Get to know Michael Broughton; he is the founder of Altro, a fintech company that is helping people build credit by paying their subscriptions on time. The company operates in 47 states and has $22 million in funding.
With Altro, low-cost subscription services like Netflix, Spotify, and Xbox Live, can boost credit scores for people with little or poor credit history, as per Forbes. Altro issues a no-fee payment card to fund them, the platform said. It explained that when customers pay their Altro bill, the company alerts top credit bureaus, including TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, to beef up their scores.
Altro, in turn, makes money by charging the services a small transaction fee. “We serve people who have never been exposed to the credit system before,” Broughton told Forbes.
The Los Angeles resident grew up in a military family and lived in South Korea and Japan before eventually moving to South Dakota and settling in Los Angeles.
Broughton came up with the idea of Altro after he was denied a $10,000 loan to cover the cost of tuition at the University of Southern California. Without credit history, he couldn’t get a loan. Meanwhile, a loan is required to build credit history.
“While I was attending the University of Southern California, I was denied a $10,000 student loan that was needed to cover the remainder of my tuition. As with most other college students, I had little credit history and no credit score and was denied the loan on these grounds. This catch-22 inspired me to create Altro—to help individuals similar to myself that have been denied access to financial necessities,” he was quoted by Medium.
About 63 million Americans are unbanked or underbanked, meaning these people do not have adequate access credit.
Broughton’s system is catering to these individuals to enable them to gain financial freedom. “The world-changing potential of Altro is enormous, and we’ve already seen some of our users achieve life-changing results, ” Broughton said.
“For example, take Sam — one of Altro’s earliest users. Sam was an Uber driver in Los Angeles who dreamed of being able to move to Michigan to live with his daughter. However, he was routinely denied from apartment applications due to his credit score. With Altro, we helped Sam raise his score from 560 to 714 in only two weeks. Sam was then able to successfully apply for housing in Michigan, where he now lives with his daughter,” he explained.
On his way to success, Broughton said he met several investors, but it was his contact with Maxine Marcus that changed everything. He was approached by Marcus after he won his first-ever pitch competition. She offered to link him to her dad, who has a connection with Jay-Z. And that encounter changed Broughton’s career.
Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures invested $250,000 into the company in 2020, according to Forbes. Broughton has since graduated from Y Combinator as a Thiel Fellow. He also became an investor in Drink Barcode and the Vice Chairman of USC Credit Union’s Board of Directors in 2017. According to him, the experience he gained as Vice Chairman of the Board of USC Credit Union, which manages assets worth nearly $1 billion, helped launch a credit card line for low-income and international students and has also been valuable in navigating the credit-building space.
Today, his company Altro has raised over $20 million.
