What was the inspiration behind building Pinwheel, and how does the company differentiate itself in the market?

In the simplest words possible, what we do at Pinwheel is connect sources—that we would broadly call income data—with the banks, lenders, and fintechs that need information around who someone is, how much money they make, and where they work to either enhance existing products or build entirely new ones.

It’s a really powerful thing, because if you think about the last time you refinanced your home or applied for anything around like a credit card, a mortgage, or a rental apartment, you probably had to download your pay stubs, your W-2s, and all these paper docs just to verify who you are and that information. It's crazy that in 2022 that’s still the primary way that this stuff happens. And it's because those pipes don't exist.

The thesis is quite simple. When you look at the first wave of fintech, what we call fintech 1.0, many people credit Plaid as being the progenitor of this first wave, for companies like Venmo, Robinhood and Coinbase etc—they couldn't exist without Plaid and the data they provide. 

We see ourselves as a catalyst for what we call fintech 2.0, or that next wave of financial innovation. The reason why we know this to be true and why we have such high conviction in this thesis is that when we came out of stealth in June of 2020, we had no PR strategy. Literally, we pinged our friends at TechCrunch and said “Please write an article. We need leads. We need people to know us.” They were like, “All right, stop bothering us and we'll write an article.”

They pushed this article out, and in the first 72 hours, we had 133 organic inbounds from Chase, BOA, Wells Fargo, Citi, SoFi, Credit Karma, LendingClub, PayPal, Square—every single large financial institution (FI) or fintech reached out. And we were like, “Holy shit.” What it made us realize is that our initial thesis was actually very myopic. 

We thought we were building a better Equifax. Income and employment verification is a big market with a big TAM. It’s a really healthy, high-margin business. We were just going to build it cheaper and better. 

As we went deeper, we realized that when you look at the 5-10 year roadmaps of these really big FIs and the biggest fintechs—companies at the forefront of innovation—more than half of all the really big bets that they want to make fundamentally cannot exist without our platform: either the data that we're unlocking or the access to paychecks that we enable. Once that became clear, we were like, “Oh, the true thesis is that we’re the platform that’s creating the building blocks of the future of the financial system.”

It’s completely rethinking how credit works by doing things like real time underwriting versus having to do things in a black box snapshot. It's enabling earned wage access—true earned wage access—because you can see how much someone's making in real time, and we can see when someone's clocked in and clock out of their shift, etc, and combine that with the ability to intelligently route their paycheck. We can do things like carve out X percent to go to this brokerage account, Y percent to go to this high-yield savings account, and Z to go pay off this loan. We can intelligently route all of it. So there's limitless use cases that can be enabled with the platform we’re building.