The Fitness Coach for Finances: One Startup's Mission

StellarFi is not the first fintech company Lamine Zarrad has founded. This plucky serial fintech founder chats with Mary about his wild ride working as a bank regulator by day, and designing a pot payment startup (Tokken) on nights and weekends -- something he said he felt compelled to do. Now at StellarFi, he is compelled to rethink bill payment. They explore the how and examine unconventional customer acquisition ideas (ahem, buying and forgiving debt) and when (and why) to challenge bank regulators.

Relevant show links: 

• StellarFi
• DealBook article referenced 

Transcript

Lamine, thanks so much for being on Money Isn't Everything. It's great to see your face. I think the last time I saw you in person was going down the mountain slide at MX's event or conference.

Lamine (00:16.846)
That's right, almost a year ago. Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited about this.

Mary (00:20.14)
Yeah, well, you know, there's so much I want to mind your mind with. But I think I just want to sort of set the stage as, you know, you're someone with so many vibrant experiences. That's like my interpretation of you. And so there's so many places to begin, but you're not a first time founder. So I sort of want to start at what appears or feels like it might have been a really wild moment for you when you were, you know, working as a federal regulator.

and you had a side thing going on when you were building a startup that was focused on pot payments. And add to that tension, you were like in Dealbook. And I believe the story was by Nathaniel Popper, who's such a killer reporter. So let's start there. Walk me to that moment of time when you were, I don't know, masquerading as a startup person, but also, you know, working at a federal regulator, a bank one, nonetheless. Yeah.

Lamine (01:15.406)
That's right. Learn that double agent life. You're gonna get in trouble all these years later. Yeah. That's funny. Well, let's talk about it. It was a fascinating time. And honestly, at the time I was scared. I was so afraid because I kind of came up in a conventional sort of a traditional world, right? A finance part of that military, you know, grad school and all those things. I just I did things like many immigrants. What I thought was the right thing to do to advance my career.

But I was always very entrepreneurial and I was never happy anywhere in any organization unless I was free and always had these ideas. And so when I was at Treasury, we were supervising 36 national chartered banks and a lot of them were banks in states like Colorado and California and Oregon.

And they're all asking at the time for permission to serve their communities and specifically cannabis businesses because they knew that this is not going away. States passed all of these laws that it's cash heavy economy and A, there's a business opportunity for them. Two, they did want to serve the community by cleaning it up. So like you take the cash out of the equation, you have accountability, you have transparency, you reduce crime.

you reduce sort of target of opportunities. Like in California, we're talking division of banking, you know, they're freaking out because dispensaries kept getting robbed, growers every time they'll like, they'll move the money, you know, drive from the Emerald Triangle somewhere.

down in Sacramento, they'll get robbed. Anyway, so there's so many different aspects and we felt responsible because we were like the last decision maker in the long line of decisions that were made. And so my bosses at the time were working pretty closely with financial crimes enforcement at work, the infamous Vinson.

Lamine (03:04.206)
in trying to figure out what to do and then developed this guidance that was referred to as the FinCEN guidance. It was I think 24 bullet points of things that the banks should do in order to serve the cannabis industry. And it was really mostly surveillance. Like you have to surveil every transaction. You have to know exactly where the money comes from. It was kind of distillation of some of the more gruesome BSA requirements put into like this supercharged version.

of like, you now have to become CIA, or NSA rather. And anyway, and so I was there and I was thinking, man, I know these banks, they don't have the resources. I chatted with like their head of technology folks and.

They were tellers at once, and no disrespect, very smart people, but this is not the stuff that they sort of know how to do and maybe even want to do. And it just felt unfair and felt like it was just unattainable. And those banks wanted to do it. So they naturally were looking for solutions. And so I thought, I can do this. I can go build this thing. And I always wanted to do this and do something like this, like create a product for the consumer.

but this time going through banks. And I had no idea where to start.

you know, like how do you start as an entrepreneur? There's so many different stories. I think a lot of entrepreneurship stories, you know, folks who like created some software and then it took off. I was not one of those people. I didn't have computer science background, although, you know, I studied advanced quantitative methods. Like I knew statistical modeling, but I had no idea like how to code something. And I didn't know how to raise money. I watched Silicon Valley a couple of times, but you know, that was the extent of it.

