You're listening to leaders in lending from Upstart, a podcast dedicated to helping consumer lenders grow their programs and improve their product offerings. Each week, hear decision makers in the finance industry offer insights into the future of the lending industry. Best practices around digital transformation, and more. Let's get into the show.
Welcome to Leaders in Lending. I'm your host, Jeff Keltner. This week, we're sharing with you a slightly older episode. My conversation with Upstart co-founder and head of product and machine learning, Paul Gooh. This is one of the first episodes we had.
Paul dives in great depth into the history of Upstart, how we chose to start the business and unsecured lending, and quite a bit on the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the overall lending process. Where Upstart is doing that today, how we do it, and where we see it going in the future.
If you're interested in any of those things, this is a great conversation. Without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Paul Gooh.
如果你对这些事情有兴趣,这将是一场很棒的谈话。不多说了,现在请享受与Paul Gooh的谈话吧。
Paul, thanks for joining me today.
保罗,感谢今天和我一起参加。
Of course. Happy to be here.
当然。很高兴能来这里。
Yeah, so I want to start with when you and I first met, or really, when you got into Upstart, because you were an undergrad at Yale studying interesting things and decided that it was worthy of your time to drop out of school and found a company in the lending industry, which is maybe not what every teenager in their late teens thinks at the time. So walk me through a little bit what it was about this space that was interesting to you and you felt like something you had to go and do.
Yeah, so when I was in school, I was studying computer science and economics, spent time sort of preparing myself for sort of life in a sort of quant hedge fund world. Spend some time there. And essentially what I realized was there were a huge number of very smart people applying novel technologies to solve an incredibly narrow problem, the problem of slightly inefficient securities prices on a variety of sort of traded securities. So that was great, but it wasn't obvious that that was solving important problems for a lot of sort of real normal people. And I thought if you could simply take the same techniques that were used there and apply them to a problem that would affect real people, you could do something that was very important.
So that was sort of the first half of the story. Then as it sort of I got to thinking about where that application might come from, the sort of most obvious place was in the sort of closest to Jason Z. Instead of incorporate finance moving over to personal finance. And the more I learned about it, the more I realized that huge numbers of people have very limited access to credit.
Essentially anyone who isn't born with money has a hard time getting access to money before they've built up a long rich credit history. And of course, that means for the vast majority of people, there are at least some limits to their ability to get credit when they need it most. And if we simply applied the techniques of machine learning and AI that had really been demonstrated to be incredibly powerful in other domains and applied them here, we could do something very important for people.
I love the mission that you guys started with directly around helping the consumers. I am curious when I look at the consumer lending space, there's lots of kinds of loans and the personal loan, the unsecured loan, what banks maybe have called a signature loan, it's kind of a small space overall in the consumer lending ecosystem. Why was that the place when you said, hey, we can use these techniques to improve access? Why was that the kind of loan as we were starting up, sorry, that she said, this is where we're going to focus our time versus some of the larger categories like mortgages or key locks or auto loans or something in that nature.
The first is if you want to demonstrate the efficacy of machine learning applied to something that's been done a very long time by many, many companies, many banks, you want to sort of apply in the place where it's going to matter the most and be the hardest.
And that's an unsecured personal loans. If you think about every other asset class, car loans, home loans, they're backed by something, even credit cards are sort of backed by the further utility of being able to use your credit card in the future.
When you give someone $20,000 and say, please pay me back, you're really backed by nothing. And what that means is you really have to be very good at making a decision about who you're going to lend to and who you're not going to lend to or else you will very soon be out of business.
And that meant that if we could do a better job of underwriting the risk here using AI, we would be able to generate incredible economic gains for both sort of the lender and the consumer. And so that's what we were able to do.
The second reason is that from the consumer's perspective, the unsecured personal loan by its very nature is the most flexible kind of loan. It can be used for any purpose. It's not something that you can only get sort of at these specific moments in your life when you're buying a car or a house.
