Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Karthik Manimozhi, CEO of RentMoola (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a reason I’m asking you about Seattle. Jeff Bezos has committed some significant amount of money to address homelessness in Seattle. I imagine that is something that is being tapped into to deal with their situation.

Is that a model that can be scaled throughout the country? Given the size and scale of the fortune that Bezos is sitting on, is that something that can be tapped into to bring some relief to this category through FinTech?

Karthik Manimozhi: Absolutely. This is a time when compassion comes first. It’s time for everybody to keep the community together. A lot of these people who will become homeless are also clients of Amazon. That’s how intertwined the society is. That’s also the bane for small and medium businesses.

A lot of the people whom they employ are also their customers. I absolutely agree with you that it’s public and private partnership, and the government is rethinking the whole system. I think FinTech could be a compelling force here. Think of these large institutions’ system of records.

FinTechs can become very effective systems of engagement. They can collect real-time data, find effective ways of sharing the pain, and also partner with increasingly large institutions to figure out a solution. The need of the hour is compassion.

Sramana Mitra: Have you talked to Amazon?

Karthik Manimozhi: I have not, but this is definitely number one on my agenda. 

Sramana Mitra: Right now, five people have a trillion dollar net worth. That’s Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bernand Arnault. Of these people, Bezos has indicated that he’s interested in tackling homelessness.

There couldn’t be a more urgent problem given COVID. There couldn’t be a more urgent time to address homelessness. This may be something that you need to follow up on to connect the dots and bring this infrastructure together. 

Karthik Manimozhi: I couldn’t agree more. The timing is right. This is the time when it’s life and death for a lot of the hard working American families. Financial freedom is very important, but also you should not be in a position to have to make difficult choices like paying rent or feeding your family. 

Sramana Mitra: It’s a tremendous opportunity for Bezos to put his fortune to work. He has benefited from COVID. He should try to see if he can connect the dots and add value by the click of a button. This is why FinTech is helpful.

You can’t just sit there without an infrastructure. You have to find all these people, understand their situation. You can provide all of that at a click of button and figure out the million people who are under threat of being evicted. You have all that data. It would be great if you can make it happen.

Karthik Manimozhi: That’s a fantastic point. At the beginning of the call, I laid out what we do. We have quite a bit of data and history. The other thing we’ve done is to make it simple for people to access these services. We have made an affordable portion of our platform and have approached other property management and real estate companies to whitelabel our solution.

Distribution is everything. In the last two months, we signed three major deals. The prominent one is the Apartment Owners Association of California where we are whitelabeling our solution for payments. They have 40,000 landlords in their membership profile, and 240,000 units under management.

The knowledge that we bring in makes us very valuable for partners like Jeff Bezos and others who want to help the community.

Sramana Mitra: I wish you all the best.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Karthik Manimozhi, CEO of RentMoola
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