Lalitha Rao is Chief Risk Officer at Imprint, the payments and loyalty platform behind co-brand credit card programs for brands including Booking.com, H-E-B, Crate & Barrel, Rakuten and Kroger. She spent several years at Capital One, led small business risk at Stripe through the pandemic surge, and ran credit policy at Square Financial Services before joining Imprint. At Imprint she runs risk as a growth function. She is measured on finding ways to say yes safely, not on minimizing losses, and she uses partner data as underwriting signal, joins enterprise sales conversations, and has led her team's move to AI-automated reporting, governance documentation and analyst-level agents.
“Risk at Imprint is really not a traditional control function. I am not incentivized to minimize losses. Really, my role is to drive growth, to find ways to say yes, but say that safely while staying within our risk appetite.”
“We're both really optimizing for growth, but growth that is durable and resilient and would last us through the economic cycle.”
“That additional information to us is a deep signal of high intent and loyalty that gives us orthogonal information that's just not available to other issuers through the credit bureau alone.”
“Even two payments in, we'll give you a credit line increase. We won't wait for a year or 18 months for the data to bake.”
“That leads to inbounds, not even outbounds, right? So we get brands reaching out to us based upon, hey, I saw what you're doing over there. I love that. I've never seen that before in a value prop.”
“The day in the life of somebody on the risk team today at Imprint is entirely different from what it was even three or four months ago.”
“We built a suite of agents within the team that are doing the work that it would take teams of analysts to do.”
“Claude is amazing and Claude is a great coworker that helps you drive better outcomes. But the accountability has to be with the individual. Did anyone ever say Excel got it wrong?”