Ep 95 Nonprofit/FinTech Founder Tracey Milligan

Midlife Mixtape

“Shouldn’t take a miracle”: Tracey Milligan, whose foundation provides services for victims of domestic violence, on hard work, serendipity, and “angels” along the way, plus her recent pivot as groundbreaking founder in the financial tech field.

Find Tracey’s work online:

Website: TheMilliganFoundation.org

Twitter: @milliganfound1

Company: Term Payments

Leave your response for our Listener Question in the comments, or press HERE to record…What’s an album you bought a long time ago and still listen to all the time now – and why?

Here’s Carlos Santana playing in a slightly larger park…

>Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 95 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on April 13, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [e-mail] ***

Tracey Milligan 00:00

So I decided, you know what? I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to create an organization specifically to help victims of violence get to safe places, get to where they could be safe.

Nancy Davis Kho 00:14

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:38

Happy April and happy book birthday to TWO new books from the Midlife Mixtape Inner Circle. First up is The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, by Jess Lahey. Jess was on the show in Episode 74 talking about her NYT bestselling parenting book “The Gift of Failure”. In her new book, Jess shares her own experience of addiction and long-term recovery, seamlessly weaving together rich storytelling with compassionate, evidence-based analysis. The result is a supportive, life-saving resource for parents and educators to understand the roots of substance abuse, identify who is most at risk, and employ the most effective prevention measures.

Born into a family of alcoholics and drug abusers, Jessica Lahey spent her early adulthood trying frantically to thwart that multi-generational genetic legacy. She ultimately failed; descending into alcoholism in her thirties, she didn’t find her way out until her early forties. After years in recovery, Lahey was determined to protect her two adolescent sons from their most dangerous inheritance.

Written from a place of compassion rather than shame or judgment, The Addiction Inoculation is a thoughtful and indispensable guide to understanding the roots of substance abuse. It helps identify who is most at risk for addiction and offers parents, educators, and other caregivers practical steps for prevention.

And another book birthday shout-out to Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, aka one of the most generous writers out there, for HER new book “Broken (In the Best Possible Way)”. Jenny is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Furiously Happy and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and her new book is deeply relatable book filled with humor and honesty about depression and anxiety.

As Jenny’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, Jenny brings readers along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way.

With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it. From the business ideas that she wants to pitch to Shark Tank to the reason why Jenny can never go back to the post office, Broken leaves nothing to the imagination in the most satisfying way. And of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor―the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball―is present throughout.

Find The Addiction Inoculation and Broken at bookstores, online, and in audio format!

[MUSIC]

Hi Midlife Mixtapers! I’m Nancy Davis Kho, creator and host of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. If you had a preferred brand of audio cassette tape that you shopped for at the mall before swinging by The Limited for some more baggies, I think you’re gonna fit in here just fine.

Before we get to today’s interview, I want to invite you listen ALL the way to the end, because we’re gearing up for another episode where YOU do the talking. I’ve got a question for you to answer – via voicemail, email, or comments in social media – and I’ll compile all of those into our April 27^th episode so stick around to hear the question!

I get guest ideas in lots of ways – sometimes I’m pitched by a PR rep, sometimes a listener suggests a person who they’d like to hear from; sometimes I’m the one inviting someone I don’t know onto the show. And every once in a while I think of someone I have known personally for a long time and say, “How has this person not been a guest yet? How have I not invited them on?!” And that’s the case with today’s guest, Tracey Milligan.

Tracey is the founder and Executive Director of The Milligan Foundation, an internationally recognized relocation resource for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. Having helped over 800 people to free themselves from violence, she has proven herself to be a champion for people in need. Passionate about instilling social change and morality. She is a prolific non-profit representative.

She’s created a payment solution called Term that’s set to change the payment landscape and revolutionize the lives of those who aspire to have more.

[MUSIC]

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Tracey Milligan, I’m so glad you’re here with me today!

Tracey 04:45

I am glad to be having this conversation with you today.

