Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany (Part 1)

100 million consumers live paycheck to paycheck and are loaded with debt. EarnUp offers a solution to help them ease their debt burden.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourselves as well as EarnUp.

Matthew Cooper: Nadim and I are the two co-founders of EarnUp. I’m currently the CEO and Nadim is the CFO. EarnUp is an award-winning platform that intelligently automates loan payments for the 200 million indebted Americans. We make it easy for consumers to stay on track with their payments.

We leverage extensive analytics and customer support to help people stay on track and make payments that they would have missed otherwise. We partner with leading financial institutions, non-profits, and government agencies in the US to try to help these paycheck to paycheck consumers. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click further down. Tell me more about what segment of consumers are you catering to. What is the basis of the lending?

Matthew Cooper: EarnUp is a consumer finance application. We are not a lender. Our product is focused on helping people that have loans pay off those loans easily and get out of debt. Our mission is to help the 200 million indebted Americans get out of debt and improve their financial health.

From a segmentation perspective, we focus currently on paycheck to paycheck consumers. These are individuals who have enough money to make their monthly payment but barely. This encompasses 50% to 70% of Americans today. We provide the ability to have consumers automate large portions of their financial lives that they struggle to do themselves.

One element of that would be flexible payments. If you’re a consumer, you get paid every week which is pretty common, especially in the lower and middle income communities. We would allow you to have a portion of your bills out whenever you get paid.

The second element that we enable is bill centralization. Consumers can manage all of their loan payments from a single interface as opposed to going to five or 10 different websites and credit card platforms to make those payments.

The third element is leveraging data on each consumer to make recommendations to them when we think they may miss a payment or when they have extra funds available. In either scenario, we give them notifications and provide assistance.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understood this. You are not providing any kind of financing to pay these loans off.

Matthew Cooper: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: You are providing some kind of software app to keep track of all the loans and manage the payment cycles, is that correct?

Matthew Cooper: All user experiences related to their loans happen through the EarnUp interface. If you’re our consumer, you would essentially come to EarnUp to manage any of your consumer loans. You can check your transactions and check balances.

All of your payment activity will happen directly from the EarnUp application. Instead of going to the Wells Fargo website to pay your auto loan and then to Chase to pay your student loan, all of that is integrated in EarnUp.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany
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