In this TEDx talk, Shivani Siroya argues that visibility—making people, data, and problems visible—is a powerful, real‑world superpower that can drive social change. She begins by contrasting traditional superhero powers with the desire of leaders to be seen, then illustrates how simple visibility—such as birth records—can protect children and enable government services. She recounts the global HIV/AIDS response, showing how making patients visible allowed treatment and stigma reduction. Siroya then shifts to the invisible emerging middle class in developing economies, explaining how lack of formal financial histories excludes billions from banking services. To address this, she founded InVenture, which creates financial identities from smartphone data, turning daily life signals into credit scores and affordable loans. She shares two customer stories—Jennifer, a Nairobi food‑stall owner expanding her business, and Kevin, who accessed emergency medical credit instantly. These examples demonstrate how visibility unlocks purchasing power and transforms economies. She concludes with a call to prioritize visibility, urging the audience to seek out hidden data, recognize what they don’t know, and use visibility to build fairer, more inclusive systems.
Chapters
So I wanted to start today by asking a very important question. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Maybe you're hoping for X-ray vision or the power to turn your surroundings into ice. Or maybe you've always been dreaming about being able to jump 60 stories high or the power to throw fireballs from the palm of your hand. This past year, Forbes asked 7,000 business leaders and top executives If they could be given the choice of a superpower between flying or invisibility, which they would choose? 72% chose flying. The reason being that as leaders, they didn't want to be invisible. They wanted to be seen. So you're probably not surprised when I tell you that I've thought about this question a lot. As a kid growing up, I read and collected comic books. I would literally put all of my allowance into collecting the oldest versions that I could find. And when I would travel back home to India to visit my family, I would read Marvel Comics with my cousins. And I would try to explain why one guy was fighting the other guy. And most of the time, it was guys and not girls. What I loved most, though, about those memories and those stories was not just that the good guys usually won, but the fact that ordinary people could have the extraordinary ability to save the world. Comic books were about superheroes discovering their hidden potential and using that potential for good. And as I grew up as an adult, I started devoting more of my time to issues that I cared about. Issues that sometimes seemed overwhelming and impossible to solve. And I discovered that superheroes, as I had imagined them to be, weren't necessarily real. But there was a superpower at work in the world, and it was saving lives and improving futures, but it just wasn't what I had expected. That superpower was visibility. Our collective efforts to bring visibility to the unknown and to the unseen are often the first step towards progress because we can't include what we can't see. And so visibility also makes our world more equal. So let's take a really simple example. Birth records. They're a powerful piece of paper that most of us in this room probably take for granted. But legally acknowledging a person's birth from the day that she's born makes that person feel counted. It makes her feel counted by the systems that are designed to protect and to nourish her. And it allows our governments to be able to design their health and education systems on an accurate understanding of their populations. By knowing the real age of a child, we can take the first steps towards protecting her from exploitation, be it child labor, forced marriage, or forced enrollment in the armed forces. And it's hard to believe that something so simple as a birth record can make such a big difference in a child's life. But to me, it's even harder to believe that almost half of the world's children are still undocumented. So let's take one more example from another issue that's really important to me. As nearly as 2 decades ago, the global HIV and AIDS crisis was considered unsolvable, not only because the drugs were actually too expensive, but also because health systems in developing countries were too weak to bear the burden of the disease. And the stigma of AIDS rendered those that were suffering with the virus invisible to us. We weren't able to save lives or reduce the rates of infection because we couldn't even identify who was positive. But the global community came together, and together we started to bring visibility to those that suffered. We were able to start to begin to erase the stigma and to put people on treatment plans and to start to educate on prevention. Health workers and researchers around the world worked tirelessly to innovate new methods of testing and diagnostic services so that even people living in the most remote areas were able to get tested and provided with treatment that could help to save their lives. And today we can say that an AIDS-free generation is within our reach. We were able to design an adequate response to the crisis because we took that first critical step of visibility. So hopefully you're starting to see why visibility is so powerful and can be so important. You may even be thinking about what else visibility can help us solve. So here's