Financial inclusion remains one of the most pressing challenges in today’s economy. Millions of Americans struggle to access basic financial services simply because they lack a credit history or have damaged credit. This gap in our financial system doesn’t just create inconvenience – it perpetuates cycles of financial inequity that can last generations.
In my latest episode of Tearsheet, I sat down with Julie Szudarek, CEO of Self Financial, a company working at the forefront of this challenge. Julie took the helm at Self just over a year ago, bringing over 20 years of leadership experience from companies like Groupon and Atida. Though fintech is a new arena for her, Julie’s expertise in building customer-focused businesses is exactly what’s needed to tackle financial inclusion at scale.
“I’ve never done fintech before,” Julie told me candidly. “But what I bring to the table is a deep understanding of how to build customer-focused businesses that are sustainable over time.” Her mission at Self aligns well with the broader movement toward more accessible financial services: “We are only here to make outcomes for our customers better than before they started working with Self.”
Listen to the full episode
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | SoundCloud | Spotify
Watch the full episode
Expanding Access to Credit: Why Decoupling Secured Credit Cards Matters
For many, the road to improving their credit scores starts with tools that are often out of reach. One of Self’s flagship products, the secured credit card, used to require customers to open a credit builder account, but that has changed.
“We saw so much demand from customers who maybe didn’t want this credit builder experience but wanted a secured card,” Julie explains. “So we found a way to make that available directly.”
Now, Self’s secured credit cards are accessible without a prior credit builder account, requiring only a $100 deposit and no hard credit check. “As far as we can tell, our deposit is the lowest in the industry,” she adds. This move aims to make credit builder apps more flexible and financial inclusion more achievable.
Customer Journey: Meeting People Where They Are
Julie emphasizes that building credit is not a one-size-fits-all process. “Our customers are on a journey,” she says. Julie explains how many arrive at Self through word of mouth, traditional marketing, and partnerships.
“More than 25% of our customers say they came to us from word of mouth,” she shares. She highlights how real customer success stories drive organic growth. Self also collaborates with affiliate partners. Such as lenders who redirect applicants denied for an auto loan due to poor credit scores, offering them a way to rebuild credit.
Beyond products, education plays a key role. “Sixty-five percent of our customers say they had no financial education growing up,” Julie notes. Self responds with resources aimed at demystifying credit, interest rates, and savings strategies.
Building a Fintech Product Suite for Long-Term Customer Needs
Since becoming CEO, Julie has focused on broadening Self’s product offerings. Especially beyond secured credit cards and credit builder accounts. “One of the things I noticed when I started was that we were limited in the number of products we had,” she says.
Customers who completed their credit-building journey had nowhere else to go. “We were just saying goodbye to customers,” Julie reflects. Now, Self is working on graduation products, like unsecured credit cards. The aim is to serve customers as they move forward financially.
“We should be keeping customers on our platform forever,” Julie states. This approach also aligns with fintech solutions focused on lifetime customer value.
Partnerships and Fintech Collaboration for Broader Access
The collaboration with traditional banks and organizations is essential to expanding Self’s reach. “We have partnerships with banks like Regions Bank, which offers our rent reporting solution to their customers,” she says.
Julie says that organizations like Pathway Homes found a connection between homeownership success and Self’s products. Customers who succeeded in homeownership often had Self’s products on their credit reports. This demonstrates the positive impact of Self’s products on financial outcomes. “They reached out to us because they kept seeing Self show up in their customers’ credit files,” Julie recounts.
These partnerships extend Self’s mission of financial inclusion. They do so by embedding credit-building tools into larger ecosystems.
The Big Ideas
- Decoupling Secured Credit Cards for Easier Access. “We decoupled the secured card so customers don’t need a credit builder account first. It’s about reducing barriers.”
- The Power of Low Deposit and No Credit Check. “Our deposit is $100, and for many, there’s no hard credit check. That makes it much less intimidating for people facing rejection.”
- Customer Education as a Core Focus. “About 65% of our customers say they had no financial education. So we focus on teaching them about interest, compounding, and managing credit.”
- Expanding Product Offerings to Keep Customers Engaged. “We were limited in what we offered. Now we’re focusing on products that meet customers where they are and help them keep growing financially.”
- Partnerships to Reach More Communities. “Regions Bank and Pathway Homes are some of our key partners — together, we’re helping more people build credit who might otherwise be left out.”
Read the transcript (TS Pro subscribers)
Professional Background and Leadership Experience
I’ve never done FinTech before, so that was definitely new for me, and it’s been a great and interesting sector with just so many dimensions and dynamics associated with it. It’s also been quite a learning curve for me, and I thank my team and my board for helping me onboard and learn the business. I continue to learn every single day.
I think what I bring to this business is experience working at both big companies and small companies, so I understand how to move fast but also how to make a business robust for the long term. I’ve also dealt significantly in consumer-facing businesses that really had the customer at the forefront of what we were doing, both at Groupon and when I ran a pharmacy business, where customer empathy was super key.
I think some of that has been very relevant in my time thus far at Self. We are a business that truly has the customer at the forefront of everything that we do. We are only there to make outcomes for our customers better than they were before they started working with Self.
Customer-Centric Approach
It’s embedded in everything that we do. It’s embedded in our values. We start many of our all-hands meetings, and every single one of our board meetings, with customer testimonials and really understanding who it is that we’re serving. When you get to C-level people and Board of Directors, we don’t fit into the shoes of our customers, at least at this current point in our lives, so I think it’s important that we take ourselves back to understanding our customers as often as possible.
We do a ton of consumer testing. I just brought on a new chief product officer, and we already did a lot of consumer testing, but she’s amped that up even further. We do a lot of research to understand the needs of our customers, we look at a lot of data, understanding how our customers are using our products and where they’re having struggles with our products, or more broadly in the macro environment.
Then we do a lot of education for our customers. Something like 65% of our customers tell us they had no financial education growing up, and they really don’t understand interest rates and compounding and just all these things that can be so incredibly impactful to a customer experience. We have a whole group dedicated to customer and community relations, and we do just a ton of education, because our goal is not just to sell a customer something and be one and done, but it’s really to change habits and to change the life aspects of how people use credit and think about money.
Comparing Fintech with Previous Industries
It is different. Maybe finance and health aren’t directly the same thing. But if you think about Maslow’s hierarchy, consumer finance and health are at similar levels. With the pharmacy business that I was running, I think there’s a lot of overlap there, just in terms of how you have to think about the customers and how near and dear these topics are to their lives and to survival.
With Groupon, the centricity probably came more on the side of the merchants that we worked with. Groupon is a marketplace with customers like you and me, and then Mom and Pop merchants that are like the corner shops. Many of the challenges that those corner shop merchants have can be very similar to experiences that our customers have. They are trying to pay for their goods and services, trying to make payroll, and they don’t know how to do marketing to get customers to come in the door.
For many of these small and medium businesses, it was their livelihood that was coming from the business, and Groupon could help them obtain more customers profitably. So there are definite corollaries, although they’re not perfectly direct.
Secured Card Product Innovation
Just so listeners who don’t know what a secured card is understand: it looks like a credit card, but you actually have a deposit that you put in place that funds the card. It’s a great way for people who are new to credit, or who have had trouble using credit cards in the past, to get reacquainted with credit.
We have had this card forever. However, up until recently, you would have needed to have one of our other products first in order to access the card. We have a product called a credit builder account, which helps customers improve their credit history. Up until we launched this secured card “into the wild,” you would have first had to have this other product from us.
We saw so much demand from customers who maybe didn’t want this credit builder experience, but wanted a secured card. And so we found a way to make that available to customers directly.
The beautiful thing about our secured card is that it has a very low deposit requirement of $100, and for a lot of our customers, there’s no hard credit pull. The credit check is one of my learnings coming into FinTech. To people who have trouble with credit, it’s like a bad word that you just don’t say, because it is so terrifying. There’s so much rejection that people experience when they do a credit check and get rejected. It’s like one of my kids getting a bad grade on a test – it’s that severe.
The fact that we have this very low deposit, no credit check requirement – we think our deposit is the lowest in the industry as far as we can tell – is super attractive to customers who are really trying to get themselves back on track with a card.
Customer Acquisition and Journey
We use a variety of different marketing channels, but one of my proudest stats is that more than 25% of our customers say they came to us from word of mouth. They heard about us from their friend who had a great experience and had a positive outcome using Self.
We use typical marketing channels as well – Google, Facebook, and Instagram. On our social channels, we do a lot of educational content that actually brings people to us. We have Monique, who is our spokeswoman, and she speaks to customers about learning how credit works and why it’s important.
We have a partnership with the Spurs basketball team in San Antonio. It’s hard to measure some of that marketing, but with the Spurs, we have a very shared focus on customer and community, so they’ve been a great partner to us.
We also work with a lot of affiliate partners who send us traffic. Often, maybe a customer comes to get an auto loan from someone, and they don’t qualify because their credit score isn’t high enough. That lender might send their customer to us. The customer comes to us and gets a credit builder account, which helps them learn how to save and build habits and teaches them about credit. Then they’re able to go back after a period of time with a better credit score and maybe get that car loan.
Customers come to us at self.inc, choose the path they want to go down in terms of the products we offer, go through an onboarding flow, and then start using the product.
Product Ecosystem and Customer Progression
Do you remember being a child and having these wooden Russian dolls that fit within each other? Our product that we launched, the credit builder account, is essentially a CD that customers put money into every single month. As they do that and make on-time payments into that loan (it’s a “loan” because they get most of the money back at the end), we report those payments to the credit bureaus. On-time payments are one of the key components that go into your credit score.
If you have $100 saved in that account through your credit-building account, then we can offer you the secured card that we’ve just been talking about, because you’ve saved up that $100 deposit. It works like magic – you don’t have to do anything else. You click a button and say, “Yes, I would like this card,” and then lo and behold, in your mail whenever it comes, you have a card in your box. For many of our customers, that’s the first time they’ve ever had a card.
Within our internal marketing and lifecycle marketing, once you’re on a product with us, we are pretty good at promoting other products to you. Last year, we launched a product that reports your positive rent payments to the credit bureaus. Rent is a huge cost for many of our customers, and my mortgage gets reported so I get credit for that, but why shouldn’t someone’s rent get reported? It just feels fair. It’s a huge payment they’re able to make every single month.
We launched a free version of that product, and we’ve had really good uptake. After customers sign up for that and see positive results, we are able to cross-sell them to other products within our ecosystem. It’s been fun really being able to keep selling customers on new products that are going to help in their credit journey, and providing credit access through some of these products that we have. Customers love us, and they want more from us, which is great.
Strategic Vision and Leadership Changes
I have a very patient and excited board of directors, but at the end of the day, many of them are investors, and their goal is to have a positive outcome. But they’re very patient, which is wonderful, because they want the right outcome for the business and for the customer.
One of the things I noticed when I started was that we were limited in the number of products that we had, and customers would get to the end of their journey with us. Maybe they outgrew the secured credit card and were ready for another, more sophisticated financial instrument, or they got to the end of their credit builder account, and we basically just said goodbye to customers.
If you look at our app store, we have incredible ratings from customers. Customers love us because they see positive outcomes using us, but we have nothing else to offer them. Tying together our investors and the product, we think there’s a real opportunity to offer more products and services to customers, to increase their lifetime value while providing incredible opportunities for these customers to improve their financial standing.
One of my first big hires was a chief product officer, Shilpa Dhar, who has significant FinTech experience at PayPal, Venmo, Coinbase, and HubSpot. She’s helping us figure out our strategic product roadmap that makes sense for the customer base we have and how to keep customers on our platform forever. You see a lot of banks that have had customers forever, and we should be doing the same, because I think our customers like us better than they like the average bank.
You’ll continue to see us offering customers products that meet them on this journey that they’re on. Customers would often leave us and go get other financial products, so why shouldn’t we be offering those financial products? One of our graduation products is an unsecured credit card, which is a natural progression from a secured card, but I think you’ll continue to see us doing more things like that.
I also recently brought on a people leader who is helping us with our transformation. We’re doing a lot of stuff, trying to do it faster and more operationally efficiently. The people and the team itself are the key to making us successful. I brought Alyssa Welling on to really help drive that agenda forward. It’s been really fun building out a team and having new people who come in with their own marks and experiences from different industries and sectors.
Performance Metrics and KPIs
We rolled out OKRs last year, and we have company-wide OKRs that we talk about as a company, and that people are rated and judged on in terms of their performance.
I like input metrics, which are indicators that have future positivity associated with them. The things I like to look at start with visitors – how many people are we getting to come and see us? That’s an indication of how our marketing is working, and the marketing team is judged a lot on visitors.
The product team is judged a lot on conversion. We get those people there, marketing did their job, so how do we get them to transact with us? Part of that is what our flow looks like and how easy it is for people to transact, but also our pricing. We have an analytics team that works a lot on pricing.
So it’s really visitors to conversions and then to retention. Those are really key criteria that we look at. We have hundreds of metrics and talk about metrics all the time, but I think those are probably three really important leading indicators for us that drive a lot of the other decisions that we make in the business.
The number of products that each customer has is important. Our customer base is always under financial stress, even when they’re working with us. Making sure that we’re helping people make payments for the products they have from us is important – it’s important for us because that’s how we make money, but it’s also important to the customer in terms of achieving what they need to achieve through Self.
We do a lot of things to remind customers about payments and to make it easy for customers to pay. We recently rolled out something where we let people choose the date that they want to pay for the products they have from us, so that it can align more closely with how they run their internal finances, and that’s been a really successful feature.
Personal Motivation and Mission
I don’t have a childhood story like James, our founder, did. But for me, the real key thing when I accepted this job was that I had a bunch of criteria I was looking for in my next role. It hit all those criteria, and then the icing on top was that we help people who need help.
I’m, by nature, very empathetic. Back to Maslow’s hierarchy – if people aren’t able to put food on the table for their kids and they’re working four jobs, it’s just so hard. I love the fact that we truly are able to help people who need help achieve better outcomes for their families and for themselves. If we can do anything to kind of break the cycle, being part of that is just an amazing thing that makes me feel really good inside.
Partnerships and Future Direction
Partnerships are really critical to us. We have a pretty big partnerships group. Some of our partners would send us customers, but we also have partnerships with the likes of Regions Bank – they offer our rent reporting solution to their customer base.
There’s a company called Pathway Homes. I think they’re Dallas-based, and they help customers learn how to own a house. They kept seeing Self on the credit reports of customers who were successful in their program, so they reached out to us and said, “It’s awesome. We don’t know who you are, but we think there’s a good opportunity here.”
We absolutely see partnerships as a big key to both how we get customers and how we get our name out there and help expand the top of the funnel in terms of the customers that we’re able to help.