Central and Eastern Europe, Agri loans, Peer to Peer Brendan le Grange Central and Eastern Europe, Agri loans, Peer to Peer Brendan le Grange

P2P funding for Europe's farmers, with Nikita Goncars (Lande)

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.

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Lithuanian fintech is compact and agile, with Jekaterina Rojaka

We don't like to say it's a small country actually, and we just held the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, so we had a very nice ad: Lithuania is not a small country, it's a big country compacted to your convenience!

That's Lithuania. It's not a relatively small country: it's extremely compact. It's easy to reach, it's pretty much all in one place. It's great work life balance. And that's why Lithuania is feeling kind of Renaissance for re-immigration.

Well, the Lithuanian GDP, if compared to 2000 it has grown five times, if compared to 1995 it has grown 8.6 times. So it was really, really expanding.

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The evolution of consumer lending in Poland, with Bartek Staszewski

The market changed completely.

Certainly the processing time for applications, whether it's cash loan mortgages is reduced significantly - I'm talking about Poland, but in fact, these are the processes that I'm seeing across Europe, it's pretty much the same way that everybody's taking but some countries it takes longer time than others to to do that - but the market is now undoubtly very heavily regulated by the Polish regulator and most of the sector is subject to supervision.

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Lending innovation in Moldova, with Bogan Plesuvescu

So we can speak about Victoriabank, but first of all, it's important to understand the level of the banking system in the scale in in Moldova, because, as I mentioned, it is a small country - in terms of square meters and also in population - the GDP is around E11.5 billion, GDP per capita is E4,400, average salary is about E450 per month, with unemployment rate of 3.5% and the inflation rate, the official inflation rate, at this moment of time, it's around 22%. And to understand the banking system, it's 51% of the total GDP in Moldova. To understand the scale of that, Victoriabank in Romania alone, which is the biggest bank in Romania, is bigger than the combined banks in Moldova - but the competition is very tight and this affects the margins very, very dramatically.

There are 11 banks in Moldova, too many for this population.

Now coming back to Victoriabank, in 2018 Victoriabank was the third largest bank in Moldova. We are always proud of our history and about the innovation which were brought into Moldova by Victoriabank, since the moment it was established as a bank.

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Joffre Toerien discusses scoring for microfinance, and Georgia

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.

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IDEAS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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