Banks certainly don't lend as much as they should, but if you talk to the average banking executive, they want to. Lending is growth, at the end of the day, lending is one of the best, biggest, most efficient growth drivers.

I think my point of view on the banking sector, specifically community and regional banks, have shifted where there is this wild aspiration to build larger lending functions…. but I think they're looking for a way forward.

All financial decisions were being made like this, by a banker in your village who knew you and your family, he knew if you were a responsible person or not at all, and that's what decided if you are eligible or not for something that the bank offers. The thing is now, with the further digitalisation, it has dehumanised, actually, the world, all these kinds of personal relations and personal insights are being vanished away because everything has to be made efficient and fast.

What is really important for me, about Most Probably, is that I want to be known as a company that can connect dots and look at complex problems and bring it to a solution that is workable, implementable, and has impact.

I like getting people together from different areas, getting people from sales, credit and and channel to speak. I'm very passionate about having people understand one vision and having the outcome be beneficial to all. So, with my executive background, together with the detailed background I have in statistics, analytics, etc. I am mentoring and coaching up and coming executives.

60% of businesses just gave up halfway through a loan application, which is crazy.

I think that indicates how much of an obstacle the process is in itself, which I think then speaks to a system that is built, probably more for institutions in terms of debt funding, rather than a system that is built to support small businesses.

A digital presence has been enough to get FIs through the past decade, and now we're seeing the transition that's taking place, where now it's going to be digital communication that gets them through the next decade.

The mistakes you make, or you watch other people make mistakes, are the things that set you up for success, honestly, because none of us, I mean, think about it. Most people learn about credit because they made a mistake. I mean, that's typically how you learn about credit, like, Uh oh, I had an aha moment.

And we're like, this is obvious, there's an underserved market. With farmers, especially small farmers, it's really tough for banks to finance them, because banks are extremely regulated and they need all kind of reporting that farmers often don't have, or they have these strange legal structures, like private individuals or families running the business.

Subsidies are also a big part of cash flow for European farmers and a key data point for us, because all the farmers are doing reporting to the government on the field and crop types they are growing to get those subsidies.

If you want to have a relationship with someone for 30 years, well, what do you need to do? You’ve get to know them.

These days in Australia, no one buys their first home and lives in it for 30 years. It's a stepping stone for future goals. You know, someone wants to expand their business or buy an investment property. It's not just like, cool, here it is. It's like, Well, okay, we could go down scenario one, this is what it looks like. There's pros and cons to that, or we go scenario two. Now it's going to cost you more here, but it's better off there. People are to just, you know, bounce, bounce those conversations off someone.

But all we're really trying to do is answer three simple questions for clients. Is this presented identity, a genuine identity? Am I interacting with the owner of identity? And are there any risk factors associated with that identity I've been presented with.

In the 90s, inflation in Brazil in one year was over 1,000% so literally, if you got your money today and you didn't use it, you didn't run to the supermarket, you buy it, you lost money. And so Brazilians really got good at moving money fast and spending fast. And the banks had to learn how to do those things since the 90s, the liquidity of the system, the security of the system, the solvency of the back like all those things, had to really be at a very good level, otherwise the mess would go into the economy

I think one of the most challenging parts of being a business, it doesn't matter what size you are, is that you tend to place a portion of who you are as a person, your value, in the outcome of whether somebody pays or not.

And you know, as much as you like to try, if you've got enough people not paying, it does actually become a demoralising feeling.

I think people are realizing that it's not always someone's fault if they are having financial difficulties, and I think that message is changing, albeit sometimes I still have frustrating conversations with people who don't necessarily see it that way.

And I think overall, the lenders, the collection agencies, debt management plan providers, whoever it might be, are wanting to be able to treat their customers in a better way, give them the experiences that they deserve, but they just don't have the systems to power that.

One of the things that I've always been interested in is in game theory, and there's a lot of that in board game design: learning how to balance the game, bringing a bit more mathematical point of view into it, but also kind of mapping out how people will interact at certain points of the game and to kind of predict their behaviours.

It is a very long process to create a board game. That was something that I read about in the early parts, but I did not properly realise until we were inside it.

If you're an individual and you care about the climate, the biggest impact you can have is what you do with your money: where you deposit your money, how you spend your money, and where you invest your money.

That is by far the largest impact you can have. Much more than buying a solar system, putting on your house, though, that's a good thing to do, and it's much, much more, by the way, than buying an electric vehicle, though that is also a good thing to do.

And this is not a niche market. Fully 40% of US adults identify themselves as highly concerned about the climate and seeking ways that they can make an impact in their own life.

Unbankable is an investigative documentary exploring whether Africa's innovation, tradition, and tech can revitalize the West. It examines mobile money, digital lending, and Bitcoin, challenging economic norms and amplifying voices from the Global South.

As I started to play with GenAI more and more, I started to understand that, hey, if I ask questions the right way, it actually gives me reasonable answers: it's not about it being good or bad, it's a question of what it's good for and what it's not.

The other big one is tech implementation, and the key questions becomes: one, nobody really knows how to validate a large language model, and two, if these things always sit on some sort of external cloud environment, well, where is my data going to sit? Am I sure that this environment in which this thing is based is actually safe from a data privacy perspective, et cetera?

The ability to react to small business capital needs, and to underwrite it in an efficient way, is challenging, and that's what I think we have learned to do well with cash flow underwriting.

That's not to say that we don't look at the credit profile of our customer, we do, but it's a much smaller percent of our proprietary scoring models than the cash flow.

Do you know one person in Canada? Then, if you put all the names of the entire population of Canada into a hat and draw one at random, you're eight times more likely to draw that friend's name than you are to win the Mega Millions jackpot.

So it's so unlikely. But here's a simple question of probability: why are there winners?

Because there are winners of this jackpot, fairly often, not every drawing, but fairly often. And if the odds are so low, as I say they are, why are there winners?

One of the UK banks that we work with, they have 17 lending systems. That’s really complicated to work with. People can change. Technology can change. What doesn't change is the process. So you have to adapt to every banks process. Technology has to adapt to every process. So essentially, people adapt, and technology adapts. But the process is something which doesn't change, and that is something which is the learning process for everyone when you work with a particular institution.

AI is emerging as a as a transformative force, which is redefining banking: from digital lending to advisory, to research, it’s across all its different business units.

The nice thing about digital lending, really, is that you have full transparency over individual loan applications, and I feel like that, rather than buying a blind pool, or a securitization backed by some some collateral pool of loans that you don't really have an influence on, you can now, with the technology and the emergence of the digital lending segment, go way further and actually have perfect insight into what's going on in the collateral pool.

So ultimately, we are directly integrated into the underwriting systems of the originators that we work with. So essentially, we see the same data that was used from the originator to process the loan application, and that enables us to form an independent view. And in addition to that, we usually get also the entire historical track record of the originator, which allows us to then also fine tune our risk models to the specific types of products and the specific type of underwriting that the originator is doing, in order to then form an opinion on a loan by loan basis, or borrower by borrower basis,.