Just to rewind a little bit, this whole BNPL craze was exploding. I hadn't seen anything like it: interest free credit didn't really make sense to me and was very excited about the prospects of this business model. But at the same time, a lot of the people I spoke to in banking and lending were just like, the last thing South African needs is just more unsecured credit being piled on top. This isn't Australia, isn't Sweden where Klarna is from.

So I did take that to heart and looking into the BNPL space realised that in countries like Brazil, Mexico being two significant examples, point of sale interest free instalments have been there for ages offered by most retailers. Yes, it's now become tech enabled. But in those markets, it's done very much off the back of a credit card. And the bank is the key issuer of their credit, they understand the consumer and what they're earning. And the thesis was that the South African use case was far more similar to those markets, developing markets, high interest rates, very disparate levels of income. In some places, you'd argue over indebtedness of the middle class, as opposed to a massive need for financial inclusion, which is the narrative.

Yeah, and I just thought that that product would fit so well here, we just have to find a way to technically adapted and created here.

We put this map on the wall, like an actual physical map, and we got pushpins, and we said, 'where should we go'?

And we each had some pins, and we started putting them in. And by the end, we were like, 'this is a lot of places'. And I started doing research. And I've never even thought about the fact that you could take a very extended trip, you could you know, pack your bags, and the budget you need - I think we each spent about $7,000 each for seven and a half months. And I know there are lots of people listening where $7,000 is a lot, but there's also a lot of people who are, like, I planned a trip for three weeks that was $7,000.

That trip was, I would say, a very pivotal moment for me. Because travelling around the world really showed me a lesson that I didn't know existed, which was: everyone in the world does things differently, and it works.

And this was in an effort to try and control each of our debt. And it's the only time in all my years working with the credit card data that I've seen the number of decreases actually being higher than the number of increases. But with the initial rise at the beginning, we saw similar trends in the 2008 recession as well. And the average credit line during the pandemic peaked in June 2020, and then sharply decreased in around the vember of that year.

Since that point, though, it's been steadily increasing, and it's now in January stands at £5,450. And the average credit line is now actually higher than it was pre-pandemic levels. So, you know, it's business as usual. Now, when it comes to limit management programmes, so with the right strategies in place, there should actually be fewer accounts needing or being allowed to go over limit in the first place, we saw a similar picture in the US with limits reducing, so they reduced through most of 2020 as well, when the issues put them in, they increase programmes on hold, although now it's not quite as high as it was pre pandemic, the average limit isn't far off now in the US. So it's standing at $7,789, if we look at January figures,