One of the key highlights for me is not necessarily something that you see in the impact report and on the first paragraph, but what do you do, for example, with war in Ukraine, and I remember that we had a project life funding, Mikro Capital Moldova, microfinance institution in Moldova. And I think we'd launched it on like a Sunday and Monday morning, the Dutch national news broadcaster as a headliner, will Moldova be next? Right?

That's not the greatest marketing for an investment product that you can get. And so we had an internal discussion, right? Do we pull the project off the website, because we always have to weigh investor risk versus what we think is right, the right balance for our crowd.

And we actually decided to leave it on there, but to allow all the initial investors already in there, we send them a message, we updated the project description that they could get their money out if they want, but we will keep the project on. And actually, it was one of the fastest funded projects on the platform for this company.

We have a lobster-catching business in north Wales, and it's a story about a guy who was a scuba diver in Thailand and came back to be with his family and wanted to start a lobster-catching business and needed some money for some nets and lobster pots.

And it's like, yeah, ‘people helping people’, it still hasn't really changed from that. I just think, you're gonna see projects funded that are really organic and natural.

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.

At the end of the day, what happens is that all the companies that were doing peer-to-peer lending, had to stop because the business model was not able to continue in the way the central bank wanted to do it. Fortunately for us, we were able to keep up our business: we already had a really good platform, that today is a loan management platform that we are offering to banks, to startups, financial institutions, to onboard to originate new credit lines, and to administrate manage those loans.

So basically from 2018 to today, and we will continue on this path: developing and selling our loan management system as a software as a service.

And beginning with Prezzta, what we're trying to do here is try to think and trying to innovate and help people. And as we like to say, without a doubt, we help to develop the FinTech industry.

I had to borrow a lot of money from my peers to be able to pay my rent. Which, as you can imagine, was not a very pleasant experience. Because you have to ask, 'can you lend me a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there' and have to remember who you borrow money from.

And I was dreaming of having an application that could solve these kinds of issues for me. And back then Tinder was already popular among kids, if it can say so. But there was no Tinder-like application to just match with people for the sake of borrowing money from them. I ended up building it myself after not finding it available.

It's been four years since I started building Lendwill, and it is extremely difficult to build a good peer-to-peer lending platform that would allow individuals to borrow money from each other. So I can understand why there had not been any product that I wanted back in the day because it's really hard!

Mukesh Bubna 7:30

Sure. First of all, we've done a slight pivot and "led grow, borrow grow" we've changed that very recently, so it's not on our website, but we moved to "delivering financial happiness".

What does that mean? From an investor point of view, in India, the fixed deposit interest rates have plummeted in the last two years from 9% to 5%, while the inflation rate runs close to 6% officially (unofficially it runs much higher). And then there's a 35% tax on the interest income. So you can imagine anybody keeping money in a bank on a fixed deposit is losing money in India. So our proposition to them is risk adjusted yield - we should be able to give you 2x of fixed deposits. And that's happens, right? Your money is growing. And that's a good thing to happen for you.

We tell our consumers to diversify across at least 100 borrowers. Now, that gives them a comfort of ability to absorb any shock from delayed payment or delinquencies.

Second is that we also have certain innovation, what we have launched also is a monthly income plan. So if somebody brought somewhere around 5 million Indian rupees on our platform, we are able to give them an income of 50,000 rupees a month, which goes back to their account for their own need, whether they want to shop they will travel, whatever they feel like. No, it is not 50,000 like a fixed deposit system. It's an arrangement giving you a ballpark on our app. Investors can start investing in less than two minutes, and can fun transfer 24 by 7, I don't have any human intervention required anymore for any investor, individual institution to on board themselves.

Yeah, it was about helping a friend to get on the property ladder. She's done very well in her career now, but at that point, she needed some help. And she was like, I really want to stay in my local community, and I really want to buy with my husband here. And she just asked us on WhatsApp if we'd lend, but it was just a lot of money to a group of people at that time. And it was like, how are we going to get paid back because we were all recently graduated. So although that loan didn't happen, that's kind of what inspired the idea for JustLend. I wanted to provide opportunities to people could do what they wish to do.