Rodney Williams

Why organisations work with Rodney Williams

• He has built two venture-backed fintech companies from concept to scale, including SoLo Funds, the only Black-led Certified B Corp fintech in the US, with over 1 million loans funded for 1.5 million users.
• He raised more than $40M for LISNR with clients including Visa, Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lenovo, giving him operating experience inside the commercial functions of global brands rather than a venture-capital perspective from the outside.
• He brings a working operator’s view of financial inclusion that does not collapse into advocacy, anchored in his testimony to federal regulators and direct experience designing products for working and middle-class consumers.
• Named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list five times across nine years, a recurrence that is unusual and signals durable founder relevance rather than one moment of attention.
• Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, with the framing capacity that programme selects for, which translates to a keynote that argues rather than just narrates.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and President, SoLo Funds, the largest community finance platform in the US, with over 1 million loans funded since 2018.
• Founder and Chair, LISNR, an ultrasonic data-transmission company backed by Visa with over $40M raised.
• Former Brand Manager, Procter & Gamble, leading digital strategy and ecommerce for Pampers North America.
• 2019 Henry Crown Fellow, Aspen Global Leadership Network.
• CNBC Disruptor 50 honouree in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2023.
• Cannes Gold Lion (2015); Ad Age 40 Under 40 (2012); Black Enterprise Tech Entrepreneur of the Year (2016); Ebony Power 100 (2018).

Biography

SoLo Funds has facilitated more than a million loans to working and lower-middle-class Americans since 2018, and it did so by treating its users as both borrowers and lenders to each other. The business depends on a functioning peer community, not on a marketing community. That distinction sounds semantic until a leadership team tries to operationalise it.

Rodney Williams co-founded SoLo Funds after building LISNR, an ultrasonic data-transmission platform he scaled to over $40M in funding with commercial deployments at Visa, Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lenovo. Before LISNR, he ran digital and ecommerce strategy for Pampers North America at Procter & Gamble, which is where he learned how large consumer organisations actually think about customer acquisition, retention, and brand economics.

That sequence matters. He has built community-led commercial models inside a $300B consumer goods business, inside a B2B technology company selling to global brands, and inside a fintech that has become the only Black-led Certified B Corp in its category. The arguments he makes about community as a commercial mechanism are operating arguments, not theoretical ones. He has been named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list five times across nine years, including 2023, and is a 2019 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

His most pointed contribution for a corporate audience is on what financial inclusion actually requires from product, regulatory, and capital partners once advocacy ends and operations begin. SoLo’s growth has placed him in direct conversation with federal regulators, congressional offices, and tier-one investors including Serena Ventures, ACME Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst, and he speaks from inside those conversations rather than from a panel about them.

Key speaking topics

• Community as commercial operating model
• Founding and scaling venture-backed fintech
• Financial inclusion and the underserved consumer
• Brand building inside large consumer organisations
• Inclusive capital raising and founder ecosystems
• Disruptive product strategy in regulated markets
• Black entrepreneurship and category creation

Ideal for

• CMOs, brand leaders, and growth executives at consumer-facing organisations rethinking community as a commercial channel.
• Boards and leadership teams of banks, fintechs, and financial services firms reassessing the underserved-consumer opportunity.
• Founders, venture investors, and corporate venture units focused on inclusive innovation and scale-up discipline.
• DEI, ESG, and impact leaders looking for a founder-operator voice on inclusive commercial outcomes rather than advocacy framing.

Audience outcomes

• A concrete view of how community functions as an operating mechanism inside a commercial business, not as a brand layer.
• A founder-operator perspective on building, financing, and defending an inclusive product inside a regulated category.
• Arguments and case material on why the working and lower-middle-class consumer is structurally underserved, and what product responses actually move the market.
• Direct experience and pattern recognition from raising capital as a Black founder, applicable to inclusive investment and founder-development programmes.