Rodrigo Acuna WINS by Helping Hispanic Millennials Build Wealth

[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: Tell me about your startup and what were you doing before you applied for jobs at investment banks. After that, then what happened?

[00:00:07] Rodrigo Acuna: 

[00:00:07] Rodrigo Acuna: I'm originally from Mexico city, born and raised there, went to undergrad there, studied economics. after graduation, I did not land the job on that firm, but I entered another investment banking boutique, that was half Dutch, half Mexican. worked there for about a year and a half.

[00:00:25] Rodrigo Acuna: Incredibly interesting. it definitely built my work ethic a lot. I learned a lot about financial modeling, finance, deal making, all of that, but at the analyst level. So you're basically moving logos from PowerPoints and building spreadsheets. The great thing about this shop was that with small team, we were only seven and it was very highly dependent on the owner or the managing director of the office.

[00:00:50] Rodrigo Acuna: So he did provide us with a ton of access to the other side of the table, to the clients. Maybe, because of necessity, the hierarchy was not [00:01:00] as well established as other places, but also, I consider him one of my biggest mentors until his passing. He was also concerned with developing the talent.

[00:01:10] Rodrigo Acuna: So I quickly rose, to senior analyst. I was in charge of developing the talent. My other three fellow analysts, basically I received the orders directly from the boss and then distribute the work, compile it. And it was a role getting ready for what it's called an associate on the banking space. And at a certain point when I was making that transition, my two associates that were teaching me everything that I should know for the next level went to business school.

[00:01:36] Rodrigo Acuna: So there was a big void left there of leadership and junior leadership and growth that my boss was not going to sit down with me and help me deal with. He wanted to see them. So at that point I thought that, okay, I've gained a lot of experience here.

[00:01:56] Rodrigo Acuna: It's maybe time to see what's out there. And I landed a job [00:02:00] here in the U S 10 years ago in Miami. For McKinsey, the consulting firm. So I came 10 years ago on a work visa to work for McKinsey. And they were focused, on covering financial institutions, banks, and insurance companies mainly.

[00:02:16] Rodrigo Acuna: So again, this was completely different, job, but the credentials helped me get there. And I learned to see operations. In this part of my career, advising banks on what to do, what not to do. And especially on technology, since we were the Miami office was very focused on the Latin American market.

[00:02:36] Rodrigo Acuna: at that point, this was 2014 smart ATMs, your banking app. We had smartphones back then, but my dad still used in Mexico, the. thing with the, passcodes to make transactions. He didn't use his phone. He could use online, but, there was no ATMs that would take cash. They would only give cash or take checks.

[00:02:58] Rodrigo Acuna: So it [00:03:00] was, a good thing to have all that knowledge from all over the world and bring best practice to Latin America. But one of the bad things about that job was that. It had a lot of traveling, especially I was covering, Ecuador, Peru. So I will fly every Sunday or Monday for one and a half years to Peru or Ecuador, come back on a Thursday and different to my dad is also a consultant.

[00:03:25] Rodrigo Acuna: So in my house, consultancy was like, everyone in my house wanted to be a consultant. My sister is still a consultant. my dad's still a consultant in his private practice now. So I wanted to try it and see what all the fuss was about. The difference is that when my dad or my sister earlier heard their careers were traveling, they will always come back home, family, friends.

[00:03:48] Rodrigo Acuna: And I was in a new city, not too much friends. My personal life was not what I wanted, but I have started to build a network in Miami and I got a job at [00:04:00] Morgan Stanley. Wealth management with, as I mentioned, I'm Mexican, but I landed with the Argentina, Peru, and English speaking Caribbean team. 

[00:04:08] Rodrigo Acuna: 5 billion in assets on their management. And I was the analyst of the team in charge of everything, trading, reporting, presentations, client management, very fun. It was, super fast paced market hours. especially the trading portion was super fun, made a couple of mistakes in my career.

[00:04:25] Rodrigo Acuna: From the moment I left investment banking, tried consulting. I wanted to do investment banking again, and I wanted to do it at the highest level.

[00:04:32] Rodrigo Acuna: And that means, you know, New York, big firm, big deals. I wanted to experience that as an international, even in a big firm, internal mobility is very difficult. So my path to do that was through an MBA. So I started planning, and doing all the things necessary to be accepted to a top business school.