Nancy 04:49

We have a lot of ground to cover because YOU cover so much ground! So we’re gonna have to move fast, but we always start the podcast with a critical question. What was your first concert, Tracey, and what were the circumstances?

Tracey 05:03

My first concert…I don’t know if this counts as a concert. I want to say I think it does. I am a true Bay Area native, grew up in San Francisco, right off the Castro/Mission/Dolores Park area and it just so happened to be the same neighborhood that Carlos Santana lived in.

Nancy 05:25

Oh, wow.

Tracey 05:26

So when I was a kid, Carlos would just play in the park sometimes. If he had a new song, he’d just be like, “Who in the neighborhood wants to hear? What do you guys think?” I remember summer days, “Carlos is in the park playing!” and you’d run out of the house and just go park on the grass and listen to Carlo’s hits.

Nancy 05:48

That is amazing. You should definitely count that as your first concert because it’s so unique.

Tracey 05:55

Well, I want to say that was probably my very first music experience. But my first real concert in stadium seats was a rap concert. My first concert, I actually got to see Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Whodini. That was my first real REAL concert.

Nancy 06:22

How cool is that?

You and I first met through your work with The Milligan Foundation. I don’t know if you remember this. You and I were at a get together for volunteers for a different fundraiser in Oakland.

Tracey 06:38

Yes, for Children’s Hospital.

Nancy 06:40

Yeah, that’s right. And I didn’t know a soul. We were at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and I looked around the lobby and knew not a single person and I screwed up my courage and took my Dear Abby advice, like, “Find somebody else who looks like maybe they don’t know everybody, too!” And I’m like, “Look at that lady. She looks nice. I’m going to glom on to her!” And unfortunately for you, it was you.

You told me that night about your work with The Milligan Foundation and I was so impressed and I have followed your work ever since. I wanted to start this conversation by having you talk about this foundation that you started in 2011. Explain what it does and how The Milligan Foundation works?

Tracey 07:21

Sure. Well, The Milligan Foundation is a relocation service for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking and actually, April 6th, will be my 10 year anniversary for starting The Milligan Foundation . So it’s been 10 years…

Nancy 07:41

Congratulations!

Tracey 07:42

… of just so much. What The Milligan Foundation does is – basically, I jokingly say that we are the Secret Service to domestic violence. We move people quite literally anywhere in the world in order to be safe. We support any organization that even touches on domestic violence or person who may be facing life threatening harm from domestic violence. Any organization can reach out to us on behalf of a client that they have who’s facing danger and needs to move out of the area in order to be safe.

The core of what the foundation does is purchase airplane, bus, train tickets, gas, pay for motel rooms, hotel rooms, basically, anything that it takes for our person to be safe, to get from point A to point B. The last time we saw each other a few years ago, the organization had just started working internationally as well. In the 10 years’ time, I’ve helped people in Canada, in England, in Ireland, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Kenya, in Nigeria. Look, I got to keep thinking. In Zimbabwe….

Nancy 09:00

Just get a world map.

Tracey 09:01

…in Mexico, Yeah, it’s been all over. It’s been very rewarding and at times, heartbreaking, because people are coming to me when they’re in the most scared, the most dangerous time of their lives and they’re coming to me for help. So I’m just thankful that I can provide the service that I can do this.

I started doing this because I myself am a domestic violence survivor and I’m dealing with the issues that I ran into. When I left my violent relationship, I very naively thought that a woman escaping family violence would just automatically go into a shelter and start her life over again and that be that. But what I learned is that if you have somebody who’s dangerous in your life, shelters don’t always take you, especially if the shelter is in the area of your abuser. They won’t let you come there because you now become a risk or potential threat to that shelter if you have someone looking for you.

When I walked away from my violent relationship, my abuser was actively looking for me to cause me harm. So the shelters in my area wouldn’t take me in. That made me homeless on the street with a seven-year-old and a two month old baby, and I had nowhere to go, and no shelter would take me.