It's something that you really can get at any time for any reason. And in that sense, it was the broadest product, it's a natural starting place. And we always felt that if we did those first and second things, it would be much easier to go from personal loans to other types of loan products, which we're now doing, then the other way around where if you start with something really safe and really limited, it would be very hard to get out of that box and go to other spaces.
Interesting. I don't think starting with the riskiest space is the way many lenders approach the space, but I take your point that it's kind of where the technologies make the biggest difference.
What do you think the biggest shift is? I mean, I know many lenders have talked about ML or AI and we talk about ML or AI a lot in terms of the context of how we underwrite credit. But talk to me a little bit about what you think the shift is from a traditional approach to lending to one that's really ML or AI driven and how you approach the question of identifying risk in a different way.
Yeah. But these words are often used as buzzwords and sometimes they cease to lose their meaning because of that. But when we say them, what we really mean is principally two things.
The first is that we've taken an approach of using an immense quantity of data in the problem. Unlike in traditional underwriting, where only a handful of data points are used, we use over a thousand variables. We use millions of rows of repayment data to actually train the model.
Those data points that we're using are a mix of both traditional and non-traditional data points. We really are sort of seeking the broadest possible set of data that can be used to drive signal about who's going to pay back low.
The second half is really about the way that we learn from that data. So traditionally, a person would go look at the data and try to draw insights from it or they might use a classical technique like a regression technique that essentially means fitting a straight line through the data.
Now the problem is that while they're very easy to draw and understand, they don't fit the world all that well because most of what happens in the world is not straight lines. It depends on actual interactions between different variables, between the different factors that drive whether a person is going to pay back or not, when they're going to pay back, if they're going to prepay, when they're going to prepay.
And so to actually make precise individualized predictions at the month level, at the borrower level, what we need to do is we need to actually use sort of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. These are algorithms that actually are highly flexible, are able to sort of find patterns and sort of tens or hundreds of relationships in our variables interacting together and the relationships between them.
And when we sort of combine that kind of big data approach with the sort of modern algorithm approach, that's really what we call AI lending.
当我们将那种大数据方法和现代算法方法结合起来时,就形成了我们所称的人工智能借贷。
Interesting.
有趣。
When you think about the uplift you've got, and we can talk about the actual increases in accuracy and how you see that, but then you talked about more data, both in terms of how you think of data as a spreadsheet, both in terms of more columns, more data points, per applicant, and more rows, more historical data look at.
I know there's also the use of alternative data points and models. How do you think about those different components and how important each of them is or isn't to the improvement in accuracy? Is there one of those that's really pulling the bulk of the weight and driving the outcome as they're a split?
I mean, how do you think about what's really driving the efficacy of the models' upsides building?
我是说,你怎么看待模型优势建设真正推动的因素是什么?
Yeah, so two answers there. The first is I would say these sort of different components work together in harmony, and that's not just sort of a generic talking point. It's actually really important because if you think about using a high powered machine learning algorithm, you tried to use it with only five variables. Well, it's not going to do anything more for you than the straight line because you've hardly given it enough data to work with.
It's not going to have enough to draw and to actually use the sort of powerful, complex, non-linear learning patterns that it's capable of. Similarly, if you were to take over a thousand variables and try to plug them into a straight line model, it wouldn't work. The model would also not be able to, it would tell you that 900 of the thousand variables are useless because it turns out that if you say, I'm only going to use this variable in a straight line way, independent completely of the other 909 variables, well, most of them actually aren't that useful.
Most of the data is useful only in the context of certain other variables and usually in a way that's highly non-linear. So they'd really do go together. I would say though, if we had to sort of pry it apart and we do for certain of our products where we are sort of selling subsets of our model where someone can just access the algorithms on traditional credit data without necessarily going through all the alternative data, we sell that product because if you had to pick a single thing that was most important, you would go with the more powerful enhanced learning algorithms run on traditional credit data, that sort of first step gives you a sort of very significant boost to accuracy, but of course layering in that additional data takes you that much further.
Let me just dig in that for a little bit because I know you said traditional credit data, but many people think of traditional credit data as 10, 15 points of data off a credit file. What do you really mean when you say traditional credit data? Because my understanding is it's a little more sophisticated than just a credit score or a credit score and a couple of extra data points, but you're digging a little deeper than typical.
