Why Shivani Siroya’s Pandemic Inspiration was a Cockroach
A cockroach is not the most obvious source of inspiration that comes to mind for the CEO of a global fintech company, yet Tala CEO & Founder Shivani Siroya said the kitchen pest embodied the energy she wanted her team to channel during the COVID-19 crisis. Cockroaches can live two weeks without water or a month without food. They can run up to three miles an hour, and hold their breath for 40 minutes. “Cockroaches can withstand even nuclear attacks,” Siroya told F3 founding partner Anu Duggal during a recent Fireside Chat. “In that sense, it was like, okay, we are not only going to get out of this crisis, but we are going to thrive. Our general manager in the Philippines always said we need to be the ‘last shrimp boat standing.’” By the end of 2020, Siroya no longer thought of Tala as a cockroach, but a phoenix.
Tala offers micro-loans ranging from $10 to $500 to users in Mexico, the Philippines, Kenya, and India. Siroya dreamed up the concept while working as an analyst at the United Nations Population Fund, where she interviewed roughly 3,500 people in nine emerging markets about their daily lives and microbusinesses. By visiting their offices, storefronts, and homes, she was able to understand their aspirations and pain points, she explained. Today, Tala stays in close communication with its users, who are no strangers to instability.
Throughout the pandemic, Siroya said, “the most surprising and inspiring insight for us was the resilience of our customers. Our customers told us that while COVID definitely affected them, they said that this was part of their life. They face that volatility every single day and they know how to navigate it. We got to learn from them, and started to build better products.” With remittance centers shut down around the world, the pandemic highlighted a greater need for digital financial products.
Here are some of her biggest takeaways from the defining public health crisis of our time.
On the advantage of being global
Because Tala is a global brand, Siroya was able to communicate with her remote teams all over the world as the pandemic set in. The Philippines went into lockdown on March 16th, 2020 — even earlier than the United States — and Tala’s leadership team in the country gave Siroya a heads-up that other countries would likely shut down. “We took that as a sign of saying, ‘let’s react quickly as opposed to waiting to hear more news,’ and it was the best thing we could have done,” she said. “Within 48 hours, we took the entire global team remote, and we did not lose a single day of business continuity.”
On managing team expectations
“There were so many unknowns going into the crisis that all of us were trying to understand,” Siroya said. “From a leadership team perspective what we tried to do was provide as much clarity as possible around those things so people could plan their own lives.” That meant being decisive with a work-from-home timeline, so employees could make arrangements for their families. (Tala will be working from home for the rest of the year.) “In some ways, you can be creative once you tell your team yes we’ll be working from home through the rest of the year.” Now, since she no longer has to jump on a plane to visit offices in other countries, she’s found creative ways to be more present virtually. “I changed my usual AMA to a video that I do with our new twin newborns.”
On prioritizing employee wellbeing
Zoom fatigue is real! People miss offices! Since working from home is all work and no play, Tala started implementing rest days, so the team could give their eyes a break. “We rolled out ‘global sloth days,’ so once a month, the whole entire team is off,” Siroya said. “Something we learned is that we can encourage people to take off, but if their peers are not off, they’re still getting pinged.” Other companies like LinkedIn are experimenting with time off, too.
On innovating through a crisis
Since every business was forced to adjust to the new normal, Siroya looked at this forced innovation as an opportunity to deepen business sustainability. “Something our CFO says all the time is ‘never waste a good crisis,’” she said. The team asked themselves: “How can we learn very quickly?” During the early months of COVID, Tala launched a series of experiments across new products and launched their credit product in India. During the pandemic, Tala reexamined every aspect of its business. The company rebuilt the payments infrastructure inside the app, redid all of its vendor contracts, reevaluated the supply chain, and adjusted its operating philosophies.
On balancing the “scalable” and “not scalable”
Obviously, apps are among the most scalable tech products. But Siroya is careful to return to the brand’s roots and maintain direct relationships with customers that go beyond a multiple-choice survey or two. “We are constantly talking to our customers,” she said. “We have user researchers across every market, and so on a daily basis and on a weekly basis, we’re doing interviews, we’re doing surveys, we have financial coaching products that are not [predominantly] automated, but we do believe in listening to the customer and having that personal interaction.”
On using the community as a focus group
Since there’s a real exchange between Tala and its customers, the company gives some users access to wireframes earlier in the process, “so they’re navigating it and we’re watching them navigate it, so we understand how they’re getting stuck,” Siroya said. They can ask questions about the new layouts in “little sticky bubbles.”
Ultimately, the market bounced back.
Even though analysts worried about the financial toll of the pandemic last spring, most of those doomsday predictions haven’t come true. “In some ways, our markets have shown us that they’re performing better than pre-COVID, because our customers are coming out hungry for liquidity, and hungry to get back to business,” Siroya said. Plus, since the world became even more digital in 2020, new customers are more receptive to trying out the product. As a lender, Tala was exposed at the beginning of the crisis, but by the third quarter of 2020, it had recovered almost all of its funds. “It’s a testament to the team, but also testament to our customers and the relationship we built with them,” Siroya said.