Mary(04:50.7)
Didn't that train you enough?

Lamine (04:52.878)
That's right, I thought I was prepared.

You know, I didn't have a network. You know, I don't come for money. I didn't have friends with money. Now I was fortunate enough to go to good schools and I built some connections. In fact, the reason I think I ended up in New York Times was because of one of those connections. You know, one of my colleagues from school was a producer at the time making videos at New York Times. And he's like, when I pitched him on what we were doing, he's like, he got to talk to Nathaniel about this. Anyway, and so certainly there was some privilege there for me that gave me access, but not in the traditional way.

sunsets, I had no clue what to do with this. Anyway, and so I thought, well, let me go figure this out. I talk to banks all the time. I know exactly what the banks want to do. Let me see what dispensaries want, what do suppliers want. And so nights and weekends, time off, I took a lot of my leave that was sort of like pinned up. I started to just to like go knock on doors, just drive up to a dispensary in Denver.

and talk to folks across the counter and ask them to talk to their managers, which would freak them out.

Mary (06:00.876)
I was gonna say, I mean they must be like, who is this guy? 

Lamine  (06:00.876)
Yeah. Who is this dude? Yeah, and it's still very sort of a, not clean cut, but kind of square at the time. I was nicely dressed. I had a badge, right? I had this badge that made me look like a FBI agent.


Mary (06:19.34)
Yeah, a little tell.

Lamine (06:22.766)
And here I am asking them, what do you do with your cash? And for most part, I got a bunch of like, get out of here. We don't know who you are. This just all seems shady. We don't want to talk to you. So I realized that the only way I can get them to talk, if I started to buy stuff.

and I started to buy stuff. I ended up with a lot of product that I purchased over a year of interviewing people. I would buy things and I'd be like, hey listen, I bought this in cash and just weird, you know you could potentially get access to banking, there are laws out there that are sort of helping banks deal with dispensaries. How are you guys thinking about this? Are you thinking about...

implementing certain technologies to help you get this and ears are perked up and like, what are you doing? I'm like, well, I'm actually building one and then start talking to these folks.

Mary (07:15.532)
So you're basically mystery shopping pot shops while working for the government, yeah.

Lamine
Yeah, while working for the office of the comptroller of the currency

Mary (07:26.924)
Yes. Did that, okay, did that feel like, did that make you nervous?

Lamine (07:33.166)
I was terrified. I was terrified. But the thing is, I couldn't shake this off. There's no other thing I could do. If I wasn't pursuing this, I wouldn't have been able to continue on with my job. I was possessed with this idea. I wasn't just interested or curious. I was absolutely, in the way that I've never been possessed by any idea before.

Mary(07:34.572)
Yeah.

Lamine (07:57.102)
It just moved me. I knew this was the right time. I knew I had the right skill set to do this. The probably best circumstances around me, I was like, I'll figure out everything else. Let me just have this idea that gotta work. It absolutely has to work. Massive, massive problem. The industry is just blowing up and it's growing. And I'm like, I can do this. Anyway, so that's how I got over my terror and fear. Yeah.

Mary (08:22.604)
Terror, you just did it. Well, when that story hit, I guess I'm assuming this, but let me make sure, I imagine that got you a lot of attention. Was it like boom growth immediately? Were you ready for that moment or yeah?

Lamine (08:32.27)
Oof.