So when a lender pulls credit, they're really getting two different kinds of things, really three different kinds of things. The first thing, the most basic package is they are getting a record of every single transaction that a consumer has had that has to do with credit. Every single payment, mispayment, delinquency, application for credit, all of that is recorded on a person's credit history. The second thing they get is they get the credit bureaus interpretation of that data.
The credit bureaus say, well, let's summarize that this sort of vast history into a handful of data points. Most commonly they'll tell you, for example, this person has had three credit inquiries in the last six months or this person has been delinquent twice in the last two years. And they'll have a handful of common summary statistics about a person's credit report. Now the third is they'll actually pass that same information into a model that is built by sort of third party scoring agency, most commonly, FICO.
And they'll output scores that say this score was based on some of these summary statistics, things like the number of inquiries in the last six months. And so you get these sort of three things, the sort of raw, complete history of a person's credit life, the summarized statistics from the credit bureau. And then finally, the sort of super summarized scores. And in sort of traditional credit scoring, a lot of the approach is to rely on the latter two categories, either the summarized statistics or even the sort of completely compressed credit scores.
And when we talk about credit data at Upstart, we are talking about the full rich raw history, which is often highly unstructured, can be permuted in almost infinitely many ways. And so there's actually a lot of really interesting things that can be done using machine learning algorithms to figure out how to generate the most signal from this history in a way that doesn't just sort of completely overfit the data or completely cause your sort of servers to melt down because you're sort of trying to run something that is sort of too big of a computation. And that's where I think a lot of the interesting work we do with traditional credit data actually happens.
So you talk about servers melting down and thought of that. We have servers in the Upstart that would melt down. I think they're all somewhere in the cloud, but not our servers. They're not our servers. They want to melt down Amazon servers and burn down a database.
But how do you think about the trends and technology that have enabled us? I mean, is there a reason from a technology point of view that these kinds of capabilities are coming to the fore now versus five or 10 years ago? There's something that's kind of shifted that's opened this up to be more accessible or possible today.
Yeah, absolutely. I'd say the first big thing is compute availability. You know, when I say, and when I sort of jokingly said servers melting down, I of course didn't actually need them melting down. But I really meant was just sort of not having enough compute to do the work you want to do in this sort of space of time that you want to do it.
And even today in a world where you can infuri arbitrarily scale up the number of EC2 machines that you've got on the Amazon cloud, we still are actually constrained by the amount of compute we can access. And the way that manifests itself is when we run into compute problems, we start seeing run times that take longer and longer.
So for our full model training process, we've often in our history got into places where the complexity of the learning algorithms interacted with the sort of amount of compute and the efficiency of the sort of compute we had available to us. That we faced run processes spanning 24, 48, 72 hours for a single run of the model training.
Now, you imagine that you do that once. It doesn't sound so bad, but actually you don't want to just do it once. What you really want to do is you want to find the optimal model, the sort of most predictive model among the universe possible models. And that means you want to search. And when you want to do search, you need to sort of go through many iterations of different models.
If each run is taking you 48 hours and you've got 1000 different runs to do, you're looking at a multi-year project to find a model. And so of course, that's not going to work very well.
Now that's sort of the state of things today. And a lot of the investments we make are in improving the efficiency of those learning algorithms and figuring out how can we short cut the search so that instead of taking 48 hours, it only takes 24 hours. And instead of doing a thousand sort of searches, we only do have to do 20 searches. And suddenly you've got a problem that's much more tractable.
Now, if you rewind back 10 years, you're looking at a compute that's a fraction, a sort of almost an order of magnitude less than what was available today at the same cost. So it just sort of been much, much harder.
Of course, in parallel with the sort of improvement in the sort of underlying sort of infrastructure, there has been many advances in the actual algorithmic technology advances made sort of both in the kind of theoretical math and statistics side and also in the sort of implemented computer science side. And of course, we benefit from a lot of those advances and we're applying them to the sort of unique problems of lending.