When I did finally end up at a shelter, when I finally did get to a shelter that was underground, specifically for high threat people like myself, listening to the other residents of the shelter at the stories of what it took for them to get to the shelter, I thought, “This is a ridiculous problem. It shouldn’t exist, it shouldn’t take a miracle or a set of random circumstances that would lead someone to be in a place of safety.” And so I decided, “You know what? I’m going to solve this problem, I’m going to create an organization specifically to help victims of violence get to safe places, get to where they could be safe.” Because oftentimes, when you are a person who is in family violence, you don’t have resources, you don’t have a car, you don’t have money, you don’t have a lot of things. But you’re forced to go if not across state, sometimes cross country and even out of the country.

So I’m just glad to be able to provide that service and I’ve done it for so long.

Nancy 11:35

Congratulations on the way that you are changing people’s lives.

Tracey 11:39

When I first started… my background is not nonprofit work. It’s not social work. This is purely passion for me. So I’ve had a pretty big learning curve to overcome.

A lot of it was just being naive and thinking, okay, well, I’m going to provide this service, and people are going to want it and that’s that. That’s what I thought when I first started and to go back to me sending out cold emails to organizations thinking, “Hey, I’m gonna help you with your clients and get people out of town if they need help,” and I sent out this email. I actually contacted the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and I asked them for a list of organizations and I sent out cold emails announcing The Milligan Foundation to about 500 organizations, and no one responded.

And I was like, “Why isn’t anyone responding?”

Nancy 12:41

“I want to help!”

Tracey 12:42

Yeah, exactly. I was like, “Why isn’t anyone responding?” That left me so dejected. I was like, “Does anybody even want this? Will anybody even use me? Will anybody even take my service seriously?”

But what ended up happening – because whenever I get interested in something, I want to learn as much as possible and that goes without saying with starting my organization. I had signed up for an event called the World Conference of Shelters and it literally happened two months after I decided to start this organization.

So I signed up to attend this conference. It was happening in Washington, DC, but I had second thoughts of going because nobody responded to my emails. Nobody would call me back, NOTHING. I booked my flight and I had a layover in Denver – a major hub. I had the layover in Denver and so I’m sitting there in Denver waiting for my connecting flight to go into DC and I’m sitting next to a nun.

And she asked me what time it is and I tell her. I’m sitting there and I said, “Yes. But I’m thinking about going home.” She said, “Well, why are you thinking about going home?” I said, “Well, I don’t know if where I’m going, I’m going to this conference of shelters in DC and I sent these people a bunch of emails, and no one responded.” She looked at me and said, “I’m going to that conference too.” I was like, “Really?” She said, “Yes, I started this conference” and I was like, “Really?” She was like, “Why are you second guessing yourself?”

So I told her what my organization does or what I was planning to do. Like I said, I was only two months into even implementing the idea. I was still learning.

Nancy 14:30

Right.

Tracey 14:31

I told her what I wanted to do, and I told her I was feeling that nobody wanted me because no one responded to my email. And she said, “If I had received your email, I wouldn’t have responded either.” She said, “We have so many abusers fishing, looking for who just left them and the service that you’re offering is so needed that it sounds like it’s too good to be true. What you’re offering is so good, it sounds unbelievable.”

She said, “But you sitting here talking to me now and I see that you’re a real person offering this very real service, of course, I want to use it. So no, you should absolutely be at this conference!”And I was like, “Okay!”

Nancy 15:16

I believe we filed that under the term Kismet. You were meant to be sitting next to her.

Tracey 15:23

Exactly.

Nancy 15:22

That’s amazing.

Tracey 15:24

So I get to the conference and within the first hour – I had spent some money putting together nice little presentation folders of my program of what I wanted to do – and within the first hour, I had given away all of my materials.And I was supposed to be there for a week.

Nancy 15:42

Oh, my gosh.

Tracey 15:43

But that was really the kickoff of yes, this is needed. Yes, I was actually going to be supported by other organizations and from that was where I really laid the foundation for my network.

