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.

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,.

Our take is that the system has crazy waste, An to that is that, when I built Vezeeta, I consumed around $60 million, but if I knew then what I know today, I would have built the exact same company for less than 50% of the money. And I think that would have been way more beneficial to myself as a founder, and even more important to the investors and the shareholders.

The second thing is, not all the companies are created equally. This is the, basically the thesis, and that's why we built In Vitro Capital. And even the word in vitro, is we're giving birth of companies. We're artificially doing that because we're not an investor. We build these companies hand by hand with the co founders. And that's when we share equity, support funding, no waste, no wasting the time to raise money, no waste in trial and error, because we are helping on those, and then we take it from there.

There's about 80% of European household left that haven't transitioned to renewable energy installations. And for them and financing is a very important part. So that's how we come in. We help our installation partners, first on the software tuning side, but then also kind of coupling that with end customer financing.

So, a typical mortgage is kind of what it is, and there have been attempts and some regulatory stuff prevents a lot of innovation, but the only way to innovate is customer acquisition. And I don't want to sound super absolute there, but the opportunity so you get, like, a Rocket Mortgage, right? It's an acquisition play. That's how they're disrupting.

In B to B, it's different. There is innovation on both sides. There's innovation on how you distribute your product, customer acquisition, there's innovation around product structure. There's innovation around reducing losses.

Marquee investors like Warren Buffet, Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son are aggressively investing in FinTech ecosystem and fintech startup.

And the reason it has happened is just one: 10 years ago, the dream of every person after completing the Master's in finance, was to get a job and private equity or hedge fund or investment banking. Now, it is not the case, every person who graduates or comes out of masters wants to get into startup ecosystem, or want to start a new startup.

So you will say that there's lots of ESG scores out there that can be a blackbox, the company will be given a score, but you don't necessarily know that the Inklings behind it.

What we're bringing with our green score is effectively that transparency, bringing in SME climate experts for a single institution and try to build that score around what their views are and how they view it and align it to their pathway to net zero or ESG, or climate risk within within their institution.

Let's just say I find Small Business Finance probably the most exciting topic in the world. And the reason being, if you look at Liberis, we support small businesses with working capital, that directly impacts their livelihoods, it directly impacts their revenues directly impact how many people they actually hire.

So the impact on the wider economy is enormous. And the way we do that, with Libris is as an embedded finance platform, we integrate with big partners. And by integrating into those platforms, we see the actual data, and we underwrite on the basis of yesterday's data, or even last hours data, depending on how you know up to date their data is. And by doing that, we have an 83% accept rate at the moment. And that's enormous.

I mean, it's, it's difficult, because you've had cost of living crisis, you know, we've had COVID, you've had these sort of huge macroeconomic conditions that have made things really tough. But the thing I always struggle with is that when we have this conversation with businesses, you know, arguably, in many ways, your software's free to them. Because ultimately, it's all about their ability to collect their ability to return. And actually their ability to, you know, bring forward working capital improve their customers position.

And the thing that always blows my mind a little bit is that what part of this doesn't make sense to a business? Because if you're a business who've lent £100 million, right, and you've got customers who are in financial difficulties, it never makes sense to write that customer off? Right? It just doesn't make sense.

Everything I wrote in innovation, lab excellence is valid for AI deployment today, you asked a fundamental question. And it was one of the big points in my book, which is buy versus bill. And this is the same advice that I would give for an AI team today, you have to buy this technology, all but the very largest global banks like the JP Morgan's of the world, only a few of them are able to actually build their own technology.

So if you're looking at an innovation programme, or an AI programme, their job is to prove that this stuff can work. All right, their job is not to deliver ready to use code ready to use a AI that is ready for production. Because you really expect them to build their own large language model and know they prove it works.

And then you need to hire, particularly for the likes of AI, one of these larger firms is going to come in and hopefully have enough liability and insurance so that when your chat GPT style chatbot comes off the rails and give somebody the wrong answer. You can you can blame them with the losses.

Ultimately what is important for us is to serve the merchant. So as we hear from our micro small business borrowers and learn a few things, we would love to share that again with the community.

Our realisation and build is the opportunity to serve this cashless commerce segment is so huge, and there's just a massive gap between how commerce has become digitised the recovered how many millions of merchants went online, but at the same time that digital credit hasn't really caught up.

So there is still a huge gap between what is a Shopify merchants ability to go online and sell in like, three, four hours. But what happens to that version, if she wants credit, it's not going to happen every 24 days, this this gap is huge. And you know, we just want to be part of a solution by no means any single entity can solve all of it.

YAt Gaia, our mission is to make the process of IVF, more straightforward, more accessible, and more affordable. So the work we're doing is driving towards enabling more families to have children, and means we have the opportunity to make this truly tangible impact on our members lives.

And so it really is this mission, I think that elevates things beyond just another plain vanila financial services company.

It is a niche focus, but it is a focus that I think goes a long way towards solving this kind of very tangible problem of infertility and helping families build from the ground up. And so our product really is organised all around trying to focus on providing additional accessibility and affordability for IVF through a combination of a loan and an insurance product that allow for an easier entry point for our members to get access to treatment.

You're unifying data from different countries into one single hub, we are standardising that, we are analysing the data and presenting it to a bank's over one single API. So for a bank, it doesn't matter if the customer is coming from Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy.

Typically banks have share of foreign customers 10% to 15%. Okay, 10 to 15% is good enough to care about, but the problem is that this 10% to 15% are not coming from one single country. They are coming from the twenty seven or even more since they outside of EU like the UK, Switzerland, etc.

So quite a long list of a country - this is a problem. And it's not feasible for one single bank. They will build the data pipelines and try to build the knowledge and standardise now it's just too expensive.

But in our case, it is okay, because if we are building this infrastructure, we can sell it to different banks, and each bank is paying their share. But of course, there are plenty of hurdles not only technology hurdle, various legal hurdles. Also we have European Union one same, same legal framework, as it said, there really is in the details. So in different countries, it's still a bit different than we are solving these hurdles.

Digital marketing was not really a thing. It started by just going out and networking, listening to people, asking them what worked, what didn't work, you know, ringing up estate agents saying, look, I'd love to do your mortgages and walking up and down the high street with my briefcase, really. I just recently went with my cousin who works for Virgin Atlantic on a trip to Austin, and I ended up doing both of the pilots mortgages!

Like all businesses, it's about understanding the customer's needs, their pain points, and trying to work out where we can stand out and make a difference and have an incredible customer experience and good customer outcomes where others can't.

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.

And then the other piece of the training that I do is I work with senior analysts as they begin to step into their first leadership roles. Because the other thing that is hugely bought by I found very relevant to my world was that when you start leading, it's as if someone goes here, the keys to the car, if you go, you mean you want driving lessons to beat after school drive.

And a lot of us analysts types are super introverted and really fact oriented. And we like our processes. And we don't necessarily do the soft skills particularly well. Yet we all respond really well to those being done well, but they don't necessarily come naturally to us. And I include myself in that. But it's something that we need to learn and be aware of how do we communicate with people up the chain? How do we take analytics and when someone says, but I don't understand. As an analyst, our tendency is to double down on the detail. And when you know what you're looking for, you can literally see people lose the will to live because they don't understand and that isn't helping, and they're not number oriented. So just make it stop.

.I think it was partly due to a chance that we eventually built Taran DM because it was at the beginning of 2020 and we had two interesting projects. So it was like a lot of potential and one of them was a decision management platform, like some customised one with scorecards for a new fintech. And the other one was a platform for a large German automotive company, which was supposed to optimise their supply chain. Middle of February we were flying to the German company, to the exporter. And we had a really good session with the management team, getting a lot of ideas on how to move it further. We were super excited about it, but as I said, like it was February 2020.

So when COVID was spreading within a few weeks, those guys stopped answering our emails and then we got back to them later, they said sorry, but our supply chains have gone haywire because of Covid, we cannot do anything a few months or maybe even a few years!

So that project got killed. And then we ended up with the other second big project, which honestly was, I think, a better fit for us because most of the team was coming from the finance, we had like the experience with infrastructures doing like real time decisions, whether it was credit risk, whether it was the high frequency trading was a large part of the team came from actual credit risk teams that may have been using the tools such as FICO Blaze or Experian Power Curve. We know the the strong points, the weak points, so big up to the I would say drawing board and we thought maybe there is like a market opportunity here or let's you know, let's basically build something.

Australia for whatever reason, is unnecessarily divergent and complex, not in the pricing aspect of the lending, that is fairly competitive, but when it comes to the approval part of the process, there is a huge amount of customer confusion as a result of that.

And one, if not the highest penetration of mortgage broker deals as opposed to direct lender deals. The way a traditional broker would solve that level of complexity is through deep knowledge and expertise and experience in having done lots of deals, and usually a close working relationship with a small number of banks. And so the reality is, and industry data supports this, that most brokers will typically use one, two, maybe three lenders for overwhelmingly 80% of their loans.

When we looked at online mortgage broking we looked at how might you make that better and different investing in incredibly high quality tooling for the broker to turn that broker to a superstar?