Yeah, it's fascinating how those two things have interplayed the availability of compute and then the sophistication of algorithms available because it's a compute available to use them and they kind of feed each other a little bit. It's interesting.
Now, the other thing I know, I'm sorry, kind of focuses on is not just the credit underwriting, but actually the process simplification, right, the mission statement, it's effortless credit, right, enable effortless credit based on true risk. How do you think about the application of these kind of technologies to effortless? What does that mean and how do you go about reducing the effort of the friction in the lending process?
Yeah, you know, I've started to really think of these not as two distinct things, but as part of one thing, which is the one hand, when you think about the term underwriting, really it is just everything you are doing to ascertain the risk of this loan. It doesn't matter whether you're doing it at the front of your process or the back of your process. It's all for the sake of one thing, which is you want to make sure that the person you're giving a loan to, the high chance of paying it back.
And whether you're doing that by pulling their credit report or by verifying their income, it's sort of all for the same purpose. It's all underwriting.
无论是通过查看他们的信用报告还是核实他们的收入,都是为了达到同样的目的。它都是核保。
Now, the flip side of that is there are, and always have been ways to gather more information about people that create a lot of cost and friction. And in some sense, there's almost a perfect trade-off between these things. You could decide to follow a person around every day for their whole life, and you probably have a pretty high chance of figuring out the sort of person who's going to pay you back, even without any fancy AI, right?
But of course, that's going to be incredibly costly and probably not a lot of— Big brother as much. Not a lot of consumers want to sign up for that service, right? So you're going to kind of scare everybody away. And essentially, that's what we've seen.
There's an incredible trade-off curve where the more work you ask the user to do, the more they go away, and oftentimes those conversion falls are very substantial. You're talking about on the order of you ask someone for a document. You can expect maybe 20% fewer people to make it through your process. And if you're sort of a traditional lender that sometimes asks for several documents, you can just sort of do the math on that and look at what kind of conversion loss you're looking at.
And so for us, we think of it as there is this efficient frontier of trade-offs between the information quality you gather and the amount of work that you put in front of your user. And the sort of real magic of our AI system is that we can really achieve much higher levels of this frontier.
And we can choose between much higher combinations of information quality and ease of process for the consumer. Where for the same level of work, we can get much more information from the consumer. Or for the same level of information, we can do it with much less work to the consumer.
That's manifested itself today in our combination of extremely high underwriting accuracy, where we often see multiples of the accuracy that traditional sort of credit models can achieve. And at the same time, we're doing that while over 70% of people that get loans with us are getting those loans in a fully automated instant way, meaning there's no documentation that they had to upload, you know, sort of human touch on the upstart side, no waiting around, no leaving the session, just sort of all one smooth instant digital experience.
Yeah, I want to talk about that instant for a second, because I've talked to a lot of lenders and particularly in the context of online loans and particularly in the context of, you know, walk up or net new traffic, which my understanding is the vast majority of upstart loans are going to first time borrowers, people without an established relationship that the movement to online with walk up results in very high levels of fraud.
So as you talk about 70% no documentation, no kind of manual review, how do you think about preventing high rates of fraud from entering the systems that's happening? Because that's kind of, I think, an astounding stat for a walk up traffic business in an online context versus what most lenders have typically seen.
Yeah, I mean, the vast majority all well over 90% of business that we do is for sort of first time customers in the whole upstart ecosystem and for a particular bank partner of ours. And of course, there are, there are a lot of fraud attempts in that system.
And so I think one of the challenges with moving from kind of traditional retail lending over to online is you just have this sort of huge exposure to fraud risk. And we've seen many different kinds of fraud risk.
Of course, sort of first party fraud or someone pretends to be, you know, or a third party fraud where someone pretends to be someone else's first party where someone just has no intention of repaying. There's sort of internet specific behaviors of one of the most common ones is called loan stacking, which didn't really make sense in the kind of analog world where, you know, it would be a lot of work to go to a whole bunch of different banks and try to get loans.