Yeah, yeah, so here's a story. So I'm still an examiner. I pitch to Axel, my buddy from grad school, who just produced a very short film at New York Times.

about the banking problem in the marijuana industry. So I was like, crap, Axel, I know him, let me reach out to him. And I'm like, dude, we're solving this, we have this new technology, it's a prototype. And he directs me to Nathaniel. I spent three or four days chatting with Nathaniel. He was so interested, I didn't expect that level of interest. I thought he was just gonna be like, okay, cool story, bro, and kind of move on. Not at all. And so he's like, look, he gets back to me the following week, he's like, I wanna

run the story. So this is like November timeframe. I want to run it. We talked to the editors. It's going to go live in February. I don't have a specific date, but just want to let you know, I'm like, cannot run the story. I'm a federal bank examiner. I'm going to get fired if the story goes live. It's like, we're going to run the story. And so I go to my boss and I'm like, look, I've been doing this thing on site.

this absolutely no conflict of interest. I did not do anything to jeopardize my status and certainly nothing to do with the OCC. I've been interviewing folks and I think I have this product that I'm gonna run. He's like, this is very interesting. You're very skeptical. And I'm like, well, the reason I'm talking to you is because New York Times is gonna run the story in February and I think I'm gonna resign.

before it runs. And he's like, why would New York Times run a story about you? It was so fuzzled. He's like, do you even have the company? I'm like, no, but we have a prototype.

Mary (10:19.884)
You have a prototype and you are well, you're Hannah Montana. Yeah, so the storyline's there.

Lamine (10:24.494)
That's right.

So the story lands, in fact, you see the New York Times clippings behind me. I'm still extremely proud of it. It's a cool story.

Mary (10:35.756)
I didn't realize that was that. That's amazing. Well, I think, I know it's a hard transition, but I think of you, I think of trying out really unusual ideas, going for it. And now I know there's been, you know, other acts since then, but like the one you're at now, Sellify and like how you're going about customer growth. But I think let's set the stage a little bit more of like context of like what you're doing. And then I want to get right into the how you bought some debt.

Lamine (10:39.15)
Yeah.

Mary (11:01.772)
to acquire some potential customers. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. So yes, your mission statement, Lamine, is now. Da da da. Yeah.


Lamine (11:11.246)
Yeah, so we are making money, making money simple. That is effectively our mission statement. And we hear overall as a company just battling the sort of vicious cycle of poverty.

It's a much more sort of abstract battle because what is poverty? We sort of identify that as kind of downward pressures on everyday Americans to pay check to pay check because of many different systemic barriers and constraints. The way credit system is structured is in fact stacking all the cards against your average day American. That's kind of like what we're solving here.

at Stellify and you know, frankly, you know what we do today very much is tied to my first experience with token then my second company in joust then Zen business like all of those experiences really built up until now where I realized that you know, we're going after these businesses to help them access banking We helping freelancers access merchant processing tools and invoice factoring tools getting into credit really this You know, you little guy the average day, you know person in this country is living paycheck to paycheck

Let's not go after businesses, let's go after them and help them out. There are a lot more of these individuals than there are.

freelancers or SMBs. And frankly, they are the economic engine of this country. Like if a consumer cannot borrow money and then repay that money, this whole thing comes to a screeching halt. We live in a very young republic. Our economy is very fragile, despite the fact that we think that it's resilient to a lot of market fluctuations and geopolitics of this world. But frankly, it's still very, very fragile because it is a credit -based economy. And so the fact that

Lamine (12:56.768)
Fed is really the only thing that we have going for us that's helping us control the volatility. And I thought, you have this Federal Reserve that's devising this constant strategy to control how much people are borrowing, but then you have consumer who cannot borrow for the most part. Two thirds of the population is impaired. And we thought, this is a problem we want to solve.

And this is a problem we certainly think technology has a big role in solving. And so we said, all right, well, let's look at consumers. Why can they pay? I think the trope is that, well, they're underbanked and or, you know, they're sort of like they don't have the resources. You know, a lot of Americans are living in poverty, but it's not true. Most of this country is actually.

very well off. And I think a lot of the recent statistics that are being released are very much sort of supporting some of our early findings. People are living paycheck to paycheck not because they don't have the money. They're living paycheck to paycheck because they're mismanaging bills. There is an element of personal responsibility and certainly like this kind of irrational exuberance. It is the other side of the coin or whatever, there's a double -edged sword, right?