one more idea. You may have seen the headlines that the middle class is growing rapidly in South America, in Southeast Asia, Africa, and in India. That the global economy is booming, and that with it is coming new opportunity and new wealth. But those are just headlines. The real story is a lot more complicated. So for example, the middle class in most African countries is defined by the African Development Bank as individuals that are living on $2.20 a day to about $20 a day. That's just above the poverty line on the low end. And a person that's living just above $2 a day Certainly doesn't have the ability to afford the services that they need to be able to live a healthy, fulfilling, and safe life. When we talk about the exciting growth of the middle class, we don't talk about what it's actually like to live on $2.20 to $20 a day. We don't talk about it because we don't actually know. Most of these individuals are still largely invisible to the systems that can really help them get ahead. Banks and other financial services have a very high barrier to entry, most of them requiring very large sums of collateral or a formal financial history. But the newly middle class, they don't have a formal record or a formal financial history because they've been operating in the informal economy till now with very few options. So the idea of trying to open up a bank account or getting a traditional line of credit from a traditional bank, that's nearly impossible to them. Mobile money has actually started to help solve some of these challenges. There are over 300 million people in emerging markets right now that are conducting their financial transactions using just their cell phones, right in the palm of their hands. But they still don't have access to the financial services and the choices that we do that can really help them get ahead, to plan for their futures, and to give them that financial security that they need. And so despite progress, the majority of the world, about 2.5 billion people are still underbanked and underserved. So this is the problem that I wanted to solve. And so I started InVenture. Our mission is to make the emerging middle class visible and trustworthy. And we do this by developing financial identities for our customers through the data on their smartphones. Our algorithms categorize and structure all of this daily life data into credit scores. And we use these scores to provide our customers with convenient and affordable lines of credit. The amazing part is that we're able to do this all just by understanding a person's daily life. By doing that, we're able to understand their ability to repay a loan. We can finally prove someone's financial potential by looking at their financial transactions, their social networks, and their communication habits. We can build a vivid, living measure of who they are, their needs, their affordability, and their desires. And we can finally make them visible to the systems that have previously shut them out. And with this increased purchasing power, it's starting to change people's lives. So one of our customers, Jennifer, she lives in Nairobi. And I had the opportunity to meet Jennifer in July. And Jennifer told me her story. She's 67 years old. She's been running her food stall in the central business district of Nairobi for the past 15 years. Hi, Jennifer. And Jennifer uses our credit product to buy vegetables in bulk. She's on her 22nd loan with us, and now that she's been able to increase her revenue and save more money, she's actually now moving her food stall to a larger location and has already started dreaming of opening up her next, next restaurant, which happens to be a French restaurant. Another one of our customers, Kevin is using our credit product for an emergency medical expense that he had a few months ago. Without our credit option, Kevin may have had to resort to an informal money lender or to a loan shark that would have charged him an incredibly high interest rate and could have put him into debt. Worse off, Kevin may not have been able to get the treatment at all. But luckily, with our credit option, he was able to request the credit Right from his cell phone, we were able to deliver that credit to him in under 1 minute, and he was able to get the surgery that he needed. Kevin is now recovering and is on his way back to getting back to work. And these are just some of the stories of our work and why we do this, but this is just the beginning. Ultimately, what we're hoping to do is to build a platform that can transform how financial systems work and who gets to participate. By leveling the playing field, we're building a system that is more fair, transparent, and more equal for all of us. And we can transform these economies by unlocking the billions of dollars of purchasing power that is currently going untapped. And it's all through visibility. So that's why visibility is my superpower over flying or throwing fireballs from the palm of my hand. And why I would ask all of you to choose visibility as yours. Be passionate, not just about the issues that you want to solve, but the less glamorous work of finding the data that you need to solve it. And know what you don't know and find a way to learn it. And remember, just because somebody— that you can't see someone doesn't mean that he or she doesn't exist. But whatever you do, remember, don't settle for invisibility because just like our best superheroes, visibility may on its face seem ordinary, but it has the extraordinary ability to change the world. Thank you.
