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?

So that's why we work with Airtel to say, let's bridge this gap. Let's try to be the boundary between the lenders and the borrowers. And the only way you can do that is having standardised credit score.

So Airtel provides all the transactions when you buy airtime on your phone, when you buy data, pay a bill, you know, that information tells us probably you have some responsibility in your house, you're moving around, probably you have some kind of mobility, are you having so many people different one sending to you, tells you you're making sales.

But if you're just receiving from one person, we can can infer probably your law student getting some update from the parents.

And where I found that problem statement, that focus, was actually when I started working with community finance lenders, specifically, an experienced that really exposed the problem, to me that exists within consumer lending. And that is that very little is given to the customer management side of the credit lifecycle.

And I've had the opportunity to sit within the community finance lenders office, I mean, this was right on the front line. And I remember there was a lady that came in, and she had lots of children with a, she was stressed because she was in arrears. And she come into this lending office to arrange an arrangement with the lender to ensure that she could stay on track with her payments. And I just sat there observing, and she sat there and she was getting more and more stressed, as the advisor was saying, Well, can you afford this much a week? Can you afford this much a week, and having the awareness as to all the data behind the lending decision, and everything that they had about it, I just felt like, there's got to be a better way to engage this customer and use this information to help her make sounder financial choices.

That was my lightbulb moment.

That's why you're hear 'the problem is the deposits', but people don’t need to have to high deposit. Not really, because they only need a high deposit, because you can't lend them enough, because you put all the risks to them. You know, if you change your product into a long dated fixed, you protect the borrower, you can lend a higher amount, they need less of a deposit. Right? It all depends on how you explain things.

And this is what other countries have done for a long, long time: Denmark for over 200 years, the Netherlands for 40/ 50/ 60 years, the US obviously, after the savings and loans crisis, they started protecting borrowers by making long dated fixed rate mortgages the 'cool product', and that protected them over the crisis against these shocks. And that in turn, helps the economy.

I agree, I think is a game changer.

And I think what's interesting as we as we looked at the financial inclusion score more we realised how important lifestyle was as well as behaviour. And that sort of led us down to something were developing to the moment which is really based on geographical havior and customer blueprints for more targeted marketing strategies, we derive a lot of this information directly from the mobile, someone's behaviour on that phone and their choices and their lifestyle patterns and gleaning all that information from the mobile, which is all anonymized data at one point.

It's still dominated by your credit card issuers.

So most people if they have Apple Pay or Google Pay, they have loaded their credit card and that's probably the most popular form of payments, but these QR payment providers who have their own mobile apps is very, very popular. And it's accepted everywhere. And while they still represent a very small share in terms of total purchase volumes, they are by far the fastest growing, and that is why issuers are very, very concerned.

And these QR payment providers are also going into that credit space, where they're offering a small credit of maybe $500 to $1,000. But they're using very basic information - just your name, phone number, email - so it's much, much faster and easier to apply for that new QR payment credit versus a traditional credit card.

More than 50% of the economic activity is informal in Latin America, and so, because of that, they don't have access to capital for growing their businesses.

And what we are trying to do is to help out to Yeah, to make it a little bit more fair for economic growth for everybody.

Obviously, you can do it with a pen and paper, but you know, I can say from experience, or at least the experience that we have, that doing it manually really doesn't work! And so really our scoring, what we are building, is to try to analyse the informal business.

But people now aren't banking where their parents banked. So there's a whole lot of more agile'ness around money movement.

That's why a lot of influencers in this financial space have had such a great rise to fame: what it allows you to do is get very specific content right in the hands of the people who need it at the time that they're looking for it.

For the big enterprise financial institutions, this is anywhere between 35% and 45% of their acquisition funnel - if I'm going to get a new mortgage, or if I'm going to get a new business loan, I'm telling you, I'm going to research it.

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.

And these fraudsters will keep coming at you. And they will get faster and wiser and smarter. But to be honest, I didn't know all the things that could have happened to me until actually I'd experienced them. So it's a massive warning to anyone, you know, whether you're a consumer or a business person, or you have a business and you own a business, or you've got a business partnership, or whatever it is, just make sure you're vigilant about everything.

Don't think that you know somebody, because you might not know them as well. You know, fraud, fraudsters can have lots of different faces and guises. It might be a stranger, like your podcast, but it also might be somebody that you know, so just be really, really careful out there. Reputations take years to build up and it takes a second to destroy.

Okay, so I knew that if Nigeria was going to grow and the middle class was going to emerge, there has to be a credit culture, right?

And I knew that one person wouldn't be able to do it. One lender wouldn't be able to do it.

Because when you look at Nigeria and look at why credit doesn't work, you need to understand that is a lack of consequences that killed credit. In Nigeria today, if you took money, and you don't pay it back afterwards, nothing happens to you. Now, one of the things that Lendsqr is doing is that, by having a technology driven consequences, then that problem is going to go away.

I worked my way, literally, through elementary school and through high school. In high school, I caught a break, I was on my way to buy a Slurpee, like maybe 12 years old, and a guy dropped something on the street, and I went and picked it up for him and put it on the back of a truck. And they're like, Hey, why don't you help us load this truck. I said, sure, I got nothing going on. And I just loaded a truck with them. And then like an hour later, they said, Well, hey, kid, why don't you come deliver the truck with us. And I said sure.

Now remember, this is time where parents didn't worry about their kids. It was relatively safe. I'm a 12 year old getting into a truck. We drove to Westchester unloaded the truck. I get back four hours later. And the guy says What are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, I don't have school tomorrow. He goes, we'll be here at four o'clock in the morning and you can work.

And I worked every minute of my life through high school.

Distressed property - maybe it’s dated on the inside with bad cabinets - can always be repaired, not distressed people. And so we focus on distressed properties, not distressed people. And that platform has worked very, very well for us.

So going live with Taktile is, I would say, very smooth and can happen rapidly.

Once we sign a customer, our customer success team provides training and support for the platform. However, many of our customers prefer to just building and figuring it out on their own on the platform.

On the other hand, on top of the software, we also have customers to identify the right data providers for their use case and for that customer segment. And we do share best practices from our experiences in the industry. By now we've seen so many products and use cases that we can tell you if you want to launch a lending product in the UK. For that type of segment, I think we have a very good idea of what are the possibilities out there of data source that you can actually use in the end.

All it takes is one bad egg to throw a business off, especially in what we're doing where it's small startups and scale ups - the impact that that person has is so broad that when it goes well, it's such a great feeling, but equally, if it goes the wrong way, and you hire the wrong person, they don't fit into your company values, your ethos, your approach to how you work, the effect goes just as much the other way.

It's not just around here's the CVs and putting bums on seats. For us. It's really about embedding ourselves in the business.

There's definitely this talent shortage. But I think there's a lot of people trying out new markets, a lot of movers and shakers, you know, you've got a global workforce, you can have people in Asia, in Africa or in North America, we're not speaking to people and saying if you can double my salary, I'll go there is people saying I need to have remote working, I need to spend more time my families and that purpose.

And I said, come on, what are you talking about? Everybody in Mexico has a mobile phone and in the region is the same, the same scenario.

So at the end, they are producing the little prints, I will say every second every minute of their day. So with alternative data, now they have the opportunity to go after this population.