[00:04:53] Rodrigo Acuna: And one of those things that I started doing takes me back when I was in high [00:05:00] school and more than high school when I was in college and I was about to graduate, I went back to my high school and pitched a class that was a vocational orientation, but more from the perspective of recent graduates from college.

[00:05:18] Rodrigo Acuna: So when we had that type of class in high school, they will tell you more about, you know, Area one is medicine in the broader sense. Area two is socioeconomics. Area three is arts. Area four is engineering. At no point we have like recent graduates, or even if they're not recent, like professionals come to these areas.

[00:05:41] Rodrigo Acuna: class and tell us, okay, I studied economics and I do this for the central bank of Mexico. I started engineering and I am a software development, engineer or I am building bridges or I am helping an architectural theorem, nothing like that. So I went back to my school to pitch [00:06:00] giving a class with.

[00:06:02] Rodrigo Acuna: My high school had around 150 graduates every class, like, let me bring all these people to tell kids are only four or five years younger than us. Why we started and what we're starting to work in and we did that for a full semester. It was a ton of fun and I started loving teaching and this was not like proper teaching, but you were sharing knowledge.

[00:06:27] Rodrigo Acuna: So when I was here in Miami with Morgan Stanley, I started doing two programs. One was, student finance lead. Which was to give financial literacy courses to, disenfranchised communities. So we will go to the homeless shelter. We will go to the public high schools, Miami Special Olympics.

[00:06:49] Rodrigo Acuna: Some, corporates where they had minimum paid jobs, like fast food and retail. And we had a program. This was without smartphones, computer technology. [00:07:00] It was a workbook that we had printed out and you give classes on what's interest rate, time, value of money, budgeting, and need versus a want all of that in very easy to understand terms.

[00:07:13] Rodrigo Acuna: I started loving that, did that, for two years and then I got offered. To do Kapow, which is, kids in the power of work, which I will go to, elementary school and you'd be with eight and nine graders and tell them life lessons, we will talk about, for example, discrimination, how do you teach discrimination to, Eight year old kids while also being responsible with their stage.

[00:07:39] Rodrigo Acuna: So we would do this, trivia game in which I would say gold team, red team, blue team started asking them about their favorite cartoons, the movies that were, you know, the Avengers, Harry Potter, all of that, but when they had to ring the bell, I would always choose a gold group, sometimes blue, never red.[00:08:00] 

[00:08:00] Rodrigo Acuna: And after the session. I will ask them like, Hey, you know, how do you feel that even though you hit the bottom first, I'd never, you know, went to red. Oh no, that's terrible. You know, we were deserving and all of that. So you will teach them live lessons in very, digestible forms. And then at the end of it all, we'll play trivia as it was intended, declare a winner and all of that.

[00:08:23] Rodrigo Acuna: Then other fun stuff like organized a day at work with Morgan Stanley, all the kids came to the office. We put them next to advisors, traders, and help them build a portfolio. And then that we were going to track the portfolio that they would choose. And it was very fun because advisors would sit down with these kids and tell them like, what do you love?

[00:08:43] Rodrigo Acuna: Video games. 

[00:08:44] Rodrigo Acuna: So he'll go in what video game companies trade. Oh, you know, Ubisoft, right. let's grab Ubisoft. I love fast food. I love, clothing. I love Disney, And we build the pitch competition and the kid that won killed it [00:09:00] that week. He killed it. and then, it all ended up with a party with the kids, a week after.

[00:09:06] Rodrigo Acuna: But I'm telling you this because at the beginning, I did have this urge for teaching, but I started when I did student finance league and Kapow. I started more from the selfish side. I knew that to get into a good business school, all these extra work activities look very good. And I ended up falling in love with, especially with the financial literacy side of things.

[00:09:32] Rodrigo Acuna: so went to business school, then, I started my MBA at NYU. Focus on finance, technology and banking and it's okay. 

[00:09:43] Rodrigo Acuna: I have my degree here above my computer. Like, you know, I'm in my house, like, I'm a lawyer or something.

[00:09:48] Rodrigo Acuna: And, you know, my girlfriend asked me, like, what's going on with that, degree. And I tell her that's the most expensive possession I own. This is like, you know, [00:10:00] 150, 000 painting. 

[00:10:02] Carrie Richardson: I'd have that made into wallpaper 

[00:10:04] Rodrigo Acuna: So I'm going to display, but, I continue with the teaching side at NYU, I was a teaching assistant for microeconomics for, three semesters teaching my fellow graduate students, that were in, semesters under me and also the undergrads.

