So yeah, to kind of summarise our mission: we want to improve the credit health of millions of people by building the world's best credit builder.

And so how do we do that? We want to make sure people are on the proper path to good credit, which is our tagline. And I think when we started talking to customers, and first of all our customer base tend to be quite tech-savvy Millennial or older Gen Z. And when you chat to them, many of their parents have gone through the 2008 financial crisis and credit crunch. And from that very traumatic experience, those parents have educated their kids to say, 'don't trust credit cards' or 'be wary of any form of interest-bearing products'. And it's very endemic in the mentality of that generation. I think it's 50% of this segment of the population don't trust credit cards.

So that's a really interesting insight. And what we wanted to do was then think about, well, people still want mortgages, right? Our customers still have long term financial aspirations, what can we do to design a product that feels fair.

So we had to tweak it and move it to image-based selection. And one thing led to the other and ConfirmU evolved from something which is good for the English language but is not scalable for 207 dialects in India, to an actual gamification, which would be much more engaging for people at the bottom of the pyramid. So what better way, you know, of engaging people in that kind of a segment. And our initial pilot was with Experian the nd Grameen Foundation in India, which is really exciting, because in my vision, Grameen Foundation is financial inclusion.

Now, as you said, ConfirmU started out as prop tech before expanding into financial services. What does the product look like today?

What we take pride in is the fact that we collateralize and localise the game to any market that we go to - credit at the end of the day is a matter of cultures, and we need to embed that within our game. So we will do a pilot and we will build a bespoke model for those lenders based on, you know, our understanding from the lender of the practicalities and the characteristics of that audience. And then we would send the link.

Well, let me paint a picture of the banking landscape at that time, the banking landscape in the 90s in Ghana, West Africa, we were just beginning to wake up to the advantages that digitization could bring in terms of transforming from manual processes to technology-based processes. And more of automating the manual process, rather than looking at the processes end-to-end and transforming them. Very, very basic accounting, very basic bookkeeping, and all of that.

And nothing really digital as we know it today, because still if you wanted a banking service, you had to go to the bank physically, all that really had to change was that we're able to do a lot of transactions in a shorter period of time. And our books were more accurate.

But by the mid-1990s, I had started getting a little adventurous with what we could do with the technology stack that we had.

… one of the reasons that immigration is so essential to the US economy and to the US labour force is that our domestic population is not replenishing, our birth rate in this country is no longer outpacing the demographic shift as the older generation exits the labour force. And what that means in terms of US population growth is that today, immigration drives over 50% of the US population growth...

There are more people today that move to the US than there are people who turn 18 and enter the financial system… and so not having a dedicated strategy for how to attract and retain the recent immigrant segment is a formula to demographically lose market share over time.

…there had to be controls that were appropriate, but manageable in an environment where you've now got people working from home, and speaking to customers on a daily basis. The peripheral technology around the collection systems needed to be able to distribute into those people's homes... What I found really fascinating is, there had already been a shift to digital, and to using digital interaction points – we’ve seen it a lot in the acquisition space, we've seen a lot in the management space, but, historically, the collection space have been very slow to follow up. But what we're really seeing now is a more significant shift to allowing customers to interact through digital portals, and to set up payment plans, and to be able to access information about their accounts so that they can make an informed decision...

we have spent a lot of time recently looking at the infrastructure between data, applying analytics, and we're applying machine learning through our data-driven decision engine, to then differentiate how treatments are applied in the operational systems. And the real key for me is that ecosystem should be fully integrated. And it should be a continuous loop so that you continually are learning from the outcomes that you get from the actions that you apply to those customers, whichever segment they fall into whatever treatment you apply, understanding what's been successful, what hasn't been successful, introducing champion-challengers wherever you can, to test new options, but also to ensure that the quality of the data that you're pulling in to help with those decisions is at the highest standard…

So that was my focus point is, if you've got nothing, that's where we start… for existing clients, you can just go with the Chief Operating Officer to a branch, have your scoring, talk to the loan officers about the clients, they know them, right, you'd be surprised by how many they have but they know them by name, and test the scoring.

The common feature here was that, like banks were slow to be on the take up of the scoring methodologies, FICO was slow to see the value of bureau information. And for that matter, the credit bureau saw FICO as a competitor, they didn't see FICO as somebody that they could collaborate with. And yet nowadays, a FICO score is synonymous with a bureau score.