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.

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.

The customer sees three numbers: that's the amount they will be getting, which is, let's say they are getting a million pounds; the fee they have to pay, let's call it 10%, so they have to be £100,000; and what percentage of daily sales the lender will be taking. And let's assume 15%. So from customer's perspective, they have to pay £1.1 million pounds to the lender at the rate of 15% of daily sales.

It can take three months, it can take six months, it can take 18 months. Yeah, so the repayment term is not fixed.

Why customers love it is because they just assume they have made 85% sale and the 15% will go to lender, they don't have to worry that I have to pay 100,000 a month, and I didn't make a sale this month. And what do I do now?

Most decisioning systems rely on an opaque patchwork of siloed teams and data streams with insufficient oversight and control.

Many decisions, therefore, back to the tech line that you just mentioned, rely on guesswork and instinct. And this leads to bad decisions, and costly mistakes and disappointed customers.

This is why we founded Taktile in 2020 to change that.

Taktile has offices in New York City, London, and Berlin and serves as the backbone for risk, for pricing, and fraud teams across financial services. It enables decision authors to enrich internal signals with data from our rapidly growing data marketplace and flexibly express their desired decision logic - and all of that without actually requiring engineering support.

We are at the station in where the market is making a shift. And this is an interesting time. It's great for us to be part of that shift. And I think we're really seeing it where you know, US regulators pushing for fraud today email integration for Model Management for how do you take the unknown risk the ethical All parts have all those false positives that are being generated.

So it's a great shift where the market needs to move away from the old school: I've seen a fraud so now I think I know all fraudsters to, I've seen a good customer now I know what a good customer looks like.

That's a great conversation that we want to be part of. And we want to hopefully lead but definitely be an active member.

What we do see is, working with larger providers, a real growth in adoption. If I think about the three months worth of data, live data, that we've got in the bureau - so December into January and Feb - interest free, predominantly online, for a term of no more than three months. There we see 3.8 million unique customers.

A big number, right? And they've made 50 million transactions, spending almost 20 million pounds. And it's not just your Gen Z. It's not just your Millennials, it's across all demographics.

And actually the fastest growing demographic is the 35 to 44 age band. Suddenly, I'm now just outside of that, but it's reflecting the point of becoming more mainstream, right? This is established, right? It's here to stay.

We always take a very commercial and common sense attitude to everything that we're lending on: if there's a solid business story as to why they want the money; if there's a clear route to how we think they're going to pay it back; and if there's an asset that we can secure against to make sure we've got something to go after if it all goes wrong,...then for me that's 95% of the underwriting there.

As oversimplified as that may sound that really is the truth.

Because I mean, ultimately, as a lender, what more do you want than a good business that's got the ability to pay you bac

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.

What we're doing is actually really, really complicated, but you can ingest this data and then give it to the bureaus and you know, the keys format, the Insight format, depending on which Bureau it's obviously a very hard thing to build. But imagine if that real time flow of data via an API became something the bureau started to ingest direct from the API.

Step one is to simplify the integration, simplify the reciprocating of data create a common standard, but eventually I think TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian should become real time networks. You know how many customers have a buy now pay later player goes to all the other BNPL players and borrows money in the same month. And if bureau data is stale by a month, two months refreshed once a month, that doesn't get caught in the system, right?

The challenge, of course, is that people forget the answers to those questions, and also a motivated fraudster can go ahead and find the answer in many cases through different methods. And you do actually see that in some cases, you get organisations like Equifax, that can go a little bit deeper, they can do what's called dynamic knowledge based authentication and maybe they can look at your bank statements and ask you have you done a transaction for this amount on a certain day? Or how much do you pay against your mortgage each month, etc. and that's a little bit better.

But ultimately, people often don't get those questions right, especially when it's on the spot.

