What is the name of your solution?
Revival
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Revival helps borrowers buy out and eliminate their debt at the same pennies on the dollar rate it gets sold to institutional investors.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York, NY, USAIn what country is your solution team headquartered?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Consumer Debt is a nearly $15T problem. For centuries the name of the game has been squeezing every penny you can get out of borrowers. We think there's no money in punishing poor people, and we wouldn't even if there was. We take huge cuts on getting them out of debt to invest in our relationship with the borrowers so that we can grow them into building wealth. Through charging fair fees along that journey, we stand to make way more than we could have ever charged them upfront by also working as a tool that they can use to build wealth.
What is your solution?
Our platform intercepts debt in bulk at a discount from lenders before it gets sold to institutional investors or debt collectors and passes savings as high as 90% on to consumers. Success for Revival will mean everyday borrowers have full access to the entire secondary loan market and will be able to secure and eliminate their own debt without regard to the size of the lender, their credit profile or payment record.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
92% of our customer base are low-income, credit challenged individuals. More than 8 in 10 of our consumers identify as African American or Latino. We get connected to individuals through the portfolios of debt that they are included in. Through helping them to buy out their debt, we are able to create net gains of $1,500 and a credit score increase between 5-15 points for consumers in 3-6 months where with competitive platforms; a comparable outcome would take nearly a year, if it was achieved at all.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
I left grad school with nearly $100,000 in student debt. My recommended monthly payments were more than my monthly rent, and I live in New York City. That level of debt felt and debilitating. It eventually pushed me into the fight to cancel student debt. I went on to design the websites for both Student Debt Crisis and the Debt Collective; the two organizations leading the fight, and the organizations behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen Chuck Schumer's plan to cancel student debt. I also personally served as a United States Senate panelist on the issue of student debt.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Foster financial and digital inclusion by supporting access to credit, digital identity tools, and insurance while securing privacy and personal data.Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
PilotWhy are you applying to Solve?
The biggest challenges that we need help solving through Solve is Go-to-Market challenges. Looking across our industry, one of the biggest challenges in serving low-income and credit challenged individuals is how much you have to spend in order to get them to use your product. We could benefit from leveraging the Solve community to create more channel partnerships because the cheaper it is for us to get in front of consumers who need our services, the faster we can scale.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Daryl Holman Jr.
What makes your solution innovative?
What makes our solution innovative is we use technology to open up and democratize access to a side of the loan business that banks and investors like to keep hidden. The loan sale side of the business is ultimately what leads to wealth being drained from communities that depend on loans to get by and our solution helps consumers recapture the funds they had been going to loan holders using readily available consumer loan data.
Describe in simple terms how and why you expect your solution to have an impact on the problem.
At Revival, we all got tired of surface level solutions to the problem of being in debt. Teaching consumers, and shaving pennies from all your transactions and funneling it to debt can only have a marginal impact. We know because everyone on our team has put in the time learning, and gone through the experience of being charged more in services fees for platforms that were supposed to help us.
We go after the source of the problem. Ownership of debt as an investment. In disrupting the ownership stronghold, we put money back in the hands of borrowers who truly didn't have it to begin with, and give them an actual chance at prosperity.
What are your impact goals for your solution and how are you measuring your progress towards them?
Our impact goal for the next year is to get over $5M in debt eliminated. Within the next 5 years, we hope to reach over $1B in debt eliminated and continue or work to help people escape loans with predatory interest rates through connections with our community partners to create an expected savings of over $100M.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Our core technology is our predictive algorithms on loan pricing. We take data from more than 20 years of debt brokerage experiences to give consumers the insight and volume needed to eliminate their debt at discounted rates that have been historically reserved for institutional debt buyers.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technology
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
revivalfunds.com
In which countries do you currently operate?
How many people work on your solution team?
2 Full Time
1 Contractor
1 Advisor
How long have you been working on your solution?
2 years
Tell us about how you ensure that your team is diverse, minimizes barriers to opportunity for staff, and provides a welcoming and inclusive environment for all team members.
We strive to find leaders from all backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations. The problem we aim to solve impacts marginalized communities the most so we privilege their lived experiences in the products we ship and compensate them equitably for the value that they bring to our company.
What is your business model?
For every transaction that happens on our platform, we take a standard brokerage fee for enabling the transaction and unlocking savings that would not otherwise exist for consumers. To help make our product more accessible to the most vulnerable consumers, we have added payment plans and enabled users to lock in discounts on their debt with payments as small as $25.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable, and what evidence can you provide that this plan has been successful so far?
Our fundraising strategy is to finish out and institutional angel round of $1M to perfect our platform and raise more traditional venture capital as we plan to scale.To date, we have raised more than $400K from some of the best investors and impact organizations in the world like a16z, the Tides Foundation and the Robin Hood Foundation.
Solution Team
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DH
Daryl Holman Founder, Revival Finance, Inc.
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Our Organization
Revival