TomoCredit co-founder and CEO Kristy Kim knew she was going to be an entrepreneur since she was 10 or 11 years old—but things didn’t fall into place until she attempted to buy her first vehicle after college. “I would say the pivotal experience that led me to Tomo… was [that] I wanted to buy my first car while working as an investment banker in San Francisco,” she says.
Kim, a first-generation Korean immigrant who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, applied for an auto loan at a Lexus dealership and was rejected right away. After struggling to figure out why and where to go for answers, Kim eventually realized it was because she had no credit history in the United States.
“I am well educated, worked hard to get a job and got a job, and I was making a six-figure income,” she says. “I did all the right things as an immigrant I was told to do. And then here I am not having [any] credit history in the U.S., so I am getting rejected within seconds of applying for an auto loan.”
Kim realized she wasn’t alone: So many students, immigrants, women and other members of marginalized communities struggle to secure leases for apartments, make big purchases such as cars or get approved for mortgages due to their lack of credit history or low credit score. In 2018, she founded TomoCredit in hopes of helping others understand and improve their financial wellness.
TomoCredit offers a credit card that’s designed to help users build their credit score as quickly as possible and receives a small fee from merchants for every purchase made with the card. To apply for it, all individuals need is a valid Social Security number or individual taxpayer identification number. TomoCredit uses alternative data sources such as bank account information to process card applications (so a traditional credit score isn’t necessary) and helps users build their scores using a weekly autopay option.
The credit card is built on Kim’s realization that a wealth of transaction records detailing spending habits exists in individuals’ bank account summaries—data that might make them credit-worthy. To launch TomoCredit, Kim found an engineer to analyze the formatting of bank account data and eventually zero in on patterns related to account balances with the goal of training an underwriting model, a structured process used by lenders, insurers and investors to evaluate and assess the risk associated with providing financing and determining the terms and conditions of transactions.
Once it gained momentum and knew how to approach the datasets, Kim shared the findings with risk managers at banks such as Citibank and Wells Fargo and asked if it was valuable for helping individuals gain access to credit even if they don’t have any credit history. Because many big banks are set in their ways and have processes that benefit the broader population, she knew starting her own company would be the only way to provide the best service to the overlooked communities she wanted to serve.
“I have a best shot at being the A-plus service for the segment of consumers who don’t have good credit or a good credit score but good cash flow and want to get help on how to improve their credit,” she says.
Since the company started, it has evolved to offer memberships that consumers can choose based on their needs and also has an AI-powered credit assistant that provides TomoScores. The cash flow-based credit score helps businesses evaluate the creditworthiness of borrowers who lack a traditional credit score.
“Whether it is paying off your credit card or researching your auto loan interest rate, come to us because we can offer you more personalized advice…. Unlike other companies, we’ve been training our underwriting model over the past six years with 6 billion-plus transaction data,” Kim says. “We’ve been training our model to give you personalized [financial] advice based on your own income level and own spending patterns.”
Every week, the TomoCredit team chats with about 50 customers over the phone to gather feedback about what other features it can add to help them reach financial goals. (For example, a user might request to dispute credit report errors via their online dashboard.) In the future, Kim hopes to continuously provide more tools and resources for customers and become their long-term “financial co-pilots”—rather than just a short-term solution.
While TomoCredit continues to innovate, Kim says the company still follows the same mission it started with, which her staff is happy to remind her of when things get stressful. “It’s not about one single feature or one single business model, one unhappy customer, one happy customer,” she says. “Eventually, we are doing this because we believe that the market and the credit system will eventually change in the way that we desire.”
Even though change to the credit system is slow, it is happening, Kim says. The evidence is in more acknowledgment of better underwriting or the need to use more AI and datasets. “My team is like, ‘Kristy, you know what? Maybe you don’t feel it every day, but definitely things are moving in the right direction.’”
Kim thinks that increasing credit access will remain a benefit to America’s economy despite any changes in the political system, thanks to capitalism and lenders’ appetite for expanding their businesses. “No matter who’s in the White House or where we are in the political environment, increasing credit access to consumers is always important and then it benefits everybody,” she says. “It not just benefits the consumers, it benefits lenders, too.”
Have bad credit?
Here’s Kim’s advice.
Don’t be afraid to know where you stand. Everyone has to start somewhere! “Sometimes people get scared or overwhelmed to even start because they feel like, ‘Oh, my stuff is terrible,’” she says. “So, it doesn’t give them joy to look at it.”
Find the right financial partner. Kim says some customers are more comfortable sharing their data with a company that uses an AI model like TomoCredit, which they find less judgmental. “We really want to be a place [where] there’s no stigma,” she says.
Be patient. Your credit score won’t improve overnight. She says that while many times it feels like you’re not making progress, there’s beauty in continuing to move forward.
“Then later, you see that you made a big difference,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Kristy Kim. This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of SUCCESS® magazine.