Even though I didn’t start out of the gate working internationally, it was the relationships that I built from that conference, from the people that I met at that conference and then attending subsequent years with people following up saying, “No, when you’re ready to scale this outside of the United States, we want to be part of the network.”

Right off the bat, I want to say my first international case was in Ireland. When China established their first domestic violence shelter because they didn’t have it there, was no such thing there for a while, I consulted on that. When New Zealand implemented their violence against women policy mimicking that of the United States, I consulted on that. Just some really, really great relationships came from that and it’s just expanded over the years and I feel blessed to do this work.

Nancy 16:50

I know that during the pandemic, domestic violence rates have risen, because there’s no place for people to go – I’ve seen it referred to as “the pandemic inside the pandemic.” In one study I looked at the rates in 2020 had increased 18% in San Antonio 22%, in Portland, 10% in New York City and I’m sure this is true internationally as well.

Something that I hadn’t thought about is that it can be as bad or worse with same sex couples because the pandemic has hit same sex couples especially hard, with members of the LGBTQ community likelier to be employed in highly affected industries like education, restaurants, hospitals, and retail. So how has that impacted the work of The Milligan Foundation over the past 13 months?

Tracey 17:36

First, we had an influx of cases four years ago, because with all of the toxic masculinity that was put on a pedestal in the political climate, we saw hate crimes literally go up 1,000% in certain demographics.

But the other hate crimes that started was in the home. So domestic violence went up in the country. To give a specific number, actually it went up 36%, almost 37% nationally. Calls to my organization for help went up 200% and when the pandemic happened, it cranked it up even more. It’s been excruciatingly hard because I haven’t been able to serve people. The financial climate of this country has also changed. People’s giving habits have changed. My organization doesn’t receive cash grants because of the work that we do, so it’s heavily dependent on independent or individual donors.

Nancy 18:50

Why would you not be able to get cash grants?

Tracey 18:53

I don’t get cash grants because we help people at their most vulnerable times, because we also provide security services for really, really high threat clients = we will actually provide basically bodyguard services and because we’re getting someone and actually moving them. We do help anyone. It doesn’t matter how you identify: male, female, or whatever. But if someone has children and they haven’t gone to court yet, then somebody who’s well-resourced can say, “Oh, well, my children were kidnapped and this organization is party to kidnapping and you’ve given them funding. So I’m going to come after you too.”

So a lot of the big grant giving organizations or big corporate giving organizations would not touch The Milligan Foundation with a 20 foot pole to help us with the actual services. Now, we are very fortunate and blessed in technology, because I am here in the Bay Area. So I’m very, very well supported technology wise with tech companies. The Milligan Foundation currently runs six figures worth of technology which is really wonderful. Salesforce is our biggest supporter since day one; Twilio for our emergency numbers, and a few other services, our content, our platform that our website is managed on – all of that is donated, and I’m very thankful for that. But for as far as actual cash, no, we don’t.

Nancy 20:28

So how could listeners of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast get involved in helping The Milligan Foundation? Where should they go if they are moved by your story and want to donate in some way?

Tracey 20:40

They can actually donate on the website, of course, there’s a donation button on the website.

Nancy 20:46

Let’s give them the URL for that so anybody listening has it.

Tracey 20:49

It’s real simple. It’s just themilliganfoundation.org.

But another thing that I’m doing just because we’ve had such a major, major influx, and like you said yourself, that there’s so much need across the country now for people who are trying to get safe. I’m actually coming out with a new initiative, a micro grant program, where I’m providing $100 in emergency funds for someone to pay for transportation costs or if they’re on the street, to get them off the street, to get them like a bus, to get a train ticket, whatever, to get out of town.

I’m doing that using a virtual ATM network that is built on the Clover and Green Dot and basically the debit card system that makes it so that they can pick up this $100 emergency grant at a 7-11, a Walgreens, a Walmart, anything like that. They don’t actually have to go to a bank or wait for a check or anything. It’s literally an SMS text message that is confirmed in a cash register a POS system at a 711 and they’ll have funds dispersed to them that way.

