Our Story
It started with a flat tire.
Douglas Merrill, former Google CIO, received a call from his sister-in-law, Vic. She had a flat and couldn’t pay for a new tire without taking out a payday loan. And yet she’s a hard-working, creditworthy single mom working several jobs to provide for her kids.
Traditional ways of assessing creditworthiness aren’t working, pushing people like Vic into taking on high interest debt to cope with the smallest of day-to-day issues. Why? Because lenders can’t assess borrowers with limited credit histories, like Vic. With the vision of making fair and transparent credit available to everyone, Douglas founded ZestFinance.
We want to change how credit works
The multi-trillion-dollar lending industry still relies on aging scoring techniques that oversimplify the view of a borrower's finances. As a result, millions of deserving borrowers get rejected all the time. Some 46 million Americans are either “credit invisible,” with no file at one of the three major credit bureaus, or “unscorable,” with insufficient information to generate a credit score. This is a failure of the modern credit system.
Machine learning is the catalyst
Machine learning-based credit models can generate more profitable underwriting by drawing deeper insights from more data, especially unused data banks already have. ZestFinance was one of the first companies to deploy machine learning models for lending, and we know it works.
Solving the "black-box" problem
We built our ZAML software with deep explainability at its core so that our customers can unlock the power of machine learning confident that they’re fully compliant with fair credit and lending rules. ZAML models can be deployed quickly, monitored in real-time, and hosted in almost any environment.
