MIAMI, Fla. — On Monday, the Toronto-based, AI/ML-powered credit scoring company Trust Science announced the addition of Imran Khan, Global Head of Innovation at TD Bank, to the Advisory Board.
Khan, an 11-year veteran of TD, joins a growing team of fintech expert advisors as founder and CEO Evan Chrapko scales his operation.
Chrapko announced the move at the Nexus Dealmakers Summit in Miami and said he reached out to Khan several years ago, right after Khan won the 2019 Tech Titan award in Canada alongside peers at IBM and Uber before the pandemic changed everything.
“Imran is not a gray-haired old guy; he’s done some really impressive things in a young career to have reached his current level at that kind of global institution,” Chrapko said. “Few people have Imran’s gifted skills, insights, and experience in financial technology. And he earned his unique qualifications ‘on the battlefield’ of in-market, high-quality execution.”
Chrapko hopes Khan’s input, after 24 years in finance and a decade at the $1.7 trillion behemoth TD, will help him propel the Credit Score 2.0 SaaS beyond its current success. Khan joins a deep bench of other advisors, like Don Guloien, most recently the CEO of Manulife Financial, and David Ebersman, the CFO of Meta at the time of its then-record-breaking$100B IPO.
Why is Khan going to the Trust Science advisory team now?
Trust Science has been serving up alternative credit scores to service the wrongly scored, “invisible prime” borrowers of the world for finance firms everywhere since 2007, long before fintech was a label.
The Credit Score 2.0 product line boasts Chrapko’s 44 patents for analytic tech to give under-served, Invisible Prime borrowers a chance at credit. Chrapko said after years of hard work, he has watched the past two years transform the credit space. Finally, the world has woken up to the needs of the non-scored, and there is no better way to promote economic mobility.
“It took a long time to build this platform in a compliant way, at scale, and with security right in the DNA of everything that we do,” Chrapko said. “In 2019, we got our first revenue, and then 2020 hits. The chaos and unfortunate stress on the economy for many people were like the little child in the fable of the emperor’s new clothing, pointing out: ‘Hey, credit bureaus, you’re naked, you’re not wearing fine firmaments!’ The emperor has no clothes.”
The trad credit awakening
Traditional institutions of the world are waking up, realizing that there are millions left out of the current models, Chrapko said. However, he said whatever the percentage of the population that is boxed out, the majority can service a loan quite well. The more prominent players may have known this for some time— or should have, and it wouldn’t take a disruptive startup to change things in a perfect world.
Experian Boost and their recently announced build your credit model is evidence of that Chrapko said, finally catching up with what operators in the below prime space have known for decades.
“If banks and traditional lenders have done a good job, then fintechs would not have a reason to be,” Chrapko said. “But that just hasn’t been the case and will not continue to be the case.”
Now, it is time for Trust Science to shine, and Chrapko said he was excited for things to come with an experienced fintech engineer like Khan on the advisory team.
Before his role as head of innovation globally, Khan was CEO of UGO, a firm in the TD Bank Group that functions as a mobile product incubator. Khan also ran the Global Digital Experience at TD for 15 million digitally active customers. Before TD, Khan was a senior leader at Deloitte Consulting and even worked as an engineer on the F22 fighter jet aircraft at Lockheed Martin: Khan knows how to design and build, and he said Chrapko was ready to tackle global scale.
“Having seen Evan in action, he’s that rare serial entrepreneur who is willing to tackle world-scale issues,” Khan said. “Evan has a track record of success and demonstrated ability to build strong teams that are up for any challenge.”
Not a one-trick pony
Chrapko said he built out the Trust Science platform to predict human behavior at a personal cost of high expense. The model was constructed for credit scoring first, as a go-to-market strategy, Chrapko said, but with the available tools needed to branch out into other sectors later. For example, he said he could branch into insurance, predictive analytics for e-commerce, marketing, even predictive tech for dating services or law enforcement.
“I am not a one-trick pony on credit scoring. At great time, cost, and money we dutifully, deliberately built this platform in a generic way as to the questions we can answer,” Chrapko said. “The science of trustworthiness is predicting behavior: what is a human being going to do? That’s the essence of trustworthiness, and scoring people for creditworthiness is simply a go-to-market choice. It’s a strategic choice that I am in the credit sector right now. Later, we will easily expand into the insurance sector, for example.
Chrapko said he has time to be both a disruptor and the creator of a new category, laser-focused. He said credit scoring is like a clearinghouse industry, and there is a reason why there are not 500 clearinghouses or credit score providers: the winner takes all in two-sided marketplaces (think Amazon). But, he said financial inclusion, in the end, is a trillion-dollar opportunity for whoever gets it right, and the tools are there to help millions heal their financial lives.
“It gravitates to an oligopoly, and I’m trying to take my role alongside the other four or five majors, Chrapko said. “We’re starting very small because you have to start somewhere, but we’re architected for that. Because of the damage that’s been caused in the world for lack of better-functioning credit scores, it’s high time that you [traditional credit scoring institutions] do something, waking your sleepy giant eye. Lots of people are hurting, but they don’t have to hurt anymore.”
This year, Trust Science is looking toward raising a Series B, and more.