Mary (14:09.452)
Yes.

Lamine (14:10.67)
the system trains you to be optimistic about life because the American dream and all that stuff, you also tend to be a little less realistic about your ability to manage obligations. And that's what it is. Even high income individuals in this country live paycheck to paycheck. And we said, let's build a bill pay. Let's build a bill pay solution to help them pay their bills.

Mary (14:35.148)
 I find this so intriguing in general and before, I want to get into the pricing model because I think that's a really interesting component here too. But before we do any of that, a year ago, I think about a year ago, you started buying debt.

to then forgive, to then say, hey, I'm StellarFi and we forgave your debt. I don't know, maybe you'll want to be our customer. We've talked about this before, but that's a wild move too. What's the status there? Are you still doing it? How did it go? How's it going?

Lamine (15:07.598)
Totally.

Lamine (15:12.654)
Yeah, it's still running. It is admittedly a lot more difficult than we thought it was going to be in terms of creating a very clear message and a value proposition to a user. So let me kind of give you a little bit of background in case listeners are not aware of this strategy. We're not the first ones to do it. There are a couple of nonprofits that sort of ventured out into the space, namely working with Medical Dead to help.

folks with medical bills that are unpaid, help them get rid of those things and get them off their profile. And we thought, this is brilliant because it aligns nicely with our certainly our mission as a company to help consumers and end that vicious cycle. But the way the system is structured is that this debt gets passed down from debt collector to debt collector.

And it becomes cheaper and cheaper to buy because it's much more difficult to collect from users. It is no better for the consumer that it's passed down three or four times because it's still on their credit report. It's still affecting them in a very negative way, preventing them from getting the job that they want to get, and it's tougher to climb out of their situation. But it's cheaper because the debt collectors know that the chances of collecting on this debt is now significantly diminished after a year or two years or whatever. And so we thought,

Well, maybe we can buy it very, very cheaply and just poof, make it go away. Instead of coming after them as a debt collector, we buy it like a debt collector, but...

We then say, we're not going to collect. We just categorically forgive every single penny on this debt. And we thought, well, maybe they'll be grateful enough to use our product because the product is designed to help them pay their bills, right, and to never get into this. The reality of the matter is that most consumers are incredibly skeptical of this because it sounds too good to be true. And that is our single biggest challenge in this endeavor to prove to our customers that, or not the customers, but those consumers whose debt we buy.

Lamine (17:08.128)
that we actually forgave their debt and that we're legitimately just doing this because we'd love for them to use our product, but we're not forcing them to do anything. There's no strings attached. And honestly, it's absolutely fascinating how much rejection we get because they're so conditioned. They're so conditioned that people just want money from them.

Mary (17:22.38)
Ha!

You know, I understand this probably all too well because I don't know if we've talked about this before, but I used to run like a social media network site for debt collectors and the tech they use. And so like, I'm familiar with some of the tactics, at least what they did like 15 years ago, which would be like including, you know, around Halloween, they send people pumpkins with the like, you owe us this money. So it's like pretty aggressive. So to have the, you know, the opposite thing happen, I can see why there would be.

sizable amount of skepticism. Are you finding any kind of medium working better than others like email or I mean do people say is this, do they reach out to you or are they ignoring you? Yeah.

Lamine (18:06.958)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we predominantly use electronic means of communication. And what we know for a fact that print will be the best in terms of reaching out to people. People still trust print. But we haven't gone there because it is expensive, right? We already buy the debt and then we have to spend some additional capital. It's certainly on a roadmap. Eventually we'll get to it. So what we do is we rely on email predominantly. And then for folks who do reach out and respond,

We then engage them and then try to bring them on board if they want to. Otherwise, we have a page where anyone who heard about us, for example, through PR, PR is another channel that we've used, can then go and see if they can find their own debt and if it was forgiven.