Nancy 22:03

We’re going to talk about why you are so well versed in the world of FinTech in a second because that is the second part of this interview.

But I just want to make a really quick point here. If you guys look at themilliganfoundation.org and are feeling moved to donate, I want to make a point, which is that after I met Tracey… I should have looked it up. We’ve probably met 6, 7, 8, 43 years ago, I don’t know, and I invited her to come to my Giving Circle, which if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you may know that I’m part of a group of women here in Oakland who have met now, I think we’re on 15 years, we’ve kind of lost track.

But we met when we were moms of young elementary school students and over the years, we’ve met four times a year to pool our resources and donate it to a nonprofit that one of the members has presented. So Tracey was my guest when it was my meeting to present and of course, my group was really moved by this and made a donation. And I’m going to tell you guys right now, it was not a huge donation. I don’t know what the dollar amount was, but we don’t roll. We’re not millionaires. We’re just donating. We’ve always said it’s what you would have spent on a night out with your girlfriends getting drinks and dinner. So the average donation is probably $50, $30, I don’t know.

We made this donation to The Milligan Foundation, and you were able to leverage that into getting Salesforce’s attention for a donation that really made a difference, right? You’ve explained to me that that just enabled you to take that next step that you really needed to take.

Tracey 23:36

Yeah, you haven’t even heard that story and I love, love, love telling that story. I have to say that I can actually now tell that story because contractually, I couldn’t say anything for a few years about that donation, about that support that I got.

So what happened? I attended your Giving Circle, and you guys asked me what I wanted to use the donation for.

I told you that the donation that your Giving Circle was giving me wasn’t to provide services directly, but to establish the IDVC, which was the International Domestic Violence Community, which was an initiative that I was putting into place that created a network of all the shelters and other organizations and connections that I’ve made over the years, and turning it into a private community. So basically, the Underground Railroad for domestic violence, digitally done in the cloud. And even though I was a Salesforce grantee, one of their one-to-one grantees, just to have access for their platform and to build out this community, I would need my own cloud servers. That went beyond the scope of what Salesforce typically gives a nonprofit. To do that, I needed to pay for that private server space. So to go outside, once again, what they usually give to nonprofits.

So I said that I was going to use the money that you ladies gave me that evening to start that service, to have that architecture, so that I could create this private Underground Railroad network of domestic violence providers, to create this global safety net so that we can all collaborate under one place securely.

I took that donation and that did provide the framework for the IDVC to be made, and it was going great. The following year I built it up to a point and was ready to launch again at the international domestic violence shelter conference. But I needed to pay for the licensing again and I had started fundraising to pay for that licensing. Now that licensing was $5,000 and long story short, I could not raise the $5,000. I couldn’t get it and I called my account rep at Salesforce, Ben – his name is Benjamin, but I call him Ben for short. I called him and I said, “The unthinkable has happened. I have not been able to raise this money to cover my licensing. What is the plan B, C, D, E, F?” Because me switching over to my own private servers or my own private cloud for this meant that I would have lost at that point, what would have been six years’ worth of work.

I was like, “What can we do? I can’t lose everything that I just spent all these years creating.”

I will never forget: his exact words to me were, “Tracey, the work that you were doing is too important and I cannot let this die.” And I said, “Okay.” He said, “Give me two weeks, and I will let you know what happens,” and I said, “Okay” and I’m on pins and needles, because I’m like, “Oh my God, am I going to lose my servers?”

The time goes by, and he calls me and he says, “I’ve got good news for you.” What he did was, he took information from my website, he took information from a company overview that I had sent him and he had made a presentation on my behalf of The Milligan Foundation to the Salesforce Foundation asking them to either give me a grant to cover that years’ licensing for my private network, or to grant me additional time, like an additional 90 days or something to give me more time to fundraise.