But online it turns out you can open five tabs and be on five different lenders websites around the same time. And you can get loans with all of them before any of them find out from each other or from the credit bureaus that anything's happened.
And so you really have to sort of prevent against all these different kinds of risks. And that's sort of a lot of the special sauce of the system that we've built up is we've built dedicated ML models targeting each of these kinds of risks.
We've built them into the right points in the flow where what we really have is sort of a thing of it as kind of a sort of decision tree of at the right sort of moments we're asking the models to sort of past judgment on the probability of certain risks.
And depending on that risk level, we can then take different actions, mitigate that risk. If we success, we do it. Great. If we don't, then there's sort of this question again of whether it would be worth it to sort of take another action. And so at each step, you're sort of asking a series of kind of mathematical questions.
And if the answer is the risk is high enough, then you need to sort of take the next action in a series of actions and kind of building that system over the years. We really developed the expertise to keep fraud to really minimal rates.
We're talking tens of basis points of sort of fraud across the platform, which again, in the context of almost completely kind of first time unknown online, fully automated sort of loans is, as we think, a really powerful statistic.
Interesting. How do you think about what happened during, I mean, the last 12 months have been kind of unprecedented time, both from a macroeconomic environment point of view and from an unemployment, potentially fraud drivers point of view. How have you thought about your model's ability to perform through this kind of unprecedented economic experience, kind of disruption to daily life? And what are the results you've seen? Anything you've learned that you think would be interesting to the listeners about what you've seen in your experience over the last 12, 13 months through this kind of very strange environment.
Yeah, extremely strange environment. Lending, of course, we always talk a lot about the economic cycle. When times are good, everybody seems to be lending. Sometimes are bad, no one wants to be lending, and when times are good, everyone's just sort of worried about when times are bad. And one of the things we've always believed is that there's sort of this itself, this kind of fascination with the economic cycle and the sort of focus of when the bad part of the cycle is coming, is itself a symptom of sort of an approach to lending that is not particularly robust or predictive.
It means that lenders aren't really able to predict very well the sort of individual consumers level of risk. They're really just doing a saying, well, overall times are good now, and we assume right now we're going to get a 5% default rate. But when times are bad, that 5 is going to change to 10. And it's sort of just a kind of like almost like throwing paint against the wall approach and sort of when the seasons change, like everything goes from good to bad. Our belief has always been that really the variation between individual borrowers far outweighs the variation between macroeconomic periods. And it's very clear that's the case when you actually zoom into the data and you see that even in the toughest economic climates, the vast majority of people in sort of low risk buckets still end up repaying their loans. The most interesting question is actually which individuals are actually in those low risk buckets and not sort of which period are you in.
So now going back to this past year, of course, was sort of a very interesting time not only was it a turn in the economic cycle, but a very unusual one. And essentially what we saw was that we saw certainly a lot of changes to consumer behavior. But in aggregate, we actually saw that the sort of loan performance of the sort of entire ecosystem across all our bank partners, all our sort of capital markets partners, the returns that they were expecting to earn, they pretty much across the board consistently achieved or beat over the course of the last year in spite of pandemic.
Now having said that, I think a lot of that does have to do with some of the sort of unique circumstances that happened here, which is another piece of what we've sort of really built into our model. And that's about being able to respond to the sort of macarate, economic changes on really a dime. I mean, when unemployment rates started going up in Q2 of 2020, that was a time where it was really important to be able to respond very quickly and precisely to those sort of changes in unemployment rates. And you wanted to be able to know like in which sectors, occupations, et cetera, there was extra unemployment risks that you needed to be modeling in and how to model it relative to traditional norms. And you wanted your model to handle that because the alternative was sort of getting a group of people to sit around the table and kind of like do some back-of-the-bomb load math and then just sort of have to like take a blunt cut to your credit box.
And that sort of really just means that you are either going to still take on too much risk or you're going to essentially stop running your business during this challenging time. Well, what we found was we were able to continue approving a significant number of people for loans and have those people pay back because they were the right people to lend to. On the sort of reverse side, as things started normalizing, again, you want that system that can respond very dynamically to updating macroeconomic data. That's sort of a system that we built and it sort of worked incredibly well over the last year.