That's been pretty effective as well. And it's a cool tool because it creates engagement on our page. Like, hey, see if your data is forgiven. And then text communications and voicemail. We've tested those. We haven't really like ran.

aggressively. Text is very intimate, it works well, but it's also very intrusive, and so we want to be very, very careful there. And of course, voicemail is interesting too, because it is inefficient, difficult to scale, but you know, with AI these days, we're sort of thinking of ways to create...

very human messages, but we leverage AI to be able to scale those things and just go out to a bunch of numbers and let them know that, hey, we explain it more in greater detail, that we forgave the death, that no strings attached. The only thing you have to do is to say, hey, I'm real, I'm here, I acknowledge it, and that's it.

Mary (19:46.892)
Yeah, no, I think it's such a fun thing to try out and it queues up my, there's only one segment I do here and it's, that's what you said, you actually said this to me because I put it in my newsletter, but it ties to this and it's that the worst thing you can do, the worst thing you can do as a credit builder is start breaking the system and then catching a lot of moral hazards. You don't want to incentivize people to do bad things and get away with those bad things. So let's unpack that here too, like how do you get in front of that, you know, risk?

Lamine (20:09.902)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Lamine (20:15.566)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, you know, it's a thing we grapple with daily, right? We want to be on the side of the consumer, but we also want to represent the system.

to its fullest extent. It's a tough thing to do when you're a disruptor and an innovator as a company. Because on one hand, we do want to help folks because we know that most people are well -intentioned. Most of them, the reason they have bad marks on their credit reports because life happened and they just need to climb out of it. Just give them a fresh start. There are undoubtedly bad actors out there, right? And we're trying to weed those out and we're getting better and better at kind of preempting and then...

sidestepping those folks and really focusing on the ones that need help. But at the same time, we don't want to break the rules and we certainly don't want to distort the nature of risk, right? We don't want to create a population of users in our platform that, you know,

look better than they truly are. In other words, if we boost their score and they're still pretty risky to other lenders and they've leveraged us to distort the fact that they're not going to be a good borrower and now someone else lost money. We don't want to be agents of doom here.

And so what we focus on is not necessarily credit score boosting. Credit score and credit building is our consumer message because it resonates with consumers that get that. We don't see ourselves as a credit builder. We see ourselves as a bill pay product.

Lamine (21:48.366)
We're a bill pay card. We are building a consumer card to help them pay their bills. That's how we see it. And our card is becoming more and more conventional looking. It started out almost like a debit card. It now has a credit component where you can keep the balance. And managed to balance would help you manage it and pay it off. And we're just getting deeper and deeper into balance management to actually become a credit card for folks who we can underwrite better and give them a card and then help them.

with all the tools and education they need to then manage that cart responsibly. And so that's kind of how we see it. We work with the bureaus pretty closely in ensuring that what we do is above board. We always look at other products out there and try and educate consumers what's good and what's not good. There are a lot of charlatans and it's unfortunate. Credit space is just...

rife with all kinds of bad actors. Everything from credit repair scams to credit builders that just fake and just take your money to just stuff that doesn't work well and still charges you. What we want to do is we want to make you not into someone with a higher score, but we want to make you as a user into a better borrower, into a more responsible borrower. We want to create some discipline. We see ourselves as a fitness coach or whatever you want to call it, like a trainer.

Mary (22:48.332)
Yeah.

Lamine (23:11.246)
where we don't just tell you, hey, this is the hack to build your six pack. We actually wanna like be there with you while you're doing those sit ups and crunches. So you can walk away with one, yes.

Mary (23:21.804)
Yeah.

How many bills are people attaching on average to the card?

Lamine (23:28.846)
Yeah, so we're between four and five bills on average and numbers growing. We actually started out with about one and a half bills and folks would attach something tiny because they would trust us. They'll link something that was trivial and if we didn't pay it, for example.

Mary (23:32.268)
Mm -hmm.

