In 2019, financially underserved consumers in the U.S. — encompassing consumers who are unbanked or underbanked, credit challenged, or who have low-to-moderate and/or volatile income households — spent nearly $190 billion in fees and interest on financial products and services.¹ Of these fees, nearly 55% came in the form of short-term and single-payment credit products such as installment loans, title loans, pawn and payday lending, and overdraft fees. While certain particularly predatory subsegments of this market such as online and storefront payday loans are shrinking with the growth of more affordable, transparent, and consumer-friendly fintech alternatives, the aggregate market size for predatory products has continued to expand at a troubling rate,² reflecting unrelenting demand for and dependence upon these products and services. This dependence on short-term, small-dollar credit products is driven by low income consumers’ well-documented inability to build sufficient savings to weather income fluctuations or small financial shocks,³ and is reinforced by the onerous fees and complicated repayment structures. The result is millions of underserved consumers trapped in debt spirals that render them unable to achieve financial stability and build wealth.

VIVA Finance extends affordable credit to an underserved subset of the population otherwise forced to rely on expensive, opaque, and predatory products which make saving – and therefore long-term wealth building – either difficult or impossible. By offering loans up to $10,000 in size, VIVA unlocks borrowers’ ability to access and finance more significant life expenses.

+  $10 million aggregate originations by end of 2021.
+  Diversification of employer partners and expansion into direct to consumer channels.
+  Optimizing costs of capital for lending operations to enable company to reduce cost of products to end customers.