[00:10:21] Rodrigo Acuna: So, that was fantastic. And then I finally achieved my goal of going to investment banking. And for what I've told you, I've always worked in financial institutions or for financial institutions. So the team that I landed on, on investment banking was a big team, which is, financial institutions group where you cover smaller banks, insurance companies, asset managers, FinTech, and specialty finance.

[00:10:45] Rodrigo Acuna: And inside there I specialize in bank m and a. specialty finance and FinTech a little bit. So I was doing, some of the biggest deals that happened the years I was there. I was involved as an associate, great experience, [00:11:00] but what happened to me. At that point in my life is a COVID hit and it hit while I was in New York and New York was one of the places that, COVID was felt the hardest.

[00:11:12] Rodrigo Acuna: I work from home for a very long portion of 2020. Everything was closed. and then the winter, times come and the weather starts getting freezing. It gets dark at 4 30 PM. I've been working 17 hours, six days a week. So life started getting complicated for me on the personal side.

[00:11:35] Rodrigo Acuna: And out of nowhere, I received a LinkedIn message from a. NYU alumni that said, I'm building something every time I put the keywords for a search, you are the first, hit, the first, result and I have done this three times, we need to talk. So, you know, I went in, talk him a little bit, see who he was.[00:12:00] 

[00:12:00] Rodrigo Acuna: Texas businessman, oil and gas investor, owner of a soccer team in Austin, the place in MLS. And I'm very much into sports and I know how difficult it is to get a franchise in the U. S. It's, there, there's these series called Billions that I don't know if you have seen it, but the main character Bobby Axelrod tries to buy an NFL team and they don't let him.

[00:12:24] Rodrigo Acuna: And the guy that doesn't let him tells him, we don't have nobility titles. In the U. S., but sports franchises, owning sports franchises is our version of being a knight. And it's like, you've made it, right? Also I remember cases where like the former owner of the Clippers of basketball in L. A. was forced to sell his team to Steve Ballmer because he said racist things to his ex girlfriend. That's how tightly controlled that network is. So that was enough diligence for me. Took the meeting, spoke for about an hour. He [00:13:00] told me we need to meet in Dallas.

[00:13:02] Rodrigo Acuna: I was in the middle of a live deal. So I only had Saturdays off. So I flew a Saturday morning, met with him all day, flew at night, back to work on Sunday. I got for me a job at his family office. And, you know, we did a bunch of deals from, buying real estate, alternative energy, a lithium company, a ton of oil and gas, and also fintech.

[00:13:26] Rodrigo Acuna: And inside those fintech projects, we were seeing the opportunity that exists for financial services for Latinos. there's a very long tale of underserved, underbanked communities in the U. S. It's more than 20 percent of the population right now, but 40 percent of them are underserved or underbanked.

[00:13:50] Rodrigo Acuna: And right now I live in Miami and if you have ever been here, you go through Brickell Avenue and you see every bank existed to [00:14:00] men from the US, you know, East coast, Northeast, West coast to Latin American banks to European banks. All of them are here. But you go five, 10 minutes away to Hialeah and all those beautiful branches start becoming cashier's check store, payday loan, pay advance, all of that.

[00:14:20] Rodrigo Acuna: And people there are paying 300 to 400 percent of yearly interest. And they don't feel it because you know, they are, they got a thousand dollar loan that they needed and they're paying, I don't know, 60 a week because that's manageable. But if you add up those 60 a week for 52 weeks, they're paying 200, 300%.

[00:14:43] Rodrigo Acuna: So there's a misprice there in between why bank of America chase cannot give you an entry level credit card when you're paying a 300 percent loan. It might be, for a variety of [00:15:00] reasons. Community shame of not paying the local shop fear, you don't know if it's a loan shark and, you know, old school mafia, they're going to come bust your knee, or simply, you know, because you do it.

[00:15:12] Rodrigo Acuna: And the question here is, how do we bridge that gap from 300 percent APR to 26%? So we started talking about this while at the family office, and that's where I met Diego and Alfredo, my co founders. they run a venture studio that has been running for around eight years now and a demand generation, a marketing agency.