Lamine (23:44.014)
you know, it wasn't going to affect them like Netflix. And then we noticed that as the brand started to mature, you know, and as we develop a little more trust and partnerships as well, like if we acquire users through a partner that promotes us, there's usually a trust factor. The users will link bigger bills and more important bills and more bills in general. Usually folks start with one or two and then by month two or three, they'll add additional bills. And we see everything from subscriptions to

to then, you know, cell phone bills, telco stuff, which is sizable, right, $200, $300 bills to, you know, to utilities and rent.

Mary (24:24.076)
And you know, I'm kind of curious, I mean, are you, I mean, the economic environment's been weird for a bit now, so it's like you can say one thing, but is it that thing? But I think one thing we can say for sure is debt, credit card debt at least is like rising. Are you feeling, are your users feeling that? Are you seeing things start to form in different ways? Or you know, are you worried about that in any way?

Lamine (24:50.958)
Yeah, without a doubt, we're concerned. We see that as an opportunity, and maybe we're just being overly optimistic, but we see this as an opportunity for us because the more sort of debt you have as a user, obviously that compresses your score, more aware of that you are, and so you seek out solutions. So certainly like opportunity for growth and discovery. But in reality, someone...

who is so over leveraged that they can't manage any of their bills. They can't just like avoid some bills and focus on others. Although we wanna help them prioritize things that are existential on our platform, it's gonna spill over. And we're worried about that. We're worried about our own collections rates and so forth. Our collections rates have been stellar, you know, pun intended here. We learn a lot, we learn a lot. We weren't always stellar. I'll be honest with you, we went to market with...

Mary (25:34.892)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

Lamine (25:43.342)
with not great collections rates, we're now head and shoulders above any lending product out there. And I looked at the data.

And frankly, we want to keep it there. And so we're constantly looking for ways to create incentives and disincentives and then mechanical constraints for users to not be able to have runaway trains and abuse the system, take some other debt somewhere and pass that responsibility to us and walk away. We're always thinking about that and thinking about it holistically.

Mary (26:15.692)
Tell me about your pricing plan.

Lamine (26:19.982)
Yeah, so today we have two plans. The way we make money is very simple. We charge users a subscription fee, which gives them access to a whole slew of different tools. They're paid for, it's a SaaS product, right? It's not a credit product per se in that regard. There's no finance fee. They pay us a membership fee, either $499 or $999, and they access BillPay solution, which is about 10 ,000 billers that they can link.

We have a bunch of education tools, access to credit counseling through nonprofit partners, projections, their full credit report and all that good stuff. You can go buy it from the bureaus directly for $24 .99 a month, for example, when it comes to credit report, but you're not getting all the other features that you're getting through us.

And then we make money on interchange. In other words, when we make a payment on a bill, we make money through the network, we use Visa cards, and we generate a certain amount of interchange that is also very attractive to us. And we like it because the more volume we have in the platform, the more interchange sort of takes over from subscriptions, and less important subscriptions become. And so at this point, we can start.

Mary (27:28.684)
Mm -hmm.

Lamine (27:33.07)
getting pretty aggressive in reducing fees and forgiving certain things and making our product as close to free as possible. So that's kind of our goal that once we get enough volume, subscriptions really become less important to us. And we just eventually, you know, either deal away with them in certain plans or deeply discount them to attract more users and really accelerate growth.

mary (27:55.916)
Well, I think it's interesting too, because I think a lot of fintech has come to realize they do need to charge something. Otherwise, their model is not going to work that well. With that, I want to, you mentioned referrals. So are you working with like neo banks? Are they passing on? Yeah, you are. Okay. In traditional banks too, or is it mostly like the neo banks? Yeah.

Lamine (28:06.094)
Yes.

Lamine (28:18.734)
Yeah, we have traditional banking partners, we have neo bank partners, we have other fintech platforms that are not neo banks, we have tech partners that are not fintech at all, just consumer platforms that provide access to say prescription medicine, things like that. Our product is a mass market product, or at least at the moment has a mass market appeal, may not be true mass market product quite yet.

