Stacey Tisdale & Lamine Zarrad

have partnered up on this app. And so let me and you've been here before. I believe when you were here was for Jiles Bank. That's right, So let's talk about your background. Thank you, Thank you so. Stellar Fi is my third startup, believe it or not, it's been kind of a crazy ride. I started out by building a neil bank on cryptocurrency back in twenty fifteen gold token. Then we build Joust, which is a bank for freelancers

that was acquired by a company calls in business. Let me hold something, man, Let me hold a cup dollars man. I'm kind to join us. Come join us. We'll give you more than dollars. We'll give your ownership, which is which is awesome. And and now Stellify. So Stellify is kind of a distillation of all of my experiences. I'm an immigrant, I came to US from a former Jossar, my father's Tunisia, my mothers from Usbert John Uh and uh. And in any case, I've experienced how difficult it is

to navigate the financial services in this country. I mean it really is. It's a it's a complicated experience, it's convoluted,

it's the cards are stacked against you. And so I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and uh and decided that I need to learn more about finance, study the business, became a stockbroker, Mayoral Lynch back at the highly financial crisis, learned a lot then than a regulated with US Treasury, and then said, I want to distill, listen to experience, all of those experiences into products because I want other people to use those products. And so

it started to build. And now Stellar is you know, think it is this way third times a charm, right, It's going to be the best, the best company we've built so far. In twenty fifteen, you were working with crypto. That's right, pretty early on. Wow, did you invest in it earlier? Yeah, I didn't have a lot of money to invest, but I invest a little bit. Okay, tell you pretty well then did All right? Okay, question this aside. But have you been experiencing, like any any prejudice because

you're from the USSA former US I have in the past. Yeah, yeah, so I when I came to US, I joined the Marines. And it's interesting back then, in the nineties, even you had a lot of folks who you know, came out of the Cold War and so, uh, you know, there was a lot of a lot of jokes made and a lot of a lot of picking in the Marine Corps. But you know, you just kind of get through it. Yeah. I just I came back from France. I was in cans and it was like, you can't if you're from Russia.

They're not rocking with you over there at all. Yeah. Yeah, they won't even allow you to buy Channel certain people, like if you go in the Channel store. Yeah, they were upset about that. But they were saying even certain things like they won't allow you to purchase things if you're from Russia. Wow, Stacy, there's a lot going on right now, and I want to know how these things

affect the economy. Ro versus way was just overturned. There's a lot of turmoil, So how does that affect the economy and why is it important for us to be empowered financially? It's I think this is going to go down as one of the biggest economic moments in black financial history, right up there with redlining, right up there with predatory lending. And it's really not a mystery. The number one reason that women don't want to have children

and want abortions as financial. They're simply afraid that they don't don't have enough money to take care of their babies, and their fears are valid. Sixty percent of all of the households in the United States black women are headed by women. So in addition to carrying that burden, they're going to have the inevitable career disruptions that come with motherhood.

Those career gaps are going to mean that they don't have as much time to build up money for retirement, they don't have as much money to build up for Social Security benefits. And you know, you live in a country where poverty stricken elderly are already the majority black women. Then you have education gaps. They're going to have to take times out of their education, which is going to

have an impact on their entire life trajectory. One thing that we're also not talking about a lot is this whole overturning of this decision is going to make the

wealth gap between black women and white women even bigger. Really, you saw companies, I think Disney made an American expressor among the companies that have said that we're going to give a benefit to our employees if you need to cross a state border to get an abortion, and imagine you have to tell your job that because that's the thing that is so personal it is and now I have to go and like go to human you know. Yeah, then who are those workers? They're largely white collar white

women who are going to get those jobs. A third of low income workers but who make less than that don't even get paid time off. So the bottom line is black women are simply not going to have the time and the money to cross state borders. And you know, six months after someone has a baby that you know, an unwanted pregnancy, they lose full time employment. There's all

sorts of things. We talk again something else. When a woman puts that she has a child on a resume, they are twice as likely not to get called back. So we see all these issues for women, but a lot of people aren't talking about how this is impacting men and men. Well, the outis yes, men, the fathers, men who support women who have abortions, who their's partner have abortions, they're four times more likely to go to