So the approach we took was to say, what is something that you should know, that you should always know you'll never forget, that we can present to you that isn't just memorable, but it's also frictionless or very easy, and in some cases, enjoyable for you to do. And we took this concept of, okay, if you live at a certain place, or you know, a certain area, then why don't we go ahead and grab different images from that area. And we're talking Google Street View images, in many cases, these are images that aren't easily searchable, you'd have to walk around and try and get to know a place if you're going to do it yourself.

And then there's another model, which is lighter, I call it the wine payback. Instead of investing €5,000, you would just finance for example, €500 and you will receive for three years €200 worth of wine, so you get €600 of wine and you've only paid €500 for it. And every year you receive the new vintage you, you start to create a connection with the wine estate.

And when you share the wine with your friends, it's completely different. Because you have a story to tell, like you've seen some of the project you mentioned with the vineyard planted in its purest form. And there's always lots of fascinating story you can tell the way wine is produced the way wine is enjoyed falling in time.

Very often I've said that WineFunding is not a crowdfunding platform, WineFunding has a crowdfunding platform. And it's very different.

When you have a contract like ours, in which you gently transfer the value of the property to the tenant, there is no capital gain or very limited capital gains. So now the yield differentials are stark: why is it that you can get 30 million pounds per billion invested over and over again, in London and 100 in Middlesbrough, compared to 30 over and over again for two human generations?

I don't think those portfolios are worth the same. I don't think ordinary people (if you took the capital gain away) would say, well, I'm quite comfortable getting 100 in Middlesborough and selling that and getting 30 in London, over and over again for two human generations.

Those properties are not the same. The one throwing out 100 million is worth more. It just is. And people look at you blankly and say how can a an apartment in Middlesborough be worth more than you can buy and sell an apartment and Middlesborough? The answer is, well, it's not, the apartment is completely perfectly priced but 10,000 apartments where the rent is commingled and you've broken that asset into two economic units, one which wobbles around and one which is stable, one is a bond and one is equity, and if you separate them out until the equity, it's like, I'm an M&A banker, right? Broken up companies and sold them in pieces. And the two pieces don't add up to the whole, they just don't.

When you then take the rent and tranche it and this is a repeat of the theme, it take a little bit of time to absorb the simplicity of it.

I mean, a lot of it's the same from a credit perspective. You're very much looking at the borrower and their underlying financial situation. So you know, as a lot of customers are in the boating space are directors or have their own businesses, there's a lot of reviewing, you know, financial information, profit and loss accounts and balance sheets and the business's performance, looking at the management team as well and their experience and how the business has performed - just as you would do if you were lending on a truck or a piece of machinery.

The difference then comes more around the use of the asset and obviously the asset itself - where lending to businesses for assets that are income generative or crucial to the operation of the business, a leisure yacht doesn't tend to tick that box.

And so there's a there's a nuance in the in the way that the asset is used in the way it's going to benefit the business. And then also there's the asset itself. So understanding the inherent value of the asset, its depreciation, the impact that that has as well.

So where does Lenuity fit in? Well, financial services and construction are the two most important things to get the UK out of a recession. Construction is building wealth for the economy. It's providing homes. For people, these are really important things, it's providing jobs, this is an incredibly important thing to drive us out in a recession. And what we're doing is enabling them to thrive in the current environment, to sell like they've never been able to sell before. Not even in boom times.

When you if you take a look back at what happened to the car industry, when they started financing their customers, it was just a massive boom for them that they could create better offers, their business became more profitable, that they had a reduction in costs. Now, when you get into house building and construction, this is magnified for bigger reductions in costs, an area of waste that they never even talk about that, you know, they talk about waste on the building site, we're talking about the financial waste of holding costs, we're talking about the difference between completions that take three months, four months and five months coming down to two weeks.

And of course, very often a financial product, or some finances around this will be the consequences of what you're trying to buy or get in your life. And so that's really the approach that we've taken with our algorithm as well, that allows us to predict how much money a customer will earn over the next five years. And we've developed in essence, a platform on progress that allows users to set up financial goals and find personalised paths