And we feel very fortunate in building this solution where we can find customers really in so many different channels. But yes, we make money. So two ways. We...

We buy affiliate traffic, right? So we pay our partners when they send people our way. And then vice versa, we have offers marketplace and constantly sort of developing new incentives for both partners and consumers where they can get discounted access through us. And then we generate referral income that way too. That has honestly been such a low priority for us. We're building it, it's moving in the right direction. But we're putting most of our muscle behind the user experience when it comes to the core product.

you know, bill pay experience. This marketplace will eventually be there. We, you know, we're not pushing it too hard.

Mary (29:31.628)
I have at least two questions left for you. And one of them is, what advice or what's one thing you'd want a banker or a credit union exec to pay attention to? It could be outside of bill pay, credit scoring, pot payments, anything. Anything you think that you're like, hey, financial institution, zoom in here.

Lamine (29:53.07)
Yeah, I think risk management in general, I think, let me specify what I mean by that. Bankers think of risk in a sort of very conventional way, like they think about risk in...

kind of regulatory framework of risk related to either their investment side of the business or the sort of onboarding side of the business. What do we do with KYC and AML? To them, it's regulatory imposed requirements that they have to sort of abide.

I think bankers need to be proactive, not aggressive or loose with those frameworks, but to challenge regulators and saying that, hey, this is a, regulatory approach should be risk -based, right? And so, and my institution does something very unique. We're not like other banks, because every bank is unique. And this is how we managed our risk and look at it holistically, kind of like what we do, right? We said, yes, we work with someone with an average score of 580.

Their bio, you know, sort of accounts are risky individual, but we don't think they're risky, not because we have a better underwriting model.

because we have enough of the insight into their bank account, we think that we can collect that money from them. We also know that there's an interest for them to build credit so that creates certain behavioral patterns. We also know that these are recurring bills that they have to pay, that they're paying through us, for example. They don't always pay 100 % recurring bills, but most of the bills are.

Lamine (31:28.814)
We know that there's a different, you know behavioral patterns there and so we within instead of blindly looking at our customers a 580 score customer we take the context and contextualize, you know the Fair risk profile and I think that's what banks need to do and I know that this this has been talked about in banking for a very long time But no one knows how to do that because no one

No one wants to challenge the approach to risk management. Certainly not the compliance side of things. And I think it needs to be. I think it needs to be aggressively challenged.

Mary (31:59.852)
Well, you heard it from a former bank regulator here. And opening it up to you, how should people reach out to you or is there anything else you want people to know?

Lamine (32:04.974)
Yeah.

Lamine (32:11.118)
Yeah, I think folks should go to our website, stellarfi .com, it's stellarfi .com and stay abreast of things. We always try and keep it updated. We're also on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, we have accounts everywhere. So if you wanna follow any of our updates there, you can.

In terms of exciting updates, we are releasing new cards here in a very short period of time. These are going to be consumer credit cards with a lot more sort of functionality in terms of usage, more bills that they could pay with those cards, and many other perks. We've been talking about this for about...

year and a half now, rewards, and we're finally releasing a comprehensive rewards product. So you can now get a lot more back for the bills you pay. So a lot of exciting things coming down the pipeline here, and keep track on the website.

Mary (33:10.124)
All right, well, I'll be following you, but you already knew that and that sounded like I was gonna stalk you. So maybe I am, who knows what's going to happen next. But one thing that is for sure going to happen next, my final question to you, what is the photo on your phone's lock screen or image?

Lamine (33:26.798)
 I unfortunately I'm kind of boring.

mary (33:33.1)
What? Is it black?

Lamine (33:26.798)
Is it all black? No, it's an Apple default, you know, orange and blue lines that I've never updated.

mary (33:46.044)
Well, at least it has some kind of color.

Lamine (33:50.318)
It does, it does just abstract, you know, geometric figures.

mary (33:55.82)
Well, Lamine, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been a delight to speak with you.

Lamine (33:59.694)
My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It was fun.