Savings app company Digit plucks first operating chief from Yelp

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Digit, a fintech startup that offers automatic saving and credit card paydown, has hired Vishwas Prabhakara to be its first chief operating officer.

Vishwas will lead daily operations and help scale the business as Digit’s user base and product offerings grow. The company does not share how many users it has.

Vishwas Prabhakara

Prabhakara was most recently vice president and general manager of Yelp Reservations. Before that he worked at ESPN, Digg and Fanvibe.

Prabhakara was attracted to Digit by its mission to make financial health effortless for everyone, he said in an interview on Wednesday.

“My dad came here in 1970 from India with my mom,” Prabhakara said. “He had a few bucks in cash and went to school. About 10 years later, he bought a house. He was able to support a family, with my mom going back to college, he helped pay for all of my college and my sister’s college and supported his parents in India. He did that with a lot of discipline. Every day, he paid attention to what we were spending, how much we were saving, staying out of debt. He instilled in us that feeling of every dollar is valuable.”

For those who don’t have such discipline, Digit tries to fill in by automating that kind of rigor around spending and saving.

“Technology will solve this problem, take a lot of that mind space off people’s minds,” Prabhakara said.

In his last job, at Yelp, Prabhakara oversaw the restaurant product and grew the team eightfold, he said.

Digit says it has saved over a billion dollars for its users. It has been gradually rolling out Digit Pay, which helps people automatically pay off credit card debt.

About 75% of Digit’s users have credit card debt, and close to half of those have signed up to be on the wait list for Digit Pay.

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