We started by refinancing student loans at Stanford. Literally. Alumni lent money to current students at better rates than the government. That peer-to-peer model was the original idea. Everything else came after.
I left Twitter as COO to run SoFi. People thought I was crazy. But SoFi had something Twitter didn't — a clear path to becoming a bank. An actual bank. With a charter and everything.
We got a national bank charter. Do you know how hard that is? The OCC doesn't just hand those out. We're one of the only fintechs in America that is actually a bank, not just pretending to be one.
Student loans, personal loans, mortgages, investing, banking, credit cards — all in one app. Every product we add makes the others cheaper to acquire customers for. That flywheel is why we'll win.
We bought a stadium. SoFi Stadium. The home of the LA Rams and Chargers. A fintech company that most Americans had never heard of now has its name on the most expensive stadium ever built. Brand awareness solved.
The student loan pause almost killed us. The government froze student loan payments for three years. Our core product — student loan refinancing — went to zero overnight. We survived by diversifying fast enough.