Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 1)

Todd has built a public FinTech business with $7M of family money and another $8M of debt. OppFi went public in 2021. Impressive, capital-efficient, fundamentals-oriented journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?

Todd Schwartz: I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. I lived there most of my life. I went through the Northbrook Illinois school system. I enjoyed my childhood there.

Sramana Mitra: And college?

Todd Schwartz: I went to Tulane University in New Orleans. That was a transformational time for me to spend four years in New Orleans. You really learn about life and about the south. I thoroughly enjoyed and developed there as a person and learned a lot. It’s a great school.

Sramana Mitra: When did you finish?

Todd Schwartz: 2004. I got a degree in Finance.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Todd Schwartz: My dad is a little bit old school and he told me to get a job. I had an interest in real estate. I went and worked for a large vertically-integrated developer of multi-family condominiums called Optima. They have a very good footprint in the Chicago area. I was working as an analyst. I had a lot of energy. They saw that I had the potential to do a lot more. Doing the analyst and development work was fine for about six months.

They came to me and said, “We have this opportunity for you to be out in the field. You get to wear jeans, a collared shirt, and a hard hat. The one drawback is you have to get up really early in the morning.” I had to adjust and change my schedule to get up at 5 AM. I had an unbelievable mentor there by the name of Mike Schwerzler. He was the head of the condo that I was sent to.

They had me working with union tradesmen to close units. It was simply put to me that the faster we close units with the fewest number of punch list items, the faster we can pay back the construction loan. I took a liking to that. I got to interact with the head of the project.

I had excelled. So much so that they promoted me and moved me to their new project. It was a three-building condominium tower with 750 units. They sent me out there to clear the site and prepare it for development. I stayed with the company for four years before I came back to Schwartz Capital Group. I left at a good time because 2008 was a transformational time. The financial system was under immense pressure.

Sramana Mitra: Your family office was in investments?

Todd Schwartz: Yes. My father is a self-made entrepreneur. He started a business buying and selling radio time. He would call on small businesses and partner with radio stations that had extra radio slots for sale. They would do the creatives and sell the time. Then they would make a commission.

He morphed that into a BPO. He was a true pioneer in the industry. It was called APAC Customer Services. He had taken it public in 1995 and had a very successful IPO. APAC was servicing Fortune 50 companies. They had a real focus on healthcare with some of the proceeds from the family investment office.

My dad came from humble beginnings. We thought that the best philosophy was to have accountants and asset managers take it and diversify it. In 2008, we learned that that was not a great strategy. We had so much diversification. To unwind all that takes so much time. We only directly allocate our own equity today. On the public side, we have no hedge funds. We just use ETFs. Warren Buffet is a big proponent of that. We think they’re great tools for getting exposure to the public market in a low-cost way.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz
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