And I happened to be in a room where there was, I guess, $3 billionaires. And I said to myself, 'why am I a room full of Nigerian billionaires celebrating Nigeria, and the only thing I have to offer them is other people's businesses to invest in, right? Like, why don't I have a business for them to invest in? Why don't I have more equity in the things I'm doing?

I was very young. I was very hungry. So, knowing that, I wanted to have a deeper and richer relationship, I then presented an opportunity to the firm I was working with and to other investors, and I said, hey, I want to do this thing, this is a business.

And what influenced the interest rate is really, first, the inflation and then the unemployment rate. The good news is in the US and Canada, the inflation has peaked from the six months ago, they gradually come down - inflation in the USA right now is around 6%; inflation in Canada, just above 5%. For the unemployment rate, both countries have the numbers at historically low. So good fundamentals. The interest rate hike period is probably near the end, that's the signal from the latest Fed meeting. Actually, Canada already paused once in the March meeting as well.

But obviously, we will see some credit normalizations which means the other risk metrics will go up because we saw that the early stage roll rate began to trend up. But again, when you look at the trajectory, it just goes back to three years ago, right, before the pandemic, so I think fundamentally it's still sound.

Lenders want to wait until somebody has established their track record some place else, really proven themselves to be able to manage their debt, and then they want to jump on them and create a loyal relationship... well, that's a very expensive proposition, because it means you have to dislodge somebody from where they've been previously.

That's one of the things that we wanted to shine a light on is to understand, are these people really riskier? In other words, do you need to wait? Or do they reveal themselves pretty quickly.

And that's really what we found, is that based on the performance of consumers, when they open those subsequent products over the first two year journey, in many cases, they actually perform better controlling for credit score performed better than those that have established that track record.

So even though more small businesses are being formed, traditional banks are lending less to them in terms of loan volume.

And that started to get me thinking about how I might join a startup or another company that was trying to solve this problem. I looked around a lot, and I didn't see anyone that was solving in a way that I thought was really equitable.

It's funny, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, people that need to be their own boss ,that feel really compelled to go out and start a company. That was not me, I was a very happy cog in the wheel. I enjoyed working in corporate America, I enjoyed working in a midsize startup. And really, it was just kind of an alignment of my passions, and a problem in the industry that I saw that no one was solving a really satisfactory way. And some good mentors that pushed me into to take that leap and jump into the entrepreneurial world.

As we grow Smarter Loans, both Raf and I we're also learning about the lending industry and understanding that there's a lot more to it than just personal unsecured loans, than just unsecured business loans. So we started developing relationships, and then that got turned into motorsports and farming and equipment financing and buses and coaches. And today we have people financing aeroplanes and aviation. So it all grew over time.

And now if you look at it, yes, that's how we're able to say 60 lenders because they represent different verticals, you know, they're not all in like personal, unsecured loans, they represent a spectrum of different types of products and services.

Entrepreneurship is a profession, a profession that requires close attention to details, and discipline on multiple facets of the business. And if it is justifiable for a person to get an MBA and transition from finance to product management, or transition from product management, to consulting or transition from sales and marketing to something else, then it absolutely is justifiable to get an MBA to mass not to master maybe, but to be a jack of all trades of all of those aspects.

The likelihood of starting a company and being successful is very low already. So arming yourself with education that is tailored specifically for that purpose, that sounds to me like a very good investment.

And I have to say it was it was an immense investment in myself.

And so in this instance, Brendan, you decide, you know, I really want to get out of the podcast space. I want to get into making movies. You take your money and you go and make a film in Georgia - every dollar or you spend in Georgia in a specific way, you're eligible to earn a tax credit.

The problem with that tax credit that you would earn is that you don't have any tax liability in the state, and so we're going to move it to Coca Cola or Home Depot or Delta, or one of these big players that want to reduce their tax liability.

The hot take on someone like Elon Musk, is everyone thinks Elon Musk sells cars. Elon Musk is a broker of tax credits. That's it. Tesla is incredible company, but his core business is the spread business of tax credits. This tax credit economy, creates 1,000s of jobs, brings tourism brings art and culture to the state. It does so many positive things to the United States and specifically to these local state economies.

So we did this that at the beginning, the very first experiments, the very first beta test, is if you want to borrow from Credilikeme, you need to post on your wall and have 10 friends vouch for you.

