We live in a world of 3 billion malnourished people: 1 billion are starving, 2 billion are overfed with the wrong calories.

Conventional agricultural lending is based on yield and predictability, but we're in the middle of trying to reset that story, so we're walking that land with that farmer. So we also get a sense of, do these people know what they're doing? Are they deeply committed to it? Are they applying the knowledge and the experience and the wisdom of the ecosystem? And I'm oversimplifying, but the idea is that a farmer that is embracing regenerative practices needs time to transition, and there's going to be some unknowns then that transition period, and so we need to stage capital in the right way.

So what happened in Zimbabwe is, one, it started becoming a lot more informal. That means in the formal market is shrinking. You don't have data, so now the credit bureau market is shrinking as well. So this was the problem I'd been battling with since I took over.

Is there a need for credit scoring, or credit risk management, or financial risk management in this kind of environment that is more informal than it is formal?

And I looked at it. And I thought about it, and I said, yeah, there is a need, because those people are still economically active, just not in the way that Western markets are structured. So that's how actually CrediSafe came about…

The innovation of our solution lies in a number of areas, but I'll speak about two key areas: and that is our awareness of the importance that AI plays today in risk decision making; and the importance that data plays in making informed decisions.

On the AI front, Provenir's auto ML product allows our customers to quickly easily and affordably develop new or improved credit risk scores, which are instantly deployable into those credit decisioning workflows on the Provenir platform.

Now, why did I make the choice to go to Kigali or to East Africa? One, the sister of my grandma lived in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, and my grandparents were there to visit them. And they came back with all these beautiful stories. And that sparked my imagination to the fullest, I would say. So in the past years, I went there on the holidays, and I decided to make that move, and to go there. And I really wanted to do something where I could bring my expertise and my experience, and having worked with the biggest banks in Europe, some of them even in America, gave me a good foundation to join Simbuka and to make lending simple, also for the people here in East Africa.

And so when we compare it against consumers that don't monitor their credit, we do see materially higher score improvements for those credit monitoring consumers, relative to the others, and does the active credit monitoring actually result in your score improving now there's nothing about looking at your credit score that causes your score to improve, it's not like every time I hit refresh my score ticks up.

But it's the same idea with joining a gym or a health club, the act of joining the health club doesn't cause you to improve, you actually have to show up and do the work, lift the weights and stretch and do the sweat stuff.