Shivani Siroya grew up in New York where her mother, a doctor, moved in her 30s to provide her family with better prospects. Siroya went on to do her BA in Government and International Relations from Wesleyan University, Connecticut.
Following this, she did her MPH in Quantitative and Health Economics from Columbia University before taking up her first job as an equity research analyst with UBS Financial Services. She also worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers as an associate but found these jobs disillusioning according to an article on Medium.
This was when she took her first step toward solving a problem: she quit her investment banking job and joined the United Nations Population Fund where she studied the benefits of microcredit programs.
For the next 2.5 years, Shivani Siroya worked on recording the habits of 3,500 people across Africa and India. She would follow her subjects to work, the market, and home to tally how much they spent on food, education, and bills.
This firmed up the belief she’d held since childhood – most people could be trusted to make smart financial decisions.
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However, what troubled her was the fact that her subjects couldn’t get credit to grow their businesses since banks viewed them as high-risk.
Shivani Siroya began loaning some of them her own money and based their creditworthiness on the information she had documented.
Tala Loan App Origin
By 2011, Siroya launched Tala and developed an Android app that gives instant credit scores to people in emerging markets. The credit score is based on daily-life data from their smartphones and the company also acts as a lender granting microloans to a mobile wallet.
Over the years, the company has garnered over 4 million customers and has disbursed loans upwards of $1 billion through its platform.
Tala Loan App registered as Tala Mobile in the United States is a world digital lending company focusing on inclusivity when it comes to access to affordable credit.
The idea was new to the world of lending when Tala launched trust-based loans targeting especially the unbanked with no credit history.
Being a promising, working, and valid idea Tala mobile received many willing investors who pumped millions of dollars into the idea.
This lender delivers instant loans via an android app known as Tala App found on the Google play store.
Tala carried the name Inventure when it was first launched in the year 2011 and it was tested in Kenya, a rapidly growing market with a good mobile money platform, Mpesa.
Who Founded the Tala Loans app?
Now it’s time to answer this question; Who Owns Tala? Shivan Siroya is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Tala.
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Who is Shivani Siroya?
She is an Indo-American woman who has vast knowledge and experience in Finance Technology.
Shivani Siroya before founding Tala, according to Wikipedia worked for big Finance Companies including Citi, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Credit Suisse, and the United Nations Population Fund.
She holds an M.P.H in Health Economics and Policy from Columbia University and International Relations (Bachelor of Arts) degree from Wesleyan University.
When the Tala app gained popularity in 2018, Shivani Siroya was nominated Wired Icon by Melinda Gates.
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