In the early 2000s, Einat Steklov moved to the U.S. from her home country of Israel to enroll at the Columbia University Business School in New York. She was juggling a full-time job with a good, stable salary and was a disciplined spender — but without a U.S. credit profile, she found it nearly impossible to capture any real buying power.
Around the same time, Rishi Kumar was having a similar experience in Massachusetts. He’d moved from India in pursuit of an MIT engineering degree, and while he came from a well-off family in his home country, that wealth didn’t translate to the U.S., at least as far as credit bureaus were concerned.
