In an interview with , CEO of Camino Financial Sean
Salas detailed how his organization has been challenging
the status quo of business financing using the cloud.
The Los Angeles-based company—which invests in overlooked communities by offering credit to minority-owned microbusinesses—leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) across all of its work, including using AI to build its own credit assessment tools.
Ten years ago, Salas noted, if a company wanted to build software or AI and ML solutions, “typically you had to build it yourself.” But now, the “beauty of AWS” is that it offers companies like Camino Financial “access to infrastructure, such that you don’t have to build everything from scratch.”
Since it was founded by Salas and his twin brother, Kenny, Camino Financial has been focused on serving Latino microbusinesses, a market with roughly 5 million organizations. However, as Salas noted during the Forbes interview, the market is “almost double that if you include businesses that are informally operated in the gig economy … it’s a very large market with an unmet credit demand.”
Using cloud and AI/ML technologies has helped Camino Financial “bring down the cost of funding into this segment . . . and price for it at affordable rates and terms,” Salas said.
Forbes