Michelle He is co-founder and chief operating officer of Abound, the London, England, lender that uses open-banking data to price personal loans, and of Render, the decisioning software it sells to other lenders. She holds a PhD, for which she studied artificial intelligence. Read our review of Abound.
Arriving from Singapore Without a Credit Score
She moved to the UK from Singapore with a PhD, a job and a decent salary, and every bank she asked turned down her loan for a flat deposit. "When it came to personal finance, it was almost as if I didn't exist," she wrote for The Heard. "Ironically, I moved here to help financial services companies improve their decision-making processes for lending!"
From EY Adviser to Lender
At EY she advised lenders on credit decisions alongside Gerald Chappell. "After years of telling my clients there had to be a better way, I realised that if I wanted to change how these companies decided who to lend to, it would be better to do it myself," she wrote. Banks, she told City AM, are "pretty comfortable serving a group of prime customers, which are very low risk and good payers."
Building Abound on Profit
She argues for growing on earnings and keeping new equity rounds to a minimum. "A lot of tech companies think the only way to grow is just to pump external money, one round after another," she told City AM in December 2024. Abound turned a profit two and a half years after it began trading.
