How MotoRefi CEO Kevin Bennett grew MotoRefi to $6.2M revenue and 9K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kevin bennett he's the ceo of moto refi a mission driven fintech startup revolutionizing consumers financial relationships with their cars as an experienced ceo he spent over 10 years launching leading startups from early to late stage he holds an mba from the university of virginia jd from georgetown university and a ba from brown university kevin you're ready to take to the top let's do it thanks nick thank you you bet okay so how are you helping consumers uh better finance or better understand the financing of their cars yeah so most consumers cars aren't doing them any financial favors uh what they get at the dealership you know in that transaction and they drive off with a big stack of paper that they usually haven't read or probably won't read it's you know above market interest rates often they're being overcharged on those insurance products they get at the dealer like gap insurance warranties and we help put them in uh better uh auto loans lower price we often cut the interest rate in half um with community banks credit unions or their lending partners and help them save money what are the rates typically i'm just not familiar what are the rates typically we typically will get folks in rates that vary from anywhere from five percent to 25 it's pretty amazing we have rates on our platform as low as 1.49 um and so we'll often cut those rates in half and we save our customers on average 100 a month on their payment interesting okay and so where do you enter sort of customer journey are you selling directly through dealerships or how does it work we are refinancing so uh oftentimes anyone's bought a car they realize they're getting all of that at the dealer they're getting their loan at the deal or they're getting those financial products at the dealer and insurance products and we are actually helping them often discover refinancing most consumers don't even know they can refinance their car and save money and so we're helping them realize that that's a financial moment in their lives that just like refinancing your home uh where you can save money on your uh on your car and that's you know that hundred dollars a month is grocery gas stuff for the kids it's real value for folks oh it's very it's extreme especially today i mean it's very real value so i mean guess give me a sensor one of those on the timeline we're gonna go back to your day one here in a second but i guess last year last 12 months how many did you revive yeah it's it's been pretty wild so we did over 250 million dollars in refinancings last year and we will do uh orders of magnitude above that this year do you think you'll break a billion uh we'll see i mean is it possible you actually know your numbers you have projections yeah it's going to be really interesting to see i mean i think in in the covid world and what's happening i think a year ago uh if we were sitting here hook it was just becoming a thing so i've learned not to try and predict the future too much but we're we're growing again by orders of magnitude so i think we're really excited but does covet do more people refi when they have issues and they're being laid off because of a pandemic or or do less people refi was it a you know a headwind for you or a negative for you i'd say slight tailwind i mean what you've seen is that consumers are looking um you know whether or not that they are personally impacted they know people are impacted they're thinking about their finances rates are relatively low and so you've seen a lot of folks uh refinance their homes for example and that has driven awareness uh with people refinancing their cars learning what else they can do to help right-size their finances optimize their personal finances and what's the 250 million is sort of hard for audience to like wrap their mind around such a big number how many people is that that you helped yeah so it's it's thousands and thousands of people um and we haven't released the exact number and kind of won't break that here on this on this podcast but uh many thousands of people across the country nationwide so uh really excited about the growth and uh continuing to grow that this year okay so take me back to day one when did you launch the company so it's a actually really interesting story so this is a venture build out of qed uh verticalized fintech fund started by nigel morris who co-founded capital one and then co-founded with a number of his uh former uh colleagues and executives from capital one co-founded qed as an adventure fund and they started right around 2008 led the series a credit karma have uh now invest globally in fintech they've been very successful and what they've done in venture uh you know that pattern recognition skill is tried and true and so when they see an opportunity uh in the market where someone isn't necessarily taking advantage of the market dynamics or the opportunity for innovation they'll stand something up and so they actually effectively in an interesting way we found we co-founded the company with our initial venture capital investor qed and that happened end of 2016 early 2017 and i actually joined when they uh got you know their first uh little bit of traction uh as the first ceo of the team in in mid 2018. okay so i mean two years it was a big period 2016 to 2018 what's going on i mean who's running the thing yeah so i'd say it was the very end of 16th so you're really looking about 12 18 month period and so that was you know initially as is often the founding story you have your your first engineer starting up in in building the platform you're just starting to think through the kind of vision and the commercialization and and you're just beginning to take it to market not really at market scale yet um but but just getting there and and so i was fortunate to to work with uh nigel and matt risley who's on our board frank rottman other great folks at qed and great folks on the team uh which was very small and and uh initially just literally the equivalent of starting out of your garage in this case was starting in the vc's basement uh which is where they were based so uh we you know moved us out to our actual first office kind of moved out of the basement got our first apartment as it were and uh and then went from there so you joined officially in 2018 but can you give us a little sense of you personally were you an exited founder like how did you get connected to the qed folks and why not just go do your own thing instead of you know jumping on the back of basically someone else's baby yeah it was uh it was really exciting for me i mean i think i i just wrapped up and it sold a start by co-founded uh with mike spain however who actually eventually came in to be our vp of engineering and is our vp of engineering today was that that you sold home then and that helped people save money actually selling their homes so i had gone through the residential real estate side of things and the financing of where people could save homes to save money then really fell in love with this idea on auto refinancing and auto is a moment when you think about the industry and what they saw and what we saw was student lending had had its sofi moment where there was digital transformation that really changed the way people thought about it could access uh financing for their education and manage that uh efficiently and when you look at mortgage there had been rocket mortgage better mortgage now better had really transformed and is in the process of transforming mortgage industry um but but that really hadn't happened in auto yet and there was this great opportunity for a you know auto as an asset class over 1.2 trillion dollars the same size student loans but hadn't seen the same innovation and so really a huge opportunity to help consumers and and my experiences in mission driven startups uh very very focused on on the mission and and the values of the company and saw the same opportunity and and early on we agreed to the grandma test we weren't going to sell anyone anything that we wouldn't sell to our own grandmother or grandfather and and that's how we operate the business and you know with a tremendous opportunity so it's been a great win-win uh for for our investors for lenders we partner with for our consumers in the team kevin how does motor refi make money so a few ways uh consumers pay us a uh low uh origination fee or processing fee and that is for the technology the convenience for example we saved them the trip to the dmv we take care of that for them that gets we're talking about we're talking like 20 bucks something like that or is it more larger so it ends up being a couple bucks a month like wrapped into the loan and so it becomes it easy and and when i we save i say we save people 100 a month that's net of all fees so that's 100 a month on their payments that they are saving and so for a couple bucks a month for the consumer our lenders are paying us for those loans because we are acquiring new members for the credit unions and helping them through the process and so you're not doing you don't have there's not a balance sheet business behind this you're selling these you're basically underwriting and selling them off and then other people are like qed capital are doing the actual lending so it's with our partners credit unions community banks across the country and they are they actually give us their underwriting we partner with them so we can underwrite an auto decision on our platform so that means for a consumer they can get a firm offer of credit in seconds okay i guess what i'm asking though...