From that presentation, they said, “The work that she’s doing is incredible. We’re going to cover her licensing indefinitely… in perpetuity, for as long as her organization exists.”

Nancy 28:05

Alright. I just got goose bumps.

Tracey 28:06

There’s more. It actually keeps going.

Because I’m a huge believer in paying it forward and Ben doing that and telling me that I mean, it took me to my knees, right?

Nancy 28:19

Of course, I mean, how could it not?

Tracey 28:20

Like you said, you got goose bumps.? It took me to my knees. And I just kept thinking, “He is my angel. He is my angel.”

Now, every boss wants to know when they have a great employee. No matter how big your company is, you want to hear when you have an exceptional employee and that is being way above and beyond any account rep. It just so happened I had Marc Benioff’s personal email address because I knew one of his senior VPs. We used to go and hang out in bars in San Francisco.. and he was like, “Marc would love what you’re doing, email him. He needs to know what you’re doing. Just email him!”

But Imposter Syndrome kicked in. I’m like, “Well, what the heck am I gonna do emailing Marc? What the hell am I gonna say?” But when Ben did this, I was like, “I’ve got to tell Marc, I’ve got to let Marc know that he has an angel working for him,” and that’s what I did. I sent that email and that was the very first sentence in that email: “You have an angel working for you and I need you to know this.”

I proceeded to tell the story of what Ben did, and the fact that it would have – because my network spans 36 different countries and some of those shelters that are represented in my network don’t exist anywhere else on the internet, because they’re so small, they can’t afford it. I said the IDVC can literally touch hundreds of thousands of lives and your employee just saved that resource.

Nancy 30:00

Wow.

Tracey 30:01

I sent that email off and a couple days later, Marc writes me back and he said, “I’ve looked into your organization and what you’re doing. Everything Salesforce has is now at your disposal.”

Nancy 30:15

Oh my God.

Tracey 30:16

“Build what you need free of charge, for ever.”

Nancy 30:20

Wow, that’s amazing.

Tracey 30:23

I could not breathe. I could not breathe.

Nancy 30:28

But I also give you credit for making that contact too, because Imposter Syndrome is real. A lot of people would have just said, “I would never reach out to him!” So good for you for recognizing that it was something worth his while. I think too often we are very quick to say, “Oh, I don’t want to bother that person,” and a lot of the time, it’s not a bother. It’s something they want to know.

Tracey 30:50

Yeah, that technology donation that Marc personally said to give me was the largest donation that he had ever done to Salesforce, to the point where they actually had to open up a new department just to manage what I had. Because I pulled out all the stops and bells and whistles to create that channel resource.

Nancy 31:16

Somebody makes an offer to you like that, you have to act on it right quick.

Tracey 31:20

You know – I’m a car woman and I love to use car analogies…

Nancy 31:23

You’re about to lose me, Tracey. I don’t even remember what car I’m driving while I’m driving it. But you go on, somebody in the audience will know.

Tracey 31:30

Somebody in the audience will know. You’ll know this much. It would be like from driving a VW Bug to being handed the keys of a Ferrari.

Nancy 31:38

Okay, even I got that!

It’s awesome. I had some sense of what went down but I didn’t realize that’s how it went. Guess what you guys – this is my point, you can make a big difference when you just get involved, see what you can do. I’m going to refer you back to Episode 54 of this show when I talked about exactly how to set up a Giving Circle. I interviewed somebody who had one who has a much bigger deal than our little homegrown Oakland, janky – we love it, but it is pretty home grown. But man, you can make a difference. It’s worth doing.

Tracey 32:12

Yes.

Nancy 32:12

Oh my gosh, we’re going to run out of time. But I’m not going to let us do that before we talk about your newest resume entry, which is that you are now a founder of a FinTech company called Term Payments, which is an online store where you can put items that you purchase on layaway. So when did you start this? I really want to talk about what it’s like to be a female, black, over-50 founder in an industry that is like, Fully Chad. It’s a ton of young white guys, right? What is that like?

