Debt Management Start-Up Tally to Expand Beyond Credit Card Service in 2019
*By Tanaya Macheel*
Tally is on track to expand its product offering in 2019, Cheddar has learned.
The automated debt management start-up, which launched in October 2017 and [raised $25 million](https://cheddar.com/videos/credit-card-payoff-app-tally-raises-25-million) in Series B funding in July, is now managing about $250 million in credit card debt and has processed more than $100 million in payments, CEO and founder Jason Brown told Cheddar Monday.
“With 2019 ahead of us, we’re laying the foundation for being able to automate beyond credit card debt,” Brown said, potentially referring to savings and investing, or other kinds of debt like student and auto loans.
With its existing app, the San Francisco-based company aims to remove the pain of managing credit card payments by letting users link their credit cards ー and paying off those credit cards on behalf of their users.
Once users qualify, Tally offers a low-rate line of credit that users pay monthly; that payment covers the minimums on each linked credit card.
Since July, Tally has tripled its headcount, launched its app for Android devices, and released a “robo-advisor for debt” that considers users’ current spending, income, debt to date, and helps them structure a monthly payment plan in order to be debt-free by the date they've chosen.
“Most people think about investing, setting a date for when you’ll retire,” Brown said. “Only about 14 percent of Americans actively buy stocks whereas 44 percent of Americans have credit card debt. We built a product that allows you to set a goal for when you’re going to be debt free.”
Tally currently has about 75 employees, half of whom are engineering and product personnel. The company plans to have 100 employees by the first quarter of 2019.
It also plans to expand its current prime offering. Tally is only available to creditworthy users (those with at least a 660 credit score).
With fintech, traditional financial institutions are doing more financial work for consumers in an “invisible and ambient” way as their brands lose customer interaction to start-ups like Tally, which are employing artificial intelligence to optimize each financial task and separating the benefits of financial responsibilities from the burden.
“Those fintechs will be effectively doing business on the customer’s behalf with the broader financial industry,” Brown said.
“Most banks are organized by product categories, things that you kind of pick off the shelf as a customer. We think about things in terms of jobs you need done. It’s more around goals and objectives as a customer — and the service might use multiple products on your behalf without you even knowing what products are being utilized to get you to your goal.”
Gamestop shares were up on The Wall Street Journal report that the video game retail company plans to enter the NFT and crypto space. Adam Hollander, the founder of Hungry Wolves NFT, joined Cheddar to break down how it could be a lifeline for the struggling meme stock darling. "They're not resigning themselves to becoming the next Blockbuster story, and so while people may not be buying as many video games in a retail environment anymore, NFTs, in particular, people are starting to expect more gaming utility on the backend — at least for a variety of projects — and I personally think its a very smart move for them to do this," Hollander told Cheddar.
On Saturday, New York will join neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut in authorizing mobile sports betting. Matt Kalish, president and co-founder of Draftkings North America, joined Cheddar to talk about the landmark change that is estimated to rake in $500 million in annual tax revenue on a potential billion-dollar market. Kalish also addressed the possibility that legalized sports betting in the Empire State could cannibalize his company's revenues in the bordering states. "It's pretty inconvenient, you know, to go across the border to make a bet. And people were doing it, but I think it really stifled a lot of the opportunity," he said. "So while there's some of that going on, I think really a tremendous amount, like a giant percent, of New York will be very incremental."
Ben Armstrong, founder of Bitboy Crypto, joins Cheddar News to discuss Bitcoin's downward trend and what's next for crypto after protests in Kazakhstan cause crypto miners to shut down.
Jake Carbone, senior data analyst at InfluenceMap joins Cheddar News to talk about a new report by The Guardian and InfluenceMap that reveals how companies are creating fossil fuel ads designed to look like Google search results.
Satoshi Island is looking to become the world's first blockchain-driven economy. James Law, the chief architect of the planned private community, joined Cheddar to discuss the vision for the potential crypto capital of the world and how it will be brought to life. For people looking to live on the island, Law said they will be able to purchase land and homes and even design their own dwellings both in real life and via the metaverse. "Satoshi Island has already been digitally scanned. We have an absolute digital twin already in our metaverse," he said. Citizenship applications are expected to be launched via NFTs, he told Cheddar.
Satellite launch service Virgin Orbit has gone public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger with NextGen Acquisitions with a valuation of about $3.2 billion. CEO Dan Hart joined Cheddar's "Between Bells" from in front of his LauncherOne rocket in New York City's Times Square to talk about what's next after the IPO, an upcoming "Above the Clouds" mission to deliver commercial and national security payloads, and the benefits of their rockets being launched from commercial 747 aircraft. "We can launch anywhere in the world," he said. "There are almost 80 space agencies across the world, for instance, and about 10 of them have space launch. We can give them a space flight capability overnight by taking a runway and turning it into a spaceport."
Tech and entertainment giant Sony appears to be getting serious about automaking. An electric concept SUV — the Vision S-02 — was unveiled at CES 2022 and is slated to be produced by a new subdivision, Sony Mobility. This comes after the company revealed the Vision S concept Sedan at CES 2020.
The highly transmissible omicron variant of COVID-19 has forced school districts nationwide to return to virtual instruction, but there remain concerns about the quality of education students are receiving online. Andy Bird, CEO of Pearson, an education publisher and assessment service provider, joined Cheddar's "Opening Bell" to talk about steps educators and parents can take to make the remote learning experience an easier one, noting that one of the biggest advantages teachers can have is flexibility. "You cannot take a rigid timetable that works in the analog world and replicate that in the digital world. You need to have flexibility. Asynchronous learning, I think, is a very important part," he told Cheddar.
