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What is Pinwheel's core technology and how does the company differentiate itself from its competitors with respect to that technology?
Kurtis Lin
Co-founder & CEO at Pinwheel
I believe data quality is a massive differentiator for us and here's why. Everyone else—including Plaid, for the most part—in the world of data aggregation goes to the source, gathers data from the source, and then goes to the customer and dumps it in their lap and says “Here's the data, good luck! Go figure out what you want to do with it.”
If you have a team of engineers and a PM who is excited to figure out what to do with it, that’s great. But a lot of people don't have that expertise. They'll be like, “Wait, what the hell? Shouldn't you give it to me in more of a structured, usable way?” And that's our philosophy.
One of the very key distinctions for us versus all of our other competitors is that we are a consumer reporting agency (CRA). That means that we’re subject to a very different set of regulations than everybody else. And frankly, it's very onerous. It's not something that you should do for shits and giggles—but it's very important for us to do because it aligns with our philosophy around this being the consumer's data.
More importantly, it actually allows us to collect the information, and then modulate it and organize it, and then use it for decisioning and actual underwriting purposes. Data from other editors isn’t legally allowed to be used in that way.
What we actually do is spend a lot of time from a data science and data engineering perspective, taking the data in and structuring it and actually saying, “Let me take all this information about an Uber driver, aggregate it into an overall report that’s actually an understanding of their current pay. Then, here's a volatility index on it, here’s a predictive model on where that income is going to be, and here’s a live earning stream of what this thing looks like in real time. I give this all to you, not just for verification, but to actually make an underwriting decision.” That's where we are so much different than anyone else in the space.