Tracey 32:47

Just like you said, Fully Chad. That is hilarious. Yeah, it is.

Nancy 32:53

Tell everybody what Term Payments is first, and then I have a serious question. I do have serious questions, Tracey, I have a couple. But tell everybody what it does and then I’m gonna ask my question.

Tracey 33:02

So Term Payments actually started off as me wanting to bring good old fashioned layaway as a selectable option when making a purchase online.

Because there’s companies you know, like Affirm and Klarna and Afterpay. They’re the point-of-sale finance where you see make four payments interest free and you can have your item now as long as you make these four payments or six payments or what have you. But those companies are still micro credit, micro loan, you still have to have a credit card, you still have to have a bank account, and it’s still leaving people unable to shop. There’s still a certain section that people who are unable to use that service.

So I thought wouldn’t it be great to bring good old fashioned layaway online, where you just make a deposit, agree to make X amount of payments for X amount of months and receive your item and not have it be credit-based, because the store or the seller holds on to the item until you’re finished paying for it.

That was what Term was originally going to be and that is still part of what Term is going to offer. But in my desire to serve who the layaway customer, is which is a cash customer who is typically walking into a brick and mortar and paying cash and not using a card, I actually came up with a solution that allows people to shop online with cash. So in pitching to venture capitalists, trying to get them to invest in me to bring this idea to market, they would look at me and hear my story, hear my solution and say, “|Okay, we understand layaway. We understand this a huge market there because we all know that Klarna and the rest of them. They’ve all raised like over a billion dollars each just about.” They understand that market. But they said, “Wait a minute, slow your roll, Tracey.”

Nancy 34:54

“I don’t like doing that, fellas. Have you met me before? I’m Tracey Milligan.”

Tracey 34:59

Right. “You just said that you’re allowing people to shop online with cash?” Because the nut that people have been trying to break in the FinTech space is, how do you get people who are unbanked or under banked to participate in the online economy?

Nancy 35:15

Let’s just pause really quickly, I want to give a couple of definitions. FinTech is just basically new technology that is an alternative to traditional banking services and it is really helpful for what you’re calling under banked customers, folks who don’t necessarily have access.

I want to make this point very clear that that has to do with redlining. We have talked about this in past episodes. But that practice of banks closing off access to financial services in certain neighborhoods because of the racial makeup has perpetuated a situation where there are a lot of people in this world who can’t open a bank account, who are distrustful of bank accounts, who can’t access all the kinds of ways that some of us are lucky enough to have access to.

So FinTech is an effort to reach people who are either unbanked or under banked and by the way, a lot of those services are very expensive, like short term payday loans is a typical example.

Tracey 36:14

Huge. 300% interest on that.

Nancy 36:15

I just want to make sure everybody understands those terms FinTech unbanked, underbanked. But also, make sure you see the connection to redlining and systemic racism when you’re thinking about these things.

Tracey 36:26

Yes, absolutely.

So Term Payments actually solves that. Investors caught on to that. They were like, “Wait a minute, you’re solving this problem, you are giving these people this consumer base a way to participate in the online economy without having a bank account, without having a credit card. Without even having credit, you’re allowing them to make purchases where they are. You’re serving them where they are.”

So that is what Term Payments is actually bringing to market and so I’ve made that slight shift. Yes, I am still going to provide that service of enabling people to buy what they want, to look “on their terms.” But the big part of Term Payments now is actually the solution that that’s going to allow people to shop online with cash. I’m keeping my fingers crossed here – launch in approximately 90 days, maybe four months, where people can select Term Payments on quite literally any website where a payment needs to be collected, and can then walk into a physical location to finish that transaction with cash.

Nancy 37:41

I realized that my question isn’t so much a question, it’s a comment. So I am every presenter’s worst nightmare. “Hi, it’s not so much a question, it’s a comment and it’s a two-part comment.”

