We recently caught up with Aneesh Varma, founder and CEO of Aire.io, for an interview. Varma launched the London-based company in 2014 to help thin-file customers qualify for essential financial products.
He graduated from Lehigh University as an engineer with a secondary degree in quantitative finance, and in 2014 was nominated as the European Commission’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
Finovate: What is Aire doing that its competitors are not?
Varma: At Aire, we don’t focus on competitors. We instead are focused on building the best product based on our core principles of what we would like to see in the world.
One such core principle at Aire is to go beyond just the data, and understand the story of the applicant. Many companies these days get carried away by big data—throwing 20,000 data points at the problem. But in reality it can lead to situations such as Ben Bernanke not being able to re-mortgage when he changed jobs. The ‘data’ was changing jobs; the ‘story,’ however, was still that he had a strong income.
At Aire, our research has been focussed on leveraging artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences to evaluate more meaningful and deeper data. Understanding the individuality of each applicant and not relying on population-based statistics.
All of our personal data comes directly from the user—via our virtual interview, done in an adaptive interface. It’s like having a human underwriter to interview every applicant, but automated, so we can run it at scale with real-time scoring.
This is really powerful, as the Aire process can score anyone without any dependency on external data. This is especially important as we expand into new geographies.
Aire’s multichannel application form
Finovate: What is the biggest challenge Aire faces in achieving its goal of offering fair access to finance?
Varma: The work we are doing at Aire is really personal to us. In many ways, we have ourselves been victims of the cracks in the current system of credit scores. We know what it means to be financially excluded. It’s really tough.
Our work is to onboard more lenders who share the same ethos as Aire about ensuring people aren’t getting marginalized just because they don’t fit into the standard boxes.
We know the Aire product works. Over the last few months, we have been able to observe empirical evidence data of our performance, and it is really phenomenal how we can boost acceptance up to 14% while still ensuring over 90% of candidates get through our process.
It’s a changing world. More and more of us are going to be self-employed, become freelancers and or migrate to other countries. We shouldn’t be left out.
Finovate: How do you engage with developers?
Varma: Ours is a startup with a purpose. We are solving a real problem—and, in fact, a really hard problem. There is no hype to our work. It is pure performance which is why we have to carefully leverage technology, research and human emotions to build a great product.
This attracts a very particular type of people who genuinely care about making an impact with their work. This really has become part of the DNA of our company.
For most of us in the team, this is our second or even third startup. And we constantly trying to optimize on everything we have done in the past. Most importantly, we focus on culture and hiring the right people.
We have a very rigorous hiring process over six stages. But once someone gets through that, we provide one of the most exciting work environments in London. You are surrounded by leading experts in each field and get to learn from them. And even teach them a few tricks! Perhaps a reason why we are attracting some great minds to join us on this journey (and a place on the European breakout list via Scott Sage).
Finovate: What’s on the horizon for Aire in 2016?
Varma: The biggest push now is to take our product to more people, in more markets. North America is next on the horizon, and we are launching there shortly. The emerging markets are also relevant, and we are starting to prepare the groundwork there.
Naturally, ongoing research is very important to improve our product. We continue to invest in research across the various fields that will enhance our offering for new markets, including fellowships with our partner universities. Ultimately, there are going to be multiple versions of how we end up delivering our scoring product to consumers.
And other than that, it’s about focussing on hiring great people. This problem we set out to solve requires not just engineers and scientists, but people across various disciplines. We have baked that into our culture as a company. So a major part of my role ends up looking at how to bring together various people to collaborate as we invent new dimensions to our product.
At FinovateEurope 2015, he debuted the Aire Credit API which enables lenders to use Aire to check credit for a thin-file client.
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