college and to earn more. And the top reason that men support women in having abortions is because they want to be able to take care of the families that they all already have. And when you put all this together, and the reason why this is going to be one of the biggest turning points in the economic history of Blacks is suffer the children. Children who grow up in these outcomes are not They're not going to have as much access to education, their life trajectories are going to

be changed. There's food insecurity. This is all research, this is fact. I'm not journalist. I'm not going to sit here and tell you my opinion about it, but this is just fact. So again we have this whole cycle. It's just heartbreaking of generations of generations when you look at all the gains of Blacks have made post COVID in the housing market being first time new investors, you see, this is just another hit that's going to slam the

economy and really affect future generations. But there's one thing that we did see in all of us over the past few years. The system is just rigged against us. The traditional financial system is. So we stepped out, We embrace the digital economy, We start to use technology to invest. We started doing all these things. Black millennials fastest new group of home buyers after twenty twenty. Now it's even

more important that we do that again. Empower ourselves again and this and especially when it comes to building credit, because it's going to be harder than ever to qualify. And that's why the whole Stellar not that's one of the things this whole Stellar FIY initiative is about. I was going to ask you, you know, um, with credit. You know, credit is a game of numbers and right decisions, right, not necessarily how well you pay your bills, but as far as how much credit. So with this app, how

do you break explaining that to the consumer? For sure? For sure? Yeah, and the credit score is pretty complex, right, It's kind of a black box initially created by Fico. Now there's advantage. You know, the bureaus kind of have their hands in it, and what they look at is a bunch of different things. Some of that stuff is like how many credit cards do you have compared to how many loans you have? Right, So it's called credit mix because people feel like if they pay off all

their loans, their credit will be through the roof. That's not the case at all, now, know what they I mean, Look at the high level, they want you to have a bunch of stuff on your profile, and they want you to prove that you're paying on time. Right, So like that's a simple rule of thumb. It's more complicated than that. And the way we build a product, we said, look, we don't want to give you another line of credit or debt for example, on your profile. We don't want

to burden you. We want to inject ourselves into what you already do. Everyone pays rent, everyone pays utilities. Stuff that you have to Netflix, Hulu, whatever, right, and you already do it. You already do it, but you get a no credit for it. And initially, when we're thinking about the app. We thought, let's just report that stuff to the bureaus. And what we learn as the bearers don't want that. They don't accept that information because that's

not credit. They're saying that, we want a real credit transaction in our system. We want to see that your customer is actually a credit worthy person, meaning that they borrowed money and they paying on money back. And if you're saying, here's they just paying for Netflix or for their gym membership, they don't want to see that in a system. It clutters the system. So we said, we have a way around it, and what we build is this, We'll build a bill pay platform that pays your bills

on your behalf. So in other words, we're using our money to pay your bills and then we pull the money from your bankccount in the back end, so we're creating credit transaction. Were quite literally advancing you the cash

and then we pull the money back. And because we created a real credit transaction, now we can pay for your Netflix, we can pay for your gym, we can pay for your rent, whatever it is, right, we're really agnostic what's on the other end of that transaction, and we can report it legitimately to any bureau, So we'll wait a minute. So you're gonna pay my stuff before I do it, and then you're gonna hope that I have enough money in account to get your money back.

We're not gonna hope. We're gonna we're gonna look into your ban account. The way the app works just like any other Apple I don't know if you use robin Hood or really like even neo banking apps. You link your account to it, right your bank account. It takes two seconds. You link it gives us a visibility into what's going on your bank account, even historical data, so

we don't have to hope we make informed decisions. Now for somebody like me who who I'm very old school with it, right, like meaning I liked hold my money. I'd rather pay my bills myself and take it out my account. He's really old school. He dies his beard, don't You can't tell how old school, but he's very old cool. Continue, that's old school. That was really interrupted by robo cop overhead. When it comes to it, that's

old school. That's old school references. But I was saying, you know, for somebody like that, so how do you protect it? To make sure that the right people can see the account and not hackers or anybody else that can get through the account. To make sure, Yeah, for sure. I mean we have a we have an onboarding experience, right,

