By giving away free credit scores to more than 60 million people, Credit Karma upended the paid credit report market. And by offering free tax returns this year — at the same time H&R Block and IBM Watson were bragging about AI-powered tax filings — the company stormed the $8.9 billion tax preparation industry. Bold disruptions like this matter, but Credit Karma’s effort to quietly assemble the massive trove of information underpinning each of these moves may be even bolder.
Credit Karma works like this: Members supply personal information (name, address, phone, social security number) to receive credit scores and, if desired, to be matched with the best credit card, personal loan, and auto loan offers, and to file their federal income taxes — all for free. The company gets paid a commission by the credit card and loan issuers, and it vows it will never charge consumers. “We will always be free, that’s our core promise,” said chief technical officer Ryan Graciano, in a conversation with VentureBeat’s Blaise Zerega at Collision 2017. (See video above.)
The resulting data itself is invaluable — imagine what insights into one-fifth of America’s household debt might yield, but the tools and models Graciano and his team use to extract these insights are its magic glue. According to Graciano, the company is able to serve consumers up-to-the-minute recommendations for their financial decisions within 20 milliseconds. And to do this, the service relies not on general artificial intelligence (AI) but on artificial narrow intelligence ANI (ANI).
Now that Credit Karma has both tax and credit data, it can add more value to its services. For instance, according to Graciano, “We can do things like notice you have a mortgage and point out that your forgot to…