[00:15:34] Rodrigo Acuna: we wanted to build a customer acquisition strategy for the Latino market for financial services. So we contact them, they came back with a plan and in building this relationship with them, we decided that we can run with this project and we can make something special happen.

[00:15:54] Rodrigo Acuna: So with the help of our friends and family, we were In Dallas and elsewhere, we raised a friends and [00:16:00] family round and launched to, to do this full time on January of 2023. So we have been building for the last year and a half, the relationships that we need with financial institutions, the technology that we need, you know, hiring, doing more fundraising to get to the point where the company's attracted for investors.

[00:16:22] Rodrigo Acuna: And that we can launch to market. And we're very happy to, to say that by September of 2024 we'll be launching our product, which is for financial services marketplace. Focus on closing the world gap between Latinos and general population, and we plan on doing this by doing strategic partnerships with balance sheet providers, banks, insurance companies, asset managers, broker dealers, payments companies that really want this demographic and offer white label products that are [00:17:00] attached to both the bank, but that the brand that they interact is I am financial.

[00:17:04] Rodrigo Acuna: And our customer acquisition plan is all built towards this demographic. We're going to speak to them how they like to be speak, how they want to be, thought about financial literacy. There's a big component, of financial literacy also in our customer acquisition plan and our, product plan. For example, we plan on having a credit card in which you need to pass videos.

[00:17:29] Rodrigo Acuna: Explaining, APR, payments, your payment date, all of those things that become familiar once you are in the system, but that they are very, new to people that have never been banked. they never heard about interest. They thought that, you know, you use a credit card and then the bank pays.

[00:17:49] Rodrigo Acuna: And they didn't understand that you owe that money. But I'm paying the minimum. Yeah. If you pay the minimum for, you know, a 300 pair of Jordans, you're going to end up [00:18:00] paying 700. That doesn't make sense. We plan on doing videos that once you have those videos and we have your data on FICO scores and all of that, we unlock the correct product for you.

[00:18:14] Rodrigo Acuna: Show me that you can be responsible. And that way, the smaller banks that we're working with, they can take that into account for their own, their writing. Because again, if you can walk to one of the big banks right now, and you With your social security number and walk out with a credit card.

[00:18:32] Rodrigo Acuna: You are not my client because you are ready. They can offer you better rates, cashback, better products. I can offer you a secure credit card, but that secure credit card is planned to graduate you to an American Express Black in 20 years. 

[00:18:54] Carrie Richardson: American Express Black is a pretty expensive card to hold.

[00:18:56] 

[00:18:56] Rodrigo Acuna: Yeah, I had a lot of, good things happen [00:19:00] to me in my life to get me to where I am. But one day that one thing that I did do this, I moved to the U S with a job offer and 1, 500 that I use for security deposits for my apartment.

[00:19:12] Rodrigo Acuna: And I started from zero and the good job part helps because I was paying with cash, everything that I was doing while I was building my credit score. But I did have to pay three security deposits for my first apartment, a huge down payment for my first lease. I went to AT& T and they wanted 300 of security deposit for my router.

[00:19:35] Rodrigo Acuna: When you enter the financial services industry and you have no credit score, you are, way behind. And what you can achieve is I, of course, didn't have 150, 000 to pay for my MBA.

[00:19:48] Rodrigo Acuna: Okay. Plus two years of opportunity cost of not making money because it was a full time program. Plus two years of cost of living in New York while making zero dollars. [00:20:00] I did that with a student loan, and I repaid my student loan two years after. So it can be done, and we want to teach that path to people that don't know that this can be achieved.

[00:20:13] Carrie Richardson: Yeah, as a non American citizen, I can relate to that. I moved here to start a business. I had a business in Canada. When I came to the U. S., they didn't consider that I had credit in Canada or that I owned property in Canada, that they didn't care about anything other than revolving credit. And I had none.

[00:20:34] Carrie Richardson: So I got a 500 prepaid card from the Bank of America. And when I sold my business, I still had not received any lending from them. They would not lend to me. So I ran my whole business on cash for 10 years because I wasn't American.

[00:20:51] Rodrigo Acuna: I've been through that same way. I started with a 200 Capital One quick silver card that I have to this day. I don't use it as [00:21:00] much. But I still have it. 

[00:21:01] Carrie Richardson: No, if you close your first credit card, then it impacts your FICO score, which you have to learn. 

[00:21:06] Carrie Richardson: It's not the same in Canada. 