just like like a banking experience. When you sign up, we validate your identity, will work with third party partners that have access to government databases, and so it's pretty it's pretty straightforward. Were you security like modern level banking security, and when you sign up, you give us your name, your address, your password, or you create a password you're so security number. We then run the check on your name to make sure you are who you are because

fundamentally it's very difficult to fraud our system. But it's uh, you know, but but you could potentially if you were to lie to us, you can access someone else's credit information. We don't want to do that, right when don't we be the company that allows you know, Angela accessing your credit report, and so we want to make sure that Angela is who she says she is. I already have access to his credit run, don't doubt it. I was

going to ask you this too. You know a lot of times people have accounts that they don't know about well that app hal would that felt? For instance, I had a piec of Richard, right, yeah, and I haven't used it in ten years. It's because I just have it, but to they closed the account, or when they closed the account, my credit shot down because now it's a closed account. But if I would have known, I would have just bought something for one hundred dollars that keeps

that account open. Credit score one oh one. So would you guys have that as well? We do. We do. So Basically, when you access the app, you can see all of your credit information, like your entire report. You can you can then see that, hey, I have this

old account. For example, I discover that I have an old account that I haven't used in ten years and there and then you know, they've been sending me letters to a wrong address saying they're going to shut it down, and now I can use that account so they don't shut it down, so I still have that access to that credit and it's you know, positively impacts my score. So absolutely. We have a ton of tools on a platform.

There's a month monthly membership fee that gives you access to simulators, calculators, everything you need to be well educated about your credit and make decisions that are you know, well informed decisions. So if you want to go borrow money for a house, for example, we want to buy a car, want to get a credit card, Our platform is designed to give you everything you need to make

a decision right there without really thinking about it. Just quick analysis, quick snapshot, and then you can make a quick decision where your Where did these payments get reported? Too? Because I know there are three main places that they report, three main agencies. Yeah, so we report today. We report to Experience, TransUnion, and Equifax. These are the three main bureaus, right that everyone knows about what people are don't talk about.

There's another fourth bureau and we're going to be reporting to that fourth burre as well. It's called Navius. And a lot of the credit card companies actually check your report from inter this instead of Experience or others. Right, And so when when other companies, for example, report your information, they usually report to one or two bureaus because you have to pay money to report. We report to all three now and we're going to be reporting to four.

So think of it this way. It's a complete three sixty impact on your credit. So like when you use our product. If you want to go borrow money tomorrow from any lender out there, it will have a massive impact on you. Right, the lender will be able to see that you have all those payments, report it. Your credit score is going to improve a crossboard through every single model. Now you said there's a monthly fee, So what does that membership fee? So we have three, right,

we have three plans. Because we have so many features, we have to figure out how do we separate those features, How do we separate those features and offer them in a fair way to folks? And so we have the lowest century plans four ninety nine a month, four out a nine a month gives you access to five hundred dollars and spending, so you can add five hundred dollars

in bills. That's pretty cool, I did think of there's no interest, there are no other fees, and you have access to a bunch of tools to manage your credit. For nine ninety nine, you can run up to twenty five thousand dollars in bills. I mean if if you were compared to a credit card, I mean, how many credit cards dollars ninety nine six four dollars nine nine that's rights. Yeah, yeah, I I you know what that's that's a good call out, man. I need to be

conscious of these things. That's true. Four dollars and ninety nine cents, and then nine dollars ninety nine cents, and so for nine dollars ninety nine cents you have access to twenty five thousand dollars in spending. That is revolutionary. There's there's not a credit product out there. You pay a mortgage, you can, I mean you can pay everything, right? How many people have more than twenty five grand a

month and bills? These guys and guess what, we have a we have a plan for you too though for nine for nineteen ninety nine, so nineteen dollars ninety nine cents unlimited, on limited. So if you have a hundred thousand dollars in bills monthly, you can add it like a black card of it is like bills months. Yeah, that's so important because thirty five percent of your credit score is on time bill payment. Because I know some people are like, well, why don't I just pay it myself?

