we realized there were no metrics that captured what we wanted to learn about our impact, so we hypothesized and defined them ourselves. Since unlocking financial access, choice and control for billions of underserved people requires both short and long-term results, we chose to assess our impact in two categories: immediate and long-term impact.

Here’s a quick look at what we found:

• Immediate impact is readily measurable. We validated that Tala has been key in helping people smooth their income and expenses to have more stability. Of customers surveyed, nearly 8/10 felt increased relief or happiness about their financial situation after taking a Tala loan, including even after they pay the loan back. Studies have shown that people under stress tend to make poorer financial decisions, so this is an important testament to our impact.
• Many customers leverage Tala to grow financially. Although Tala loans start out small and grow afterwards, our study revealed that many Tala customers can use these loans to grow their income. Some customers start with a small side hustle, while others are already established micro-entrepreneurs. Either way, they take Tala credit to buy stock to sell at a profit, or to weather downturns in their business to maintain momentum. We would love to study these customers more longitudinally to understand how they succeed.
• Almost 90% of all customers had significant unexpected financial expenses. We have to provide more flexibility for our customers. Many of our customers lead unpredictable lives and we see it come through in repayment patterns. For example, we learned that even salaried employees can experience instability due to their employer. As we closed the study, we were left with a desire to investigate the other challenges our customers faced and questions like, ‘How can we help the customer reach stability and plan for the future? How do we get to a place where people feel like they’re in control of their money?’

The team taking off

The biggest positive takeaways from the study — that Tala credit helps customers finance micro-businesses, weather unexpected emergencies, and decrease financial stress — allowed us to better understand our short and long-term value. Beyond that, we unearthed more questions and a desire to dig deeper. Luckily, we have an amazing, growing team to do just that.

In the past year, Tala created the Product Impact & Insights team to work hand-in-hand with the product team to ensure that we build great products that change our users’ lives. That means staying close to our customers so that we build the right thing, build that thing right, and understand the results to improve future iterations. As PII’s team of researchers 
continues to grow, we have three specific goals:

• First, conduct strategic research on user problems to identify new opportunities for Tala. Here we do problem discovery to inform ideation. This is an important step that product teams often don’t have the luxury of doing but is critical to human-centered design. If you are solving a problem that doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to the user, then it’s very difficult to succeed.
• Second, ensure Tala ships solutions that are effective and intuitive to use. Here, we work with product designers and product managers to ideate and test various concepts, aiming to weed out the bad ideas from good as quickly as possible, and then hone usability in designs.
• And finally, ensure that every Tala team member has shared knowledge of solutions’ impact from the user’s perspective. This helps the team to truly learn with each iteration, getting smarter and improving the flywheel of product development each time.

In the coming years, Tala is excited to create a unique process to bring well-designed products to underserved users in frontier markets. And we want to do it at scale. To succeed, we will blend together the tools of ethnography and empathy (the “why”), with technology to measure what users do at scale (the “what”). It’s not one or the other, you must be fluent in both, and our team is up for the challenge.

Click here to read Tala full impact report in Kenya! Share your thoughts and ideas with us at people@tala.co.

Want to build with Quang, Shannon, and the rest of #TeamTala? We’re hiring! We are user researchers, data scientists, engineers, customer experience designers, marketers, and finance geeks all passionate about extending financial freedom to the billions of underserved people across the globe. We believe in people from every type of background — around the world, and within our company.

Come join our global team at Tala.co/Careers!

The post Measuring Impact: How to make your customers your best product designers appeared first on Tala.

I called this company InVenture — a made-up word that captured what I wanted to do and why. I wanted financial services to be more inclusive of all people. I wanted to do this work in partnership with people. I also wanted this work to be an adventure — a journey that our company would take alongside our customers, to help them move from subsistence living into the financial mainstream.

But the solving of this problem has also been an adventure. Four years ago, I was spending months with women micro-entrepreneurs throughout Africa and India, recording their daily transactions and expenditures by hand to try to build their credit history. I couldn’t have imagined that today we’d be building these scores in an instant, from thousands of miles away and from the thousands of data points on their smartphones.

Today we’re a data science and mobile technology company with offices in Santa Monica, Nairobi, and Manila. In the past two years, we’ve moved beyond building just credit scores to become a company that will also take the first risk on our customers and lend to them directly. But today we’re also exploring what other critical services these financial identities might unlock, and we’re moving as fast as we can to take our mobile financial services platform into new markets where we know we can have an impact.

That’s why today we’re transitioning the company name InVenture and rebranding as Tala — which is already the name of our financial services app in Kenya and the Philippines. As our journey takes us into new countries all over the world, we want a singular name that is resonant in many cultures and languages, and we want our colleagues everywhere to work proudly for our singular vision of broadening financial opportunity.

We want our colleagues everywhere to work proudly for our singular vision of broadening financial opportunity.

Tala means many things in many languages, including rhythm in Sanskrit, star in Tagalog, and tree in Arabic — all symbolic of how we design and approach our product. Our new logo, with its shape evoking a drum and a star, is also a circle — capturing the sense of community and inclusivity that we strive to build both within our company and around the world. But the singular orange arrow reminds us of our commitment to each person, our desire to see them as one of a kind, and our goal of building customized products that work uniquely for them.

As we continue on this journey as Tala — with each other, with our customers, and with our incredible investors and partners — we’ll continue to stay true to the company values that have guided us from the beginning. We’ll be nimble and adaptive to change, like our customers. We’ll stay committed to excellence, bringing out the best in each other and in our products. We’ll be meritocratic, valuing people of all levels and backgrounds and experiences both in our office and in our markets. And we’ll continue to show up to work every day because we believe in providing all people everywhere with more choice and control over their financial lives.

Onward and upward!

The post Why Tala? appeared first on Tala.