As the CEO and co-founder of Nova Credit, Misha Esipov has been helping people deemed “credit invisible”, like immigrants and thin/no file consumers, leverage alternative data to prove their creditworthiness, enabling lenders to gain a more accurate picture of consumers financial history to inform a more risk-averse underwriting process.
Nova Credit’s flagship product, Credit Passport, helps immigrants establish creditworthiness by leveraging the credit history from their home country and translating it into a local-equivalent score.
Last year, Nova Credit launched Cash Atlas, which allows consumers to connect their bank accounts to its platform, giving its clients a direct view into consumers’ bank statement history. This allows consumers with little to no credit history to prove they have a consistent income and history of bill payments, all in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
An immigrant himself, Esipov moved here from the Soviet Union in 1990, when he was three. He later graduated from New York University and joined Goldman Sachs. In 2016, he co-founded Nova Credit.
“My family experienced firsthand the financial obstacles that come with being an immigrant, so I approached the problem with a personal connection,” Esipov said.
As a graduate student, Esipov realized just how many of his peers were international students who experienced some version of the problem that migrants’ credit histories do not follow them across borders.
“We believe that once consumers have access to their data, it’s up to them to determine what they want to do with it,” Esipov said. “That served as the philosophical approach behind Nova Credit, and after seven years of partnership building, meeting regulators, building data integration, standardizing information, we now have connectivity into two billion consumers all around the globe.” – Carter Pape
Source: AmericanBanker
Congratulations Micha from all of us at BIIA! Best wishes for future success.
