Yendo’s new Chief Product Officer Kevin Bird, left, and CMO NIzar Rana. [Photos: Yendo]
Yendo—a Dallas company offering the “first-ever” credit card secured by its customers’ vehicles—has appointed Kevin Bird as chief product officer and Nizar Rana as chief marketing officer. The hires come at a key inflection point for the company with the launch of its new unsecured card, which completes its innovative credit card suite, and a stronger focus on using AI to help “main street Americans” access financial services, Yendo said.
With decades of experience scaling consumer fintech products to tens of millions of customers, Bird and Rana’s combined expertise, including Bird’s hands-on experience building AI applications, equips Yendo to grow its platform and speed its use of AI to streamline lending decisions, lower the cost of services, and pass those savings directly back to customers in better rates and faster access to credit, the company said.
“Main street consumers have never had a real menu of options when it comes to borrowing—they either accept high cost, low borrowing power, or go without,” said Yendo Co-Founder and CEO Jordan Miller.
“Kevin and Nizar have spent their careers building financial products that actually work for people the system has overlooked,” Miller added in a statement. “As we complete our card suite and look toward the next phase of growth, their leadership will be essential to putting these products in front of every American who deserves a better option.”
AI-powered lending lowers cost and speeds approval
Bird joins Yendo from Elicit, an AI-powered research platform where he led the product from pre-revenue to serving marquee customers including Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Google, and others. Prior to Elicit, Bird spent eight years at Nubank, the world’s largest neobank, as its first product manager, helping boost the company from 45,000 customers to more than 60 million and growing the product organization to over 300 product managers.
“AI is a genuine unlock for what we’re building at Yendo,” said Bird. “Legacy lenders rely on outdated infrastructure and bloated cost structures that make serving nonprime consumers feel like a risk they can’t afford to take. By using AI to streamline lending decisions and drive down our cost to serve, we can offer this demographic something they’ve rarely been given—competitive rates, fast approvals, and a product that actually works in their favor. That’s what gets me excited about joining Yendo.”
‘Proud to help tell that story’
Most recently, Rana served as head of growth at OnePay, one of the largest consumer fintechs in the country, where he led growth and helped scale banking services to millions of customers. Previously, Rana managed a $150 million acquisition budget at LendingClub and held marketing leadership roles at Metromile and Wells Fargo, after beginning his career as a business analyst at Capital One.
“This product genuinely doesn’t exist anywhere else—no one else is offering nonprime consumers a real choice between secured, asset-backed, and unsecured credit, all with fair pricing and no predatory fees,” said Rana. “My job is to make sure the tens of millions of Americans who need these products know they exist. Yendo is doing this the right way, and I’m proud to help tell that story.”
Financial partner to underserved Americans
The two appointments are part of Yendo strengthening its leadership bench to support its next phase of growth, the company said. With Bird leading product and Rana driving marketing, the company said that it is equipped to grow its platform and achieve its goal of “becoming the most trusted financial partner for nonprime Americans.”
Last fall, Yendo announced a $50 million Series B funding round that included investors Spice Expeditions, Autotech Ventures, FPV Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, Mark Cuban, and Clocktower Technology Ventures, among others. The company landed the new funding to accelerate its expansion beyond secured lending to build an “AI-powered digital bank” for the millions of Americans underserved by traditional financial institutions.
As inflation and rising debt levels continue to squeeze household budgets, Yendo said it’s redoubling its efforts to make affordable, intelligent credit more accessible to the people who need it most.
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