Is that system predicting macroeconomic conditions or how do you think about what you're doing to bring macroeconomics into your risk profile? I get that the individual is greater, but you're still talking about ingesting some sort of macroeconomic status into your decisions. How does that work?
Yeah, so we were not in the business of predicting macro. That is sort of a whole business in of itself. We're very happy to be. We're happy to be. Yeah. We're super happy to be market neutral with respect to macroeconomic.
So what we want to do is we want to take market consensus. And so there are a variety of sources for market consensus statistics, both things that have already happened and things that are expected to happen in the near future. And we take those and we simply plug them into a system that's been fit against historical metrics, meaning we've taken things like historical charge off rates on consumer credit across different asset classes, historical levels of unemployment across different industries and occupations.
And we've built models that connect these things to the way that they would impact our particular categories of loans. And so we've essentially built that into our model so that as soon as the latest unemployment numbers are released on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, where the latest sort of monthly projections are released from various consensus groups of economists. Those numbers just essentially just get fed into the model, update the macroeconomic assumptions and then you're properly calibrated to the sort of market consensus on macroeconomic numbers.
That's a really interesting approach. I like that. So I want to ask one of the you use the phrase bank partners a couple times. Just wanted to dig into the way you think about working with banks versus a lot of the fintechs that are out there. I know pursuing chargers, buying banks, becoming banks, what is the business model for upstart in terms of working with banks or the bank partners that you talked about?
Yeah, we're a technology company through and through. We've been doing this a long time and I think every time we've had an opportunity to sort of think about which path in the road we want to go down, it's been very clear for us that we want to be more and more of a technology company and that's what we're good at. We're not good at being a bank. We're not good at any of the things that a bank is good at.
But we are very good at building technology and we believe very strongly that the way that technology is moving, especially in the field of AI, it's going to be a sort of technology field where you sort of need aggregation and returns the scale that's true across data scale. It's true across the R&D investment scale. It just doesn't really make sense for every single bank or every single business in a certain industry to really be developing their own AI engines and tools and data sets.
It's just not going to be scaled enough to be as good as one that is essentially shared across many in that industry. And so that's what we aim to be. We aim to be the common technology provider and builder. And we think actually banks are good at a lot of things. Those things sometimes don't include building technology, but they do include having great customer relationships spanning many products, having the sort of customer trust and loyalty and sort of brand understanding that comes with the sort of retail presence comes again with having those different products has that sort of relationship with with checking accounts, banking accounts, all of those things are things that that we don't do. We don't want to get into doing.
But we do want to support and enable our bank partners to be very, very good at lending. And we think that piece of it needs a strong component of AI. And that's what we bring to the table.
Got it. I appreciate your thoughts. It's been an interesting conversation, Paul. I think hopefully interesting for the listeners in terms of what upsides doing that's unique in the space.
I have three questions that I usually ask guests at the end of the podcast, but I'm going to add a fourth for you that you don't know about. So here you go.
我通常在播客结束时向嘉宾提出三个问题,但现在我要为你加上第四个问题,你不知道的。所以,让我问一下。
You know, so you came out of college, well, literally out of college because you hadn't graduated when you started an upstart and you've been in the basically the consumer lending space for a decade now, more or less, what's been the number one thing that surprised you about the way the space is operated since you when you kind of came in from an outsider with I'm going to guess pretty limited preconceived notions about the industry was.
What's been the biggest surprise? Yeah, for sure, I think the biggest surprise is going to, I mean, I expected there to be a lot more people trying to build what we're building. I mean, it just seemed to me like such an incredible opportunity to create value for lenders and an incredible opportunity, a great value for consumers.
It almost is like bang your head on the table. Obviously, this is probably the best application for AI that you could have period. I mean, best in terms of like it's sort of this combination of all the kind of pieces are there, like the sort of high volumes of data, the high economic opportunity, the sort of real time decision making.
