Rethinking credit score with Kristy Kim (Episode 50)
In this episode, I sit down with Kristy Kim, CEO and founder of Tomo Credit.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Kristy Kim, CEO and founder of Tomo Credit.
TomoCredit, a San Francisco fintech company focused on expanding access to financial services through technology. Since launching the business in 2019, she has led its development and the introduction of TomoIQ, an AI-powered financial advisor designed to support consumers in managing their financial lives.
Before founding TomoCredit, Kristy worked in business development at Credit Sesame and held investment roles at Kenetic, Oasis Labs and Vault12. She previously founded and led a venture-backed e-commerce company and served as Head of Global Business Development at Com2us Corporation, where she worked on international growth initiatives. Earlier in her career, she advised technology companies on mergers and acquisitions at J. Moore Partners, which later merged with B. Riley Financial.
Kristy is also a member of the Forbes Finance Council, where she contributes perspectives on fintech and personal finance. She holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and has served as a lecturer at Haas, teaching entrepreneurship and blockchain. Her background brings together financial expertise, startup leadership and a strong understanding of emerging technologies.
With her, we will talk about credit scoring in the US, fintech services and the importance of being in San Francisco to build your fintech startup.
In this episode
Kristy Kim, founder and CEO of TomoCredit, explains how arriving in the US from South Korea with savings but no credit score led her to build a cash-flow-based alternative to FICO. She describes how financial literacy gaps keep people out of credit, why TomoCredit now serves mostly US-born customers rebuilding their credit, and how the company is rebuilding its product as an AI personal finance adviser. She sees agentic payments as the next frontier for managing debt.
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and TomoCredit
- 1:01From South Korea to the US
- 3:12Discovering she had no credit score
- 7:23Why US credit starts from zero
- 9:39Secured cards and the first Tomo product
- 12:48Cash flow scores vs FICO
- 15:00From problem to company
- 19:39TomoCredit's customers today
- 22:41International expansion
- 23:42Building in San Francisco
- 26:39From finance to tech
- 29:30Rebuilding the product around AI
- 35:04Agentic payments and fintech trends
- 38:11Advice for founders
Key facts
Kristy founded TomoCredit in 2019 after finding she couldn't get an apartment or car loan in San Francisco because she had no credit score, despite having savings and no debt.
Kristy moved from Seoul to the US at 11 and started her career in M&A in San Francisco's Financial District, working on software company sales.
TomoCredit's first product used bank-account cash flow to create its own Tomo score and extend credit regardless of credit history.
TomoCredit hired modellers from Wells Fargo and Citibank to build an alternative underwriting model to FICO.
TomoCredit has more than 4.5 million customers, mostly in the US.
Most early TomoCredit customers were immigrants; now many are US-born people recovering from credit mistakes.
TomoCredit has rebuilt its product from scratch as a chat-style AI financial adviser, TomoIQ, now in beta.
Canada and the UK are TomoCredit's natural next markets.
In the US, credit starts from zero and must be built by borrowing, which catches out immigrants and people whose families don't understand credit.
About 80% of personal finance is simply knowing the rules, and your closest circle largely determines whether you do.
Consumer AI finally makes affordable personal financial advice possible for the large group of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
Agentic payments could prevent missed payments, the main cause of credit damage, if permissions and human oversight are designed well.
Success in fintech comes from showing up again and again, because problems like access to credit take years to solve.
Questions and answers
Why couldn't Kristy get a credit card?
Without a credit history she was only offered a secured card with a low limit, even though she had plenty of cash.
How does TomoCredit's AI adviser work?
It starts from the user's credit and cash-flow data and suggests personal next steps, such as a plan for delinquent accounts.
What did San Francisco give Kristy?
A culture of optimism where starting a company, even one that fails, felt normal.