[00:21:08] Rodrigo Acuna: You need to learn. And here, you know, I have one of my subscriptions, I don't know if it's. Netflix or Spotify or Dollar Shave Club, but you know, 12 a month charged into that card so it doesn't get, you know, not operational and then I pay it and I keep that credit.

[00:21:24] Rodrigo Acuna: But yeah, it's tough. one of our huge business pieces is that No credit is not the same as bad credit and big banks, they cannot bend their underwriting models because there's so much access, so much inflow that if they say, okay, I'm going to start giving credit cards for people with 580 FICO, all the scammers would flood in, get the card, make the payments, and then, you know, just, never pay back.

[00:21:55] Rodrigo Acuna: But the Latino community is very, cash [00:22:00] based. I grew up with my dad. Whenever he bought a car is when he had the full amount to buy the car. Whenever he bought a TV, it was when he had the full amount to buy a TV. If your uncle lends you money, you first off, you won't eat. Until you don't pay him back.

[00:22:20] Rodrigo Acuna: we believe that the Hispanic community in the U S is ruled by the same values of, you know, family commitment, being responsible with money, they just need the access. And another thing that also affects a lot is that a lot of the origins of these Hispanic Americans comes from illegal immigration.

[00:22:44] Rodrigo Acuna: So when mom and dad came maybe 30, 40 years ago to the U S. They didn't want to go to the bank because being at the bank implied that someone knew their address. And they didn't know if this was communicated to immigration services, [00:23:00] so they lived under the water for their whole lives. And now their kids are born, they're American, they have social security numbers.

[00:23:07] Rodrigo Acuna: they have transitioned from very hard labor intensive works to more managerial roles. And this third generation is going to community college or to university and getting even better jobs in tech, healthcare, and others. But if you learn in your house that the bank is bad, don't trust the bank, you know, you don't need the bank, cash, cash, cash, then you're, you know, in the easiest, of examples, you're losing 1.

[00:23:39] Rodrigo Acuna: 5%, yearly, on cashback. And this is not taking into account interest rates, or you want to buy a house and the down payment that you need to put in, it's way higher or your interest rate It's like, if you're only cash transcribed, you're a millennial, Gen Z, you don't see home ownership as anywhere near your [00:24:00] future.

[00:24:00] You're paying 2 percent more for everything that you buy. 

[00:24:03] Carrie Richardson: I was speaking to Dave Madera, which is how we ended up interacting who, and he was talking about how the client base, for his multifamily residential properties , they didn't trust banks and that became a problem for them when it was time to rent an apartment.

[00:24:22] Carrie Richardson: They had no credit rating. They had no history with a bank. And that's one of the problems that he was trying to solve is like, how do we, how do we create a credit product that will be trusted by a community that has habitually turned their backs on the banking community when I noticed when I was in Mexico is that 

[00:24:43] Carrie Richardson: they seem to do a lot of like what we would call layaway in the U. S. where you go into the store and you pay a little bit every month, say, like, for back to school clothes for the kids. You start paying for those clothes 6 months before and then by the time it's time to go [00:25:00] back to school, all their uniforms are paid for.

[00:25:02] Carrie Richardson: But they've had to, they go in and they put a hold on the merchandise. And they pay for it in advance until it's time to take it home versus us in America where we go in and we take it and then we pay 28 percent for the privilege of having it today. We're not patient. We aren't the same.

[00:25:19] Carrie Richardson: It's a different mindset completely. 

[00:25:22] Rodrigo Acuna: Yeah. And also like hybrid models have started to, to jump in from that the buy now pay later. 

[00:25:29] Rodrigo Acuna: But even without a credit card, you know, you want to buy clothing or you want to buy an air flight or anything.

[00:25:35] Rodrigo Acuna: And there's always the option of, Hey, pay 600 now or pay 70 for six months for 12 months. They end up making their interest in those. Easy to accommodate payments, but at the end, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it's predatory, but it is a necessity that is being solved for [00:26:00] people that really want to do things or own things.

[00:26:02] Rodrigo Acuna: but then I think that the root cause of that comes to education. it's the financial budgeting. What's a need versus a want, right? If you really need those school clothes. That's a need. And if your only way to acquire them is paying them six months in advance in small fractional parts, awesome.

[00:26:23] Rodrigo Acuna: If it's again, you know, the newest Jordan shoe or, you know, a designer bag, That's probably outside of your budget and you shouldn't be buying. 