I just want to point out – I hit the research hard today. Only 17% of FinTech companies have female founders, and women account for less than 30% of the sector’s overall workforce. That’s according to FinTech Magazine. My observation is that if you get a more diverse workforce, if you get more diverse group of founders, you’re going to have solutions that nobody’s thought of before because they’re coming from a different life experience, from a different place, from a different perspective and it’s also the good.

So I just think it’s fabulous that you are shaking things up. I hope you are scaring all the Chads. And I have a friend named Chad, so I hope he’s not listening. Not you, Chad.

Tracey 38:36

Chads don’t get it.

Nancy 38:38

Because they’ve never experienced it.

Tracey 38:40

Most of my time when I pitch certain VCs, I actually spend the majority of the conversation explaining how poor people think and what poor people want, because they don’t get it. I actually had one VC tell me, “Why would someone want to shop someplace other than Walmart?”

Nancy 39:01

How hard did you grind your teeth in that moment? Did you crack a molar? Was it a molar cracker?

Tracey 39:08

Nancy, you know I can be blunt. And my response to him was if someone told me that the only place that I could shop for the rest of my life was Walmart, I’d want to shoot myself. I had another VC that I pitched to ask me, “Why would someone who doesn’t have a credit card want to shop?”

Nancy 39:32

Well, credit to you for not having a homicide record at this point. Thanks for coming on the show with your hands clean!

Before I let you go, we always close with this question. What one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Tracey 39:48

Follow your heart.

Nancy 39:49

What’s that mean to you?

Tracey 39:50

It sounds so cliché, but I knew exactly who I was when I was 16 years old and the only reason I deviated from the path that I was on was because I listened to other people, and I thought that other people knew better than what I knew. But now that I look back at that, it’s like, “No, I’m still that same person. I should have stayed on that path and I probably would not have made some of those mistakes that I made if I hadn’t thought that someone else knew better than me what I wanted.”

Nancy 40:21

Follow your heart is great advice. Tracey, I’m so thrilled we got a chance to catch up again, I feel lucky. Check out what Tracey is doing. I’m so glad you’re on the show today. Take care. Stay well, and I hope to see you in person soon.

Tracey 40:36

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Nancy, I appreciate it.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 40:42

I want to just mention a phone number here in case anyone listening needs it – 800.799.SAFE is the National Domestic Violence Hotline, that’s 800 799 7233. And please head over to the show notes to check out links to Term Payments and to The Milligan Foundation to learn more about Tracey’s work!

Our next episode is all about you! Here’s the question I’m asking:

What’s an album you bought a long time ago and still listen to now – and why did it stick with you?

Maybe it reminds you of a certain place, or time, or person. Maybe it’s comforting like a big schlubby sweater, or invigorates you back to energy levels you had before the gray hair and your kids’ tuition payments. Whatever the reason that particular album (vinyl, CD, 8-track tape) still takes us space in your soul, let us know what the album is, and why. I’ll collect up your stories and share this in a Listeners’ Still in Rotation podcast episode at the end of the month.

As usual for our listener-contributed episodes, there are lots of ways to share your thoughts:

• Leave me a voice mail right from your computer! Go to www.MidlifeMixtape.com and you’ll see a blue button on the right hand side that says, “What album is Still in Rotation for you?” Just press it, and you can start recording with one click. I would LOVE for people to do this so I can incorporate your actual voice on the episode! NOTE: There’s a 90 second limit on this, but you can re-record before sending if you need to. Or press https://www.speakpipe.com/MidlifeMixtape and start recording!
• Record a voice memo into your phone and email it to [e-mail]. Again, it would be so cool to hear and share your story in your actual voice.
• Leave me a comment below!
• Email me the story of your album that’s Still in Rotation to [e-mail].
• Send me a Facebook message, tweet or Instagram comment @midlifemixtape

Please send in your favorite albums and we’ll all take a nice musical walk down memory lane in Episode 96!

Thanks so much to all of you for listening and I’ll catch you and your favorite old albums next time!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

The post Ep 95 Nonprofit/FinTech Founder Tracey Milligan appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .