Decoding Disruptors: Shivani Siroya, Founder & CEO of Tala

Michael Gervais (0:08)

Welcome to Decoding Disruptors. This is a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast, and it is presented without interruption by Microsoft.

And Microsoft has radically transformed under their CEO Satya Nadella with his really bright, crystal clear emphasis on building a culture around mindset, inclusion and diversity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That's their mission statement. That's awesome. I've been fortunate enough to have like an upfront view over the last handful of years of Microsoft. And I'm telling you, this organization truly cares about people and the psychological skills they need to flourish. So I couldn't be more excited to partner with Microsoft in bringing this series to life. And Decoding Disruptors, what we're doing is we're taking a deep dive into the minds of extraordinary women who have disrupted the narrative in their business, their industries, their communities. And it all begins with the narrative that they changed around themselves within themselves about what is possible.

I had the chance to interview nine amazing women for this series, and all of the conversations were filmed. And they're currently available at decodingdisruptors.com. There's lots of other stuff around the content that's there. So I really want to encourage you to go check it out. decodingdisruptors.com. You can watch short form, you can watch long form. We've curated all of the women's insights based on mindset principles. So go check decodingdisruptors.com for more. And you can also take our disruptors assessment, the compete to create team. We are so inspired by the insights of these women that we wanted to spin up a little assessment.

And it's a pilot assessment just to spark awareness of where you are on the psychological skills related to the path of disruption of your own narrative in your life. And again, that's all available at decodingdisruptors.com. Now, this week's conversation is with Shivani Siroya. And she built a near billion dollar business on the back of a simple belief, people are trustworthy.

Okay, so how does that come about?

After holding jobs with big investment banks and with the United Nations, Shivani recognized a global problem.

Almost a third of the world doesn't have access to credit because they have no way to build a credit score. So without credit, it's obvious people can't get home loans and small business loans and life improvement loans. It's difficult to progress personally and professionally when you're outside of that loop. So she did something about it and Shivani founded Tala. And it's a smartphone lending app designed to provide access to credit to 2 billion people that have historically been overlooked by traditional financial institutions.

The Tala app uses behavioral data on the phone. And what they're doing is they're building a credit profile for people. It's amazing. It's sophisticated. It's smart. It's wonderful. It is so organically genius that like I'm so stoked to share what she's doing and her team.

And so with this aggregated information and the algorithms that they've created, they can evaluate individual risk and provide instant loans to customers. And with that, Shivani has disrupted financial systems. But what's more remarkable about her is she has a complete alignment in every aspect of her life. Wait until you hear this. Wait until you hear this conversation. How she works. It's amazing. And what's amazing about it is how wonderfully purposeful she is.

How strong her ideas are and how delicately she embraces the fragility of the human experience.

I mean, amazing. Everything she does is grounded in a clear philosophical approach. And what I love about this, and I mean, I love about this, is that she reminds us all of how important it is and how clear it becomes when you work from principles that serve others. This conversation made me better. And I hope it does the same for you. Actually, strike that. I don't hope it does. I want to challenge you to listen deeply and to act quickly on clarifying the principles that guide your thoughts, your words and your actions. What are they? Write them down. Get crisp about them. Practice them. And stay the course on your mission in life. If you haven't done that work, if you don't know your philosophy, the thing that guides your thoughts, words and actions, and you don't have your mission or vision of what you want to, where you want to go in life and who it is that you're working on becoming, forget about it. So I want to... This is the challenge, right? To listen deeply and to act quickly. And I'm so fired up to share this conversation with you. And another massive appreciation for Microsoft for making this magical series come to life. And so head over to decodingdisruptors.com, check out the videos.