[00:26:36] Carrie Richardson: That's it. That's the most important lesson any of us are going to learn today. 

[00:26:40] Rodrigo Acuna: Correct. Correct. And it all starts with, you know, how much money I'm making this month, how much money I'm spending, what is it?

[00:26:49] Rodrigo Acuna: How much is it? Do you want to save it? You want to buy stuff? you want to save for retirement? And again, like it's so [00:27:00] valid. You can have the goal of, you know, Disneyland or Europe vacation, and you're saving for that. That's amazing do that, but do it when you're ready. Why, pay all that interest in the buy now pay later, if you can save for it, six months plan for it.

[00:27:18] Rodrigo Acuna: And then when you do it, it feels natural. It feels, you know, you feel relieved. You're not waking up and having emails reminding you that your payment is due. And, I think that it also creates a stress free environment. Where people can, function better in their daily lives, relationships, work, kids, banks bombard us with offers when you're in the good side of their books, or with reminders when you're in the backside of your books, trying to avoid the second one.

[00:27:51] Rodrigo Acuna: I think it's very important for a stress free life. 

[00:27:55] Carrie Richardson: I had An investment advisor from Bank of America call me recently asking me [00:28:00] if I'd like to have a conversation with them and I'm like, where were these calls when I started a business and you guys wouldn't give me a credit card and you wouldn't give me a line of credit and you wouldn't support me in any way, but you'd like my money now.

[00:28:12] Rodrigo Acuna: Yeah. 

[00:28:12] Carrie Richardson: No, you don't get a second chance. I deal with the credit union now. The credit union supported my business. 

[00:28:17] Rodrigo Acuna: Correct. And you're mentioning something very important of why we're trying to do an IM Financial. We want to be your first yes.

[00:28:25] Rodrigo Acuna: And that builds a loyalty that goes beyond benefits. When you help someone when they truly need it, they remember it. And I think that being that first, yes, as a business idea, it's very innovative because people want to reach out to you. When you have the hundred thousand dollars, they want to reach out to you when they can make money off of you, but they don't want to take the risk when you're starting.

[00:28:58] Rodrigo Acuna: And I think [00:29:00] it's very important for the economy to give yeses to the people that everyone says no to. 

[00:29:07] Carrie Richardson: My husband would tell the story of how when he started an I. T. business. He was very young and there was, a piece of software that he wanted to buy. They call it a PSA.

[00:29:17] Carrie Richardson: it was going to the investment in the software was something like 20, 000 dollars, which he didn't have that liquid to spend at the time he went to the credit union. The credit union lent to him for that. And he became 1 of the largest clients. Of that credit union over the next 10 years.

[00:29:32] Carrie Richardson: now he serves as part of their audit committee. He's giving back to the bank that supported his business originally. 

[00:29:39] Rodrigo Acuna: One of my biggest takeaways is that I went to high school here in Miami after I gave the needs versus wants.

[00:29:48] Rodrigo Acuna: story. senior came, and he introduced himself. He's, from Peruvian descent. he said like, Hey, I love what you're doing. I love that you work at Morgan Stanley. I'm going to go start [00:30:00] a community college here in Miami. But my plan is to transfer to once I get great grades, and I keep in touch with you.

[00:30:07] Rodrigo Acuna: He's second year when he transitioned from community college to university of Miami on a scholarship.

[00:30:14] Rodrigo Acuna: We gave him a summer internship at Morgan Stanley at my team. He transferred to Cornell. So big rising star. We gave him a recommendation to do the investment banking. Senior, summer internship at Morgan Stanley. And then he graduated and he works in, lives in New York now.

[00:30:32] Rodrigo Acuna: And that was amazing. His goal of, you know, getting from public school and, inner city, Miami to being an investment banker, that that's not an easy path to do.

[00:30:45] Rodrigo Acuna: I like to believe that what we did with him first with the financial literacy and then with the opportunities. Open the doors that he needed to be who he was meant to be. And, you know, technology [00:31:00] allows us now to do that on a bigger scale, on a grander scale, and maybe it's not these direct referrals to jobs and opportunities, but it's, the credit, the lines of credits that you need to start your business, to go to college, to buy your first house, to invest, and, you know, that, that's really the goal of what we're doing.

[00:31:23] Carrie Richardson: Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that with us today. I appreciate you.