I find finance interesting and it seems like it pays super well if you're at the right company, but the idea of putting all of my creative energies into making super rich people even richer is kind of soul crushing. Anyone here in fintech doing other stuff? I've heard there's interesting ML work being done for fraud detection, for example.
Qwil - check them out
Your understanding of finance is bizarre, the super rich part of it. Most asset management has nothing to do with rich people, e.g. pension funds manage assets of ordinary folks like teachers and policemen. It may not be cool for you but people need money to live after retiring. If you don’t understand the purpose and only focus on means then you don’t need to be in finance at all. Just work with your cool toys in any industry.
Fintech tends to focus on helping retail consumer spend money and institutions invest money. Better and smarter deployment of money helps the economy overall.
Kabbage Credit Karma
Doesn’t credit karma sell your data to lenders? How is this fulfilling?
Well Credit Karma also provides value to the customers. They show chances of being approved for a particular cc, and Knowing which card you have chance to get or not can prevent you from making hard inquiries to your credit report. It's good tool, to monitor if there are any new credit card opened under your name ( identity theft) etc. Well They do sell your data to lenders to sell targetted advertising, but, which consumer facing company doesn't ?
Chime doesn't serve super rich people and is a B2C company focused on consumer banking. Our ML team is hiring in SF and fraud operations teams are being built out in Chicago in 2020.
Soul fulfilling - work at a non-profit.