They’ve inherited a passion for entrepreneurship from their mother, who immigrated from Mexico and opened over 30 restaurants in southern California. They’ve also gotten to observe firsthand the challenges overlooked entrepreneurs can face, particularly in the Latino community where small business owners often have no access to affordable credit.
The U.S. Latino microbusiness community's unmet credit demand of almost $20 billion struck the Salas brothers as an enormous opportunity to build a business that could promote financial inclusion. They founded Camino Financial with the mission of providing an AI-based financial technology platform that would bring affordable credit to Latino and other overlooked community microbusinesses.
In doing so, they also reinvented the lending process.
Using data tools and ML, Camino Financial created the Camino Score, an alternative to FICO, the credit scoring system used by most lenders. Using its proprietary scoring system, Camino Financial can provide capital to qualified business owners who might be rejected by traditional banking institutions for not having a FICO score.
The backend platform for Camino Financial’s technology is Luna.AI, which was built on AWS. ML and AI technologies help Camino Financial collect and analyze market data to underwrite more efficiently as well as improve every step of the credit process, including application, funding, servicing and wealth creation.
Two successful entrepreneurs with a mission for good are twin brothers Sean and Kenneth Salas.
Providing Affordable Credit To Overlooked Entrepreneurs
Twin brothers Sean and Kenneth Salas founded Camino Financial with the mission of providing an AI-based financial technology platform that would bring affordable credit to Latino microbusinesses.
The company’s goal is to use technology to make capital more accessible and affordable for all entrepreneurs. Moreover, Camino Financial strives to bring empathy to its AI and to lead by example in the fintech industry.
This unique approach is having an impact: Since its founding in 2014, Camino Financial has funded over 9,000 customers with $180 million in financing, and since November 2021, the company’s revenue has grown 300%.
They launched the company with the goal of providing online entrepreneurship courses to high school students in Yemen. But they faced an enormous hurdle: Due to ongoing conflict in Yemen, only about 25% of the Yemeni population had access to the internet.
Rather than give up, Arist’s founders looked at the problem from a different angle and realized that while internet use was limited, most people in Yemen (70%) had access to a mobile phone. So Arist invented a new way of delivering training—and offered courses via text message.
Since launching its first course in 2018, Arist has provided over 100,000 text-based courses to people around the world. And with AWS, Arist can now support large enterprise clients and scale seamlessly as the company has grown 10x year-over-year. Plus, the flexibility of the cloud has helped Arist deliver its courses across multiple messaging applications.
Arist now provides a variety of learning opportunities—including compliance training, leadership development and onboarding courses—to a variety of individuals and organizations, including Fortune 500 companies. It also offers tools that organizations can use to build, deliver and analyze the adoption and effectiveness of their own training courses.
With 90% of the world on mobile phones (and only 60% on the internet), Arist has created a way to bring education opportunities to more people in more places. Moreover, the company has maintained its commitment to learning access and offers discounts to nonprofits and other social-good organizations.
In 2018, when they were college students, Maxine Anderson, Michael Ioffe and Ryan Laverty founded the microlearning platform Arist.
Making Education Accessible Around The World
But Candidly focuses on the economics of education, providing tools that support the full arc of education expenses, from planning and borrowing to paying back student loans.
According to the Federal Reserve, the median annual wage of college graduates in the U.S. is $22,000 higher than that of people with only a high school degree. However, student loan debt can reduce that financial benefit by limiting a person’s ability to save money, buy a house and acquire wealth. About 46 million people in the U.S. carry student loan debt totaling nearly $1.75 trillion.
Candidly is helping reduce student loan debt by rethinking education financing, from planning and funding to loan repayment and building wealth. Inspired by the Portuguese term desenrascanco, which means “finding a solution to a problem out of left field,” Candidly uses AWS ML tools to provide users with a comprehensive app- and web-based solution that helps them make informed student loan choices and develop a repayment and savings strategy.
Candidly also uses ML to continuously evaluate users' financial health, provide personalized payment plans and predict a borrower’s residual income and ability to pay down loans quicker. As a result, Candidly has helped its users save an average of more than $300 per month and shorten their loan repayment times by an average of five years.
And with 2,000% user growth since 2020, Candidly relies on the scalability of the cloud to expand quickly and efficiently while only paying for the services and capacity that it needs.
Candidly, a financial wellness platform founded in 2016, also helps people achieve their learning goals.
Building Financial Wellness By Reducing Student Loan Debt
When I reflect on what these three AWS customers have achieved, I’m reminded of something Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, once said about how to get out of a tight box: “Invent your way out.”
Camino Financial, Arist and Candidly have each pursued their mission of building a business that could transform people’s lives by throwing out the old rules and inventing fresh solutions, such as a new scoring system for credit applicants, a new process for obtaining and repaying student loans and a new delivery approach to virtual learning.
Every day in the U.S., tens of thousands of entrepreneurs apply to start new businesses, many of which have the potential to significantly change our lives for the better. This is one reason AWS provides the most comprehensive set of data, AI and ML services and continuously works to make them more cost-effective and easier to use.
We’ve seen the impact individuals with a vision can have on the world is enormous. And we’re committed to helping more entrepreneurs dream bigger, invent faster and be bolder in the problems they choose to solve.
Learn more about how AWS helps startups grow their business and find perspectives on innovating with the cloud at AWS Executive Insights.
“Invent Your Way Out”
Transforming
For Growth
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