Behavioral Science Can't Cure Everything: Why Prevention Matters

So customers are feeling more nervous than ever and more of them are entering delinquency than ever before.

Behavioral science is amazing. I really believe in it. I studied in school, that's why I started the company. But it's not a silver bullet for everyone. If somebody loses their job, me nudging you more effectively if you have no money in your bank account isn't gonna solve that problem.

So we were like, well, if we're in the business of helping these customers, what else can we do? And what else we can do is we can move from curing customers to preventing it. So we've launched a new product called SymendPrevent in partnership with Walnut and they're right after people cure. We basically in this high context window, they introduce insurance products where if for a small premium on their monthly bills, if something bad happens to them, the insurance company actually pays their bills directly until they get back on their feet, they get their next job or what have you.

We believe it's going to be a pretty effective thing. The psychological aspects of it, or that when you've ensured future uncertainty and you've offloaded that risk, your willingness to buy more, your loyalty to the brand, all of these things become tailwinds to the original organization that we serve. So we're pretty excited about it because it's very complementary to the original mission of the company.