And at the same time, it's sort of like this enormous, enormous market, one of the sort of oldest industries, most profitable industries, sort of the source of almost all profits of the consumer financial system. And yet, here we are 10 years, almost, since I dropped out of college and I guess it has been actually more than 10 years. And almost we see so little, so little sort of happening in this direction outside of what we're building at Upstart that I've just been surprised by, I think, the level of sort of inertia and maybe some of the kind of institutional sort of barriers to innovating in this direction.
But we hope that's starting to change now with some of the success we've had. I'm certainly seeing a lot more interest from the bank side talk to you. So I, fingers crossed, you're going to see more lenders coming this way and technology providers trying to tackle this problem in different ways.
So now my standard three questions, what's the, you know, this is entry one for you, because you've really, you know, spent most of your career one company. But what's the best piece of career advice you've ever gotten?
The best piece of career advice. Can't be for me. Probably, I think I'll go with when in doubt, air on the side of being more technical. I think that's something that someone told me back when I was in high school. And really it was sort of like, I think the idea was that in almost anything you're doing, whether, whether the sort of nature of your work is usually done in a technical way or not, just because of sort of the power of technology to increase efficiency, to sort of leverage things and to really train your mind to think in a rigorous way.
It's almost always helpful to sort of aim to be on the more technical end of people in the sort of space of something that you're doing. I think if nothing else, it forces you to think in the way that a mathematician or a computer scientist thinks, which is in a sort of highly logical, rigorous way. And if you approach problems that are usually not approached as rigorously in a more rigorous way, it turns out you can often sort of find insights or optimizations about them that are missed when they're sort of thought about in generalities or thought about without the sort of precision that's common to those fields.
Interesting. Certainly, having known you for 10 years, my level of rigor and thinking and analysis has gone up substantially. It's kind of hard to have a discussion with you without doing that. My second question is, what's the best advice you've gotten about the consumer lending space in general? And this one, I think it'll be quite interesting given your history.
Yeah. The best piece of advice we've gotten about the consumer lending industry. Have you ignored all the advice that you got and just charted your own path for some time? No, no. Certainly, and in our years, we have spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel on many things. I mean, for example, we didn't know about direct mail when we started.
And for many years, we just thought there's no way that direct mail can be a thing that is done in the 21st century as sort of a successful mode of advertising. But it very obviously is a sort of successful way that advertising and consumer credit is done. And the sort of best advice has been something along the lines of, don't be clever and innovative in stuff that you don't need to be clever and innovative about. When we started, we really tried to sort of make everything about what we did different.
And that meant all the sort of different terms of the loan, the way we structured, servicing fees, and sort of every last part of it, we sort of tried to like rethink. And most of those were like minor, minor optimizations.
And of course, sort of the core thing we were doing was like a really big optimization. But because of all the sort of small different things we did, we found ourselves constantly tangled up in kind of the greater like ecosystem sort of has a set of norms of how they operate. You know, when you think about rating agencies and sort of regulators and sort of all the sort of different things that they're used to.
And you kind of want to isolate your sort of innovation down to the things you want people to focus on and not get sort of spend all your time hung up on the sort of innovations that don't really move the needle, but do sort of create a lot of confusion and sort of headaches for people. And I think we did a lot more of that early on and a lot less now.
Sounds like finding that efficient curve you were talking about between effort and accuracy and collecting data. Maybe you didn't quite have that right. And the product organization and the early days.
And then my last question is always, what's your bold prediction for the future? Can be lending, FinTech, Life in general, what's your bold prediction? You seem like a guy who makes bold predictions. So give me a nice bold prediction I can bring you back and hold you to.
A bold prediction. I usually see you lacking for bold Paul or predictions, frankly. You don't have to give me odds if you don't want, but I'll take them. Prediction without odds is not much of a prediction. That goes to that rigorous thinking point you made earlier.
Well Paul, I appreciate your joining us. I think it's a very interesting discussion on application of AI across the lending life cycle. Concepts around underwriting and particularly like to your point on macroeconomic where the difference in individual risk is much greater than the variance among individuals during an economic stress period. That was a really interesting point. So thanks for joining us. Appreciate your make of the time.
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