Thirty five percent the biggest component of your credit score is on time bill payment and all of those bills. What the mean was talking about don't count. Now that Stellar fi is paying them on your behalf, it almost looks like you're paying off a credit card transaction, so you get credit for those. And there's the other apps out there. None of them give you that credit building acts.

None of that give you on that unlimited access. And another thing that really distinguishes Stellar five from the others is as Angela and I were, you know, part of this journey and talking to people about through the years with wealth Wednesdays about what they need. Nobody can do this stuff alone. It's really hard to improve your finances alone.

So the first thing we did is we contacted the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, that's the big thing tank nonprofit, and they are going to offer free one on one credit coaching to Stellar fy users and that really distinguishes us. So you can just go to NFCC dot org, forward slash Stellar and you get a free, real person, one

on one on one credit coaching. This is about financial empowerment platform you touched on earlier, the Roe v. Wade, you know, and how women it's more important than ever for women and men to rebuild their credit. But it's you know, all these marginalized groups between Latinos, Hispanics, communities of color. We really lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year because we get charged higher interest rates and

it's harder for us to do things like mortgages. A lot of our friends in the pride community, this is really significant. I was sharing this with Lamine. When transgenders have the operation, they lose their credit history. It's like starting from scratch. A lot of people don't know that it's a new identity. You lose your past credit history. So stellars for everybody not know that. Ye say that fast next time you said transiendents have the surgery. They

lose their credit history, credit history. Yeah, it's financially devastating. They don't keep their name when you when you make that name change and you make that gender gender identity, they lose their credit history. It's become it's become a b it's a big issue. You have the three major credit bureaus saying that they're trying to work on it and find other ways to get their identities. It's becoming a big legislative issue. And it happened. If anyone changes

their name. It's not just a name. It's it's your gender. Oh wow, it's it's mostly the general. If you have bad credit, it could actually work in your favor. Well, no credit is no credit history. So you tell me when I if I transition. I know we talk about this, but me transition, yes, I know, yeah, I transition, you guys, credit history, yes? And what so the three major credit bureaus have tried to make that better. So now you'll have to go through um, you know, mountain of paperwork,

cumbersome process that most people won't go through. But it's going to get some legislative attention. And that's just another group. You know, we have to empower ourselves and build credit. That's what stellar fies all about. It's for everybody, but these you know, marginalized groups as really I didn't know. You get a new benefit, you don't get a new sec you don't exist anymore according to the credit burea.

You wow because you change your gender, but you have the same social because because credit is social, right, isn't it? She quit is much more than just so security number, right, SoC security number is just one little tiny attribute. And the way credit is looking at you holistically, they're seeing all kinds of different things. And when you like jumble it up by changing stuff, including your genders, it just resets. It's easier for them to be like, well, this is

a whole new identity here. I never knew that. That's wow. What do you think about? I mean, if your credit is messed up, that's smart. No, it's not because bad no credit is worse than bad credit. So you have no credit. Ever, Yeah, it's like you're starting over. Interesting, No one's gonna lend you money, right because I don't know. Yeah, you got to rebuild everything and you have no history. Now.

Let mean so this is basically like, okay, so if you have to describe what Stellar Fire is, is it like a loan that you're paying, Like, how does that work? Because you're giving the money that's paying it, and then you're taking the money from the bank account, so it looks like you're making payments on that's right. Okay, it's not alone, right, So I want to be very clear

about that because it's important too. There are credit builders out there that give you a loan and you sometimes like it's secured loan, you put some money down because it don't trust you, and so and then it created this fake loan on the back end. We don't do that, right, So what we do is we, you know, when we make those advances, when we pay your bills, we then

report that as a line of credit. Basically, it's like it looks like a credit card on your credit report, which is good because you mentioned that that it's good to have access to a bigger line of credit because it reflects well on your profile, meaning that when I as a mortgage lender, when I look at your profile and I see that you have a bunch of credit available to you that you don't use, you look responsible to me. You look like a good barrower to me.

And that's what we do. Right. So if you add all of your bills but it's average American has four thousand monthly bills, right, but don't get reported to anything. But you add it to Stellar, you now have this four thousand dollars you know, available credit to you monthly that we pay off every month, right because you pay those bills and so it's always available and it reflects really well on your profile. You will you guys, have a report to the credit bureaus negative to you, Like

if somebody doesn't do what they're supposed to do. Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, And the short answer is it can happen, but the way we design a system is to prevent that. Specifically, you asked like, hey do you how do you trust me to pay you back? Right? What we do is we validate your balance and if you have sufficient balance, we admit a payment and then we pull the money from your account, so we kind

of eliminate the possibility of you not paying. It can happen because if you have no balance and if you don't have a valid balance and then you can't pay it, then that would happen. So if you have no money, right, and we've had customers that signed up, they have zero money in the bank account, they're like, hey, I have a you know, have a rent comment up, can you pay it for me? We unfortunately can't. We can't pay your rent if you don't have money in your bank account. Yeah.

So you know this is this is not a value add yet, but what we're working on is basically to do that right to help folks who you know, live paycheck to paycheck most Americans do, even high earners. And we say that we know that you can get paid on the fifteenth. Your rents is do on the first, we'll pay it and then we'll collect it on a fifth gotch. So that's coming up that's not available to

users yet. Challenge that you guys are doing, We're going to be launching over the next couple of days a five day credit challenge to help people take control and understand their credit better. The first day, we're going to have you examine and do a little search on what we were talking about credit biases and how different groups

are discriminated against. The second day, we're going to talk about goals and Stellarum is really a goal oriented approach to credit building, and I'll explain what that means um. Have you ever looked at your on your credit card statement and it says, oh, I have a seven twenty credit score, and then you go to a mortgage lender and the guy walks out and he's like, I'm sorry, ma'am, you have a six hundred credit score and you're like, oh,

I just looked it said I had seven hundred. That's because people don't realize that the lenders usually use FICO scores, but there are sixteen different versions of the Fico scores. So on auto lender is not going to be looking at the same version that a mortgage lender is going to be looking at. So we seller's also a financial education tool, so people need to know that going in. So on day two of the challenge, we're going to help you identify what your goals are. Day three is

a little credit score one oh one. Day four we have you linked to actually linked to Stellar and link your bills to Stellar, which by the way, just takes a couple of minutes. And on day five we want everybody out there to set up for that free credit coaching. I just try to get the app. How can I get the app? Yeah? Sure, go to a Stellifi dot com, Stellar SI dot com that's like Stellar Finance. Yeah, that's for Stellar Finance, and then go to try it for

free and then sign up. Okay, I'm signing my mom up. I wanted to ask you, sure, Yeah, I am if I wanted to sign my mom up, but use my bank account. So technically you shouldn't do that. That sounds like, but but but you it's possible if you want to link your bank account to you. What if you want to pay like your family members bills, We'll put the money on her account. You could you could do that. I mean the best the best thing to do is to put the money in her account and let it

let her have her account. So what we do is we validate, we check in the checking her name on your account. But we do make exceptions because sometimes family members, right, so sometimes it's a you know, a spouse and using your spouse's account. Sometimes it's your child and so forth. So we do make exceptions, but it adds a little bit of friction because we don't we don't know if you stole someone's account, right, if your name doesn't match, So we want to make sure that at all alignes.

I was going to ask you, you know, why is it? And sometimes like if you try to get let's say a smaller credit carcause I know this happens to a lot of people. They try to get a smaller credit card, whether it's PC, Richards and Son or best Buy or Bass and it's very dang to get that. But then let's say you try to get a car or a mortgage and you get that, why is that? And why interest rates so damn high on those credit cards? Like if you don't read the fine print, like twenty eight percent.

It is ridiculous. I can I can answer that. Go yeah, for sure. So most of those credit cards, they're unsecured, right, And so when the lender makes a decision and they're like, man, I don't know you. You don't have a good credit. So here's one hundred dollars in spending limit, and you're gonna pay thirty three percent interest because we don't know you and we don't want to lose one hundred bucks.

When you borrow money for a car, there's a collateral and if you don't pay that, you know car, they're gonna come collected, right, And so this is why it's easier to sometimes borrow money for something that but you know, that's tangible, that can be there and repossessed. That's why a lot of people go that route sometimes. And it's a lot more difficult to borrow money just on a

credit card. And if you do, you know, if you're like an entry level borrower, either you're young, or you have a bad credit or whatever, it is, good luck getting a decent card. You're gonna be paying crazy interest. Difficult. Yeah. I don't know if that's part of an app too, but you should have some type of thing for fine print that teaches people what it is and what it means. I bought a piano for my daughter when she was

when I was like twenty two twenty three. It was a Steinway and Son, and I really couldn't afford it at that age, but I bought it, and I paid them monthly because I could pay them monthly. And ten years later of me paying it, I just happened to look because they just kept coming out their account and I looked. I was like, how much did I actually

pay on this piano? And I only paid like five thousand dollars after ten years on this piano because the interest rates were so high, and the way that they did it was they took their interest rates the first ten years right like, But it was a piano and I been paying it for ten years, but I didn't know and I didn't read the small print because nobody talk me about credit. So I actually had to pay it off to make sure because I paid them so much money for goddamn piano that my daughter doesn't play

no more. But that's another point. But that's what you should do. You should really, I don't know if that's part of the app where it shows people about those interest rates and how that works. Big educational component also makes it different than you know, any other credit building apps out there. Yeah, now, what if you have a credit card, right and obviously you don't have to pay it off every month? So do you let Stellar know this is the amount that I want to pay before

it gets your mine? Or is it automatic? So when you link a card, for example, to Stellar to pay it off, it's automatic. It's so you designate what do you want to pay and we pay it on your behalf. It's just like bill pay right or all we are is bill pay the build your credit. But every month you can change that, like maybe you want to overpay what the minimum payment is obviously absolutely yeah, but you

can make double payments whatever you want. Would you just say that that sums it up your bill pay that build your credit. That's right. That's a great selling point. And given the website again where people can download it and definitely try this out. Yeah, it's Stellar Fi dot com, Stella Funnies dot com. And we'll be doing the challenge on Angela's Facebook page in a couple of days and

she'll let you know. And that's gonna start what we want everybody to participate in, that this is really a movement to empower ourselves with credit because nobody's helping us. I'm really excited about it, and I just want to say for people who are like, I'm just not going to pay my bills because i feel like I'm swamped and it's overwhelming, And what difference does it make any who does that? Who says that, I'm I'm not going to say who it is, but somebody did recently tell

me that. Yeah. They're like, well, well they have credit cards that are just that our way overdoing that. They're paying the minimum on and it keeps on getting more and more interests, and they're not concerned we're paying it off. They're like, it's just too much, Like I owe over one hundred thousand dollars and I just get overwhelmed. Yeah, and it's overwhelming, and so I'll just pay this fifty dollars a month and I'm not concerned about paying it off.

But at some point somebody is going to have to pay it. So if you know, something happens that gets passed on, it's not like it just goes away. Ever. And I do feel like the best thing to do. It's such a great relief to improve your credit, to see those changes being made to pay down those bills.

And so that's why I was really excited to be working with Lemine, who has a proven track record, and Stacy, who was already my partner with Wealth Wednesdays, and bringing something like this to help people, because I do feel like a lot of stress comes from finances if you're not doing it right, but a lot of relief and excitement can come when things start to get it getting more positive, and those people who are experiencing that severe trauma, like I have what you just said, have one hundred

thousand dollars in debt, I don't know what to do. This is one of the reasons we partnered with the National Foundation of Credit Counseling. You will get a coach, you'll get a plan, and it's a live person and that NFC dot org forward slash Stellar and that's really something we're excited about. Well, thank you guys for joining us, and definitely hit up the website and download the app right now and good luck with everything. Appreciate you, Thank you,

big shout out to Lemine. Watching them build this has been incredible some of the engineers were in the Ukraine, pulled it off once and it's been fun. It's been a journey. Thank you Lemina and Angela. All Right, well it's Lamins Rod Stacy Tisdale. It's the Breakfast Love Goal Morning. St