Meet Nina Mohanty, CEO and Co-founder of Bloom Money
FemWealth Springboard
Hi FemWealth Friend!
For a new edition of FemWealth Springboard, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Nina Mohanty, co-founder and CEO of Bloom Money, a UK-based fintech on a mission to deliver fintech services to diaspora communities, an exponentially growing demographic across Europe. Starting with a savings club that enables members to save for special occasions, education, starting a business or more, Bloom aims to nurture generational wealth among diaspora communities in the UK, and across Europe.
In July, Bloom Money announced its $1.2 million pre-seed round (closed in March 2022), led by Zinal Growth and joined by January Ventures, Pact VC, and angel investors Bérénice Magistretti, June Angelides, Dr. Fiona Pathiraja, and more.
Learn all about Nina’s journey into FinTech and entrepreneurship, and
what she is most excited about in building Bloom Money:
FW: How has your background as an immigrant and employee in the fintech sector, working at companies such as Mastercard, Starling Bank, Bud, and Klarna, led you to found Bloom Money?
NM: I was born and raised in Silicon Valley to immigrant parents - my father is from India, and my mother is from Taiwan. They were “dotcom boom” engineers, but funnily, my entire upbringing, I never thought I would go into tech. I ran into another direction - I actually studied counterterrorism and war and started my career working for the Obama administration. And that’s what initially brought me out to the UK working at the US Embassy in London.
And then I fell into this role at Mastercard. It feels funny because today there are university degrees and programmes for FinTech, but back then it was just people throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what would stick.
I desperately needed a job and someone pointed me in the direction of Mastercard. I applied and miraculously - I mean I had a rejection letter from every investment bank and consulting firm in the city - Mastercard decided to hire me. It was serendipitous because it was when Monzo was Mondo, and Revolut and Starling Bank were just starting out. So it was really an exciting time because it was that early stage of London FinTech that we all know today. They’re all grown up now, but back then they were starting out.
That was really when I fell in love with FinTech. It was a ‘coup de foudre’ for me - this is amazing, we can apply technology to make people’s financial lives better and that is really impactful.
I then went to Starling Bank and helped launch the current account and learned a lot. I was meant to continue working at Starling when a bunch of guys approached me and said there is this thing called open banking, it’s going to change the world, it’s going to change retail banking, come work with us. And I was very skeptical but had a few conversations and I became employee #12 and the first woman on the team at Bud, which is an open banking platform. They say building a startup is ‘building a plane as you’re trying to fly’ - it was exactly that. It was a very exciting and murky time as well because no one really knew what was going to happen and how to monetise open banking. But it’s also very serendipitous again because it’s where I met Dan who’s now our CTO. It was a perfect experience in startup life because it gave me enough responsibility and insight into how startups can be, without being the founder myself.
Then I was approached by the team at Klarna. At the time, Klarna was not as big as it is today. It was a big deal in Sweden and Germany, but in the UK it was just starting to gain some traction and in the US it was struggling. So I went and joined the US team, winning some contracts there, and then bounced back to the UK. Ultimately, it was that coinciding time with Covid, when we were all sat at home staring at our screens and going “What am I doing with my life?”.
I’ve always been really interested in the intersection of immigration and financial services because I grew up watching people move. I grew up moving with my parents. And I grew up watching my parents move money around as well to their families. So that was why ultimately I decided, after doing interviews with other people and speaking to a lot of people from immigrant backgrounds, actually, I was obsessed with this problem; which was that people who are newcomers to the country are so focused on providing for their households in their new home, and also sending money home that they often struggle to build wealth for themselves where they are. I became so obsessed with the problem and decided to pursue building the solution.
The interesting thing is Bloom is very much a story of my own lived experience because I grew up watching my parents sacrifice a lot for me and my brother. My net worth compared to my grandfather’s net worth - he was a bus conductor in rural India - that is a huge, vast difference in our net worths already and the opportunities that I have compared to him. And that is in large part of the fact that my father left India and set out to give me and my brother a better life. But the interesting thing is we did that in the span of one generation but typically, on average, it takes five generations to get where our family got to.
So Bloom is really about how can we build products and services that help accelerate that growth of wealth so that other immigrants can experience this acceleration of wealth faster.
FW: What is Bloom Money’s mission?
NM: Bloom’s mission is to accelerate the growth of generational wealth within immigrant or diaspora communities. When we talk about it more broadly, from the perspective of financial inclusion, I think a lot of people have asked me ‘What is financial inclusion to you?’.
My definition remains the same: Financial inclusion is when people no longer have to change themselves to fit our financial system, and rather the financial system changes to reflect who they are.
That’s what is so beautiful about FinTech - we now have the ability to more efficiently and at scale serve people for specific needs, whether that’s an LGBTQ+ lens of community, a migrant community, or the elderly. There are so many different ways that we can serve people better and I think that’s a big part of our mission as well. It’s just including the greatest economic force that is coming to Europe, which is through migration.
FW: Why have you decided to serve diaspora communities?
NM: We’ve been very focused on this particular demographic for two reasons:
It’s a massively growing demographic. The last EU forecast was saying that by 2050 there will be 110 million non-EU migrants living across Europe. And that’s actually a fairly conservative estimate because there are more and more reasons why people are immigrating. Some of it has to do with economic opportunity, of course, but some of it has to do with climate change and political instability. And also increasingly Europe needs immigrants. It’s not just us working in tech, sitting on our computers all day, it’s people who are doing the actual work of moving our society forward.
It’s so interesting because people ask “How did you find people to speak to when you were researching or doing user feedback?”. Immigrants are all around us. Not only are they doing highly skilled work, but there’s a whole range - people like security guards, hospitality, cleaning services, transportation which I would argue are also skilled work. In the UK we had a crisis because all of a sudden the Eastern European lorry drivers weren’t allowed to be here anymore. We couldn’t move our food around the country.
The far-right politicians are becoming increasingly anti-immigration, and yet if you look at the actual immigration policy, the immigration numbers are the highest they’ve ever been in the UK because we need that. It makes for a very cognitively dissonant messaging.
When these people come because they are so needed, there is a very specific lifestyle - not just sending money home, which is, of course, a very common behaviour that a lot of people share; but also just the fact that your life events are going to be different. You are going to have your traditional wedding. Maybe you still go on holiday, but every few years you’re going to actually go ‘home home’, and when you go home you’re going to bring gifts. These things will come with various financial burdens. There’ also the fact that maybe one day you’ll even become a citizen of your new country, and that comes with immigration and legal fees. And yet who is building for these problems?
FW: What are some of the values you focus on?
NM: So, I’ve been referring to as three ‘T’s:
Transparency
Trust
Tradition
The first two go hand in hand. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is keeping everything as simple as possible and that almost goes towards being ethical and simple, and let’s not confuse people. Let’s say exactly what fees they are going to pay and why. And I think this is something that FinTech has done well, challenging the traditional financial services systems - actually is there a better way for us to do this?
Trust is a huge one. We need to be trustworthy, obviously, as a team, in our conduct and our values. And also, we need to earn the trust of the communities that we want to serve.
The market size is not just in financial services, or the lack of. The market size is the trust gap that immigrant communities have towards financial services, institutions, the government, the healthcare system, the employer, and the taxman.
There’s no trust in these institutions, oftentimes because they have been treated so poorly. And so, there is this trust gap, which is also a massive economic gap. I’m actually trying now to re-quantify it, because there’s so much more to it in terms of verticals of life, whether it’s housing, government, health service, and more.
And then finally tradition. Our traditions make us human. Tradition is something that people want to hold on to. Whether that is me having gone to Chinese school from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated from high school (I went to Chinese school every day after school from three to six pm), or my dad bringing me to temple because he is Hindu to celebrate Holi or Diwali. We all have these beautiful traditions in our own cultures and we want to make sure that we honour those traditions, but modernise and digitise them where we can.
FW: How did you approach product development, especially given how multicultural the customers you serve are?
NM: It’s been an interesting challenge because our big question is, how do you speak to so many different cultures when you’re also trying to create a cohesive brand? Digital marketing has been very helpful in that regard where you can be very specific and targeted towards people, and you can find ‘like for like’ audiences. But I also found a lot of value in just being in the community physically - I spent a weekend a few weeks ago flyering on Ridley Road Market, which is known in London for having large communities of immigrants. Being there, you learn more about what it’s important, and what are the things that people care about.
While we are different culturally, we are also paradoxically similar. For example, many of our cultures will have a holiday around the harvest. So then we boil that down - so the common denominator is ‘autumn is a harvest festival’. It might be called different things. How do we segment our customers in there?
Similarly, weddings - traditional weddings are usually very large, exciting, multi-day events, but they are going to add up in terms of money. So the job to be done (JTBD) from a product perspective is still going to remain the same, despite what the holiday may be called, or what religion it is. That’s actually something quite beautiful, and for me, as someone who very much loves traveling and loves meeting people and multiculturalism, it’s so striking to see these patterns that we have - everyone looks to celebrate spring, whether that’s through Easter or a spring festival. And everyone likes to celebrate something in winter because it’s the end of the year. We just have these things that are innately human, that everyone does and that’s really profound.
FW: What are you excited to achieve in the coming 6-12 months?
NM: I’m really excited to get nerdy with various fintech-specific things, such as new products and services that we want to launch. I’m excited to bring it to more people - right now we’re in a semi-public beta - and so I’m pumped to bring Bloom to more people. We’ll be hitting the fundraising trails in September.
Expanding to other countries is also on the roadmap, and for me having lived in France, and having relatives in Germany, I know firsthand how difficult it is there. And there is a captive audience. We know that there are tons of immigrants coming to France, Italy, Germany, and Spain - so let’s build for them.
The frustrating thing is, this community is still very underserved. People don’t think of Europe as a place people immigrate to, they only think of the US as a country of immigrants, and I would argue that the EU is increasingly becoming a place of immigrants too.
Bloom Money will soon start fundraising for its Seed round. Connect with Nina on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via email at nina@bloommoney.co.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.