And then, like that, we came up with this term of crowdsourcing your credit score.

Definitely, that was non-scalable.

It was challenging, operational wise, but we learned a lot of the willingness, we learned a lot about the willingness of people to prove they're credit worthy when there isn't enough information. And we learn that if we create this circle of trust with our user base, they would be willing to share stuff with us.

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 there were two things I didn't like. The first was I was never in control. So a lot of times I got incentivized with equity and when it came time to pay out, that equity never happened.

Then second - and more to what really bothered me - was there was a lot of times that clients were too qualified, or it wasn't the right programme for what these companies offer. So when this happens, clients need other programmes. And these big FinTech companies don't have them, most of the banks don't have them - like, if you walk into Chase and ask them for invoice factoring, or ask them for equipment financing, or something very specific that your business actually needs, that's the right programme, they don't have it. They don't know it.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of this country, most people are employed by a small business, and we still produce most of the country's GDP. And it feels like the last three years small businesses been under attack. Without small business, a lot of the opportunity that we have in this country is gone. And that's why I put this stuff together. That's why I care so much.

I started very idealistically, I think, with this mental model that people want and need to borrow money, right? Like, I think that's why many of us are drawn to this industry, right? Because we see that if you need to borrow money, it's good to have options.

That was my mental model coming into it.

Overtime, I started to see really that so much of what was happening to consumers wasn't driven by how much they wanted to borrow, it was really driven by how much the bank wanted to lend. And I really wanted to understand those dynamics more.

We use the same standard of care across the credit spectrum, and we actively seek new ways to innovate the scoring process. It's the architecture of our model that allows us to score approximately 37 million more individuals than conventional models. And interestingly, to note about that 37 million, approximately 10.7 million are members of the Black and Latino communities who have historically often been underserved. And approximately 3 million of those have scores that are above 620, which is generally considered those that will be eligible for traditional lending products.

So inclusion and broadening access to credit and being predictive have been guiding principles for VantageScore since its inception.

The refugee population is very much not a monolith, right. In fact, it's a very diverse group. It's 90 million people who broadly are all tied together by the fact that they've been forcibly displaced from their homes, whether to another country - and thus have become refugees - or within their existing country - and are those internally displaced. So if we're looking at this population of 90 million people, similar to any other kind of group or population of the size, the needs are going to be diverse and differ from different people and from different communities.

Refugees come from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are or were doctors, lawyers, restaurant workers, employees, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and so on. And so we often see in the media this image of refugees in a refugee camp, living out of a tent - for many refugees, that's not the reality, right? They've settled in a city or a town or a village. They're not in a camp where they're receiving direct humanitarian assistance, they're looking for opportunities to start small home-based businesses, retail out of home, selling food products, sewing businesses, and so on. Many are looking to start small shops or kiosks even refugees in camps, right?

The learning aspect is probably the most important we eat volatility for breakfast, we make love to volatility!

That right there describes our structural - and I think unassailable - advantage in a world that has suddenly become quite a bit more volatile than it has been for the last number of decades, under which my friends in the conventional 1.0 version of the bureau's operate. And global interconnectedness or the globalisation of economies means that things happening in the Ukraine, from which my ancestors hail, to the gas pumps in North America is a pretty direct connection. And so whether it's gas pumps or groceries that are becoming much more expensive, you have consumers feeling it.

And therefore, to my lender customers, those same consumers need to be scored properly in the fullness of all of the environmental macro factors, as well as the micro factors down at the borrower's level.

That's the way this has been for the last 20 years in the United States. And it's only the last five years that things have really kind of changed. Unfortunately, we've been at the front of it, we're enabling the bank account opening. So a bank account origination for any companies within the United States that are looking for bank accounts, either in hemp hydroponics, cannabis, any kind of frontier industries, those kinds of markets are very difficult for those guys to get bank accounts, we have multiple banks, we can introduce them to and then on the backside, where we make our money is in the lending process.

So when somebody like Brendan wants to expand his store, or he wants to go grab some inventory, or he wants to buy some lights, and he needs to finance it, you'd come back to Payzel all after you've gotten your bank account all squared away, and you'd say and I'd like to have some access to some lending.

and I just said, from my perspective, as someone who used to leave her credit reports - once I finally got the courage to even request a credit report - on the counter for weeks, because I was too scared to even open it.

And what I'm hearing on the flip side is that there's just not enough education around what lending even means, or what interest rates even are, or how that affects you.

I just did a segment for Good Morning America, where I was breaking down interest rates, and they said, 'oh, we didn't know that just because interest rates go up on credit cards, it's not all bad. It also goes up at the bank, that's cool'.

But when I started talking to other people and reaching out to other real estate platforms, there just wasn't a lot of information out there about private lending. Ironically enough, you know, Brandon Turner with BiggerPockets, his big thing was to go find a private lender to fund your deals. But then there wasn't any discussion on how to do that funding of the deal, which is why we ended up doing a book with bigger pockets, because there was that gap in the marketplace. And then also during COVID, the world shut down. You can't get together with people, you know, the RIA meetings that I had been attending, we're now posted on Zoom. But for anybody who's gone to a RIA meeting, you're not likely going to bump into somebody else who's also doing private lending. Because first off, you don't say that in public, because instantly you become the most popular person in the room and RIA meeting. So we kind of have to be a little bit of lurking happening there. But, you know, during COVID, not even that was happening. So I went out looking for community.

High level, I would say there are four elements of the lending process, and we started with one: which was how risky is it to lend Brendan a certain money? Like what's the likelihood of repayment or default, and then really allowing our lenders to specify, are they comfortable with that? How do they want to price it?

Increasingly, I think to the point you're making, we are also applying it to the second area we really focused on, how do I reduce friction in the process, right? We didn't start with this insight. This is kind of one of those you learn in the market. When we started, every borrower that our lenders were onboarding, we did a phone call, we asked for an ID to be uploaded to verify identity, that standard kind of KYC stuff that you do. And we had this insight, like, for the small loans, it costs too much money to get on the phone with people, maybe we could just use automated signals to do fraud prevention and not get on the phone, just for small loans, just for a few, to see what happens.

And so we tried it. And we saw this 2x to 3x increase in pull through and actually equal or positive credit performance. We went, 'oh, that's interesting, if I can take a certain amount of demand and turn it into twice as many loans, that's really valuable'. So we started the process of saying, can we use machine learning to get to a place where we're comfortable with more loans of larger sizes of longer durations that we can approve without that human intervention, because it both lowers the cost, but it reduces the friction.

And it turns out, consumers are not only rate sensitive on the loan side, they're also friction sensitive, they don't like putting in a lot of effort. So we are now at a place where our lenders see 70% of loans coming through the platform, having no touch origination - with ID verification, income verification done in automated ways, with very high NPS and very low cost and high conversions as a result of that.

It's interesting, you're kind of tying the stories together between India and Canada. But yeah, a lot of these alternative lenders don't have distribution, right? They have good products, but it's very hard for them to access new traffic, and they can get new traffic but a lot of that traffic may be absolutely terrible quality. So by partnering with us, we're able to drive traffic to them that's meaningful, you know, we do a lot of the pre qualification. So we cover off costs of credit pulls and things like that. And by the time we send it to them, you know, the goal is to have about an 80% chance of them converting with that lender.

So their cost of underwriting is lower, they're getting the lead flow that they want to get. And it's efficient, right? They don't need to do any marketing, their cost of acquisition is predictable. They pay us a per-funded fee. So again, predictable, you don't have to pay per lead. But yeah, they want a distribution. And we could provide the distribution.

The other thing that we noticed was consumer behaviour changed, which was really interesting. Some of it was taking the subsidies and doing this, some it was taking the payment holiday and doing this, and some of it was just people doing it on their own: but we've seen the largest stockpile of cash going into bank accounts that we've ever seen, of just new deposits that came in over COVID. And so there's this big pot of cash that consumers are holding onto right now.

And I think the provision for credit losses that most of the banks had forecasts through COVID were relatively high and nothing came to fruition, right. They didn't see the link. And in fact, delinquency rates have been dropping, even when deferrals ran off as the freezes expired. We thought, well, you know, the people taking deferrals are probably the people that need it. Once they don't have that option anymore. We're gonna see delinquency rates amongst that population increase... and it didn't. So it did, it's increased slightly, but not to the levels that we had thought. And so I think lenders looked at that brand. And they just said, No, we're ready, we're ready to jump back in and you know, ourselves from a supply perspective, we tighten the reins, you know, it was prudent from a risk perspective what we did, but we're ready to start to get back out and you know, reengage with consumers and lend.