The shift to mobile-first, data-driven financial services has arrived, and there is no turning back. Over the past year, there has been a massive acceleration in the adoption of consumer fintech.
Petal has benefited from that trend — not just because we offer a fundamentally better credit experience built for mobile customers, but because our cash flow underwriting technology has enabled us to continue making credit accessible, even as big banks slam the brakes on lending. In fact, Petal is growing far faster than ever before.
In February, we announced that we’d reached 100,000 customers. That was a big milestone for us, but we’ve nearly doubled since then.
In order to keep up with this pace of growth, we’re excited to welcome two significant new additions to the Petal team.
First, we have hired a new head of engineering, Ali Heron. Ali joins us from Two Sigma Investments, a leading financial sciences company where she served as a senior vice president, leading large engineering teams in the use of data science and distributed computing to solve complex challenges in investment management.
Before joining Two Sigma, Ali ran teams working on HBO GO and HBO NOW, and spent ten years at Microsoft in engineering and product roles for advertising, mobile and MSN. Ali holds 16 patents and leverages her engineering and product experience as an adjunct professor at NYU, teaching computer science students how to turn ideas into reality. She is here to scale both Petal and Prism Data, and help us to invent the future of financial services.
Second, Susan Ehrlich, a seasoned financial services executive who most recently served as the CEO of Earnest, has joined Petal’s board of directors.
Susan is one of the most respected operators at the intersection of fintech and financial services. Among others, she has worked in executive roles for Simple; for Amazon; for H&R Block; and for Citibank. Her expertise and guidance will be invaluable as we build Petal from a startup into a nationwide financial brand.
Ali and Susan are part of a much larger wave of hiring at Petal. Our team now includes more than 130 employees, working from a new headquarters in New York, in our virtual office, and in our office in Richmond, Virginia. And we’re still hiring. If you’re interested in our mission to make responsible and modern financial services available to everyone, please reach out.