Custom Credit was really set up with three mission statements in mind - we always are asking ourselves, does this move us closer to this or further away - and that is (1) to become the most customer centric FinTech in the UK, (2) is to ensure our colleagues better reflect our customers, and (3) to improve financial literacy, both in terms of our customers and the broader community.

I think the product itself is tailored and custom. But to achieve that, the way you score and assess risk needs to be tailored and custom, that's often where the problem is with these other kind of flexible payment lenders, most lenders will make a decision on on affordability based purely on averages to estimate your your expenditure. They will use a combination of the information you've provided to them, and an indicator from the credit reference agencies.

People with very different spending profiles and very different income profiles effectively could be judged to having the same level of affordability. So we've actually taken a different approach in that, initially, all of our customers will have to provide open banking data.

If I'm looking like 10 or 20 years back, when we were basically as a FinTech organisation the majority of our decisions were relying on the application form. So credit application form. And nowadays, it's leaning to the direction where you ask very few questions from customers. So from a UX point of view, from a customer experience point of view, it's much smoother.

And it can be super automatic - meaning by that you're able to work with a very lean organisation to support 10s of 1000s of customers. It all comes down to what kind of data sources you're able to use. So coming back to this credit application, you might have had 50 or 20 questions on a credit application 10 years ago, today, it might be that you are asking just for identification, which in countries like Finland, Sweden, Estonia, it's automatic. So basically, you're using bank IDs to do the automization.

And once the automizationis is done, then you're able to start calling different data banks, credit bureaus, all kinds of third party data banks, bank transaction history that you're also able to get through the same identification method, although it's a different call. But anyway, you are able to get so much information to support your decision making and you're able to automate the size from the beginning until the end, meaning by that in a previous life, when we were making the risk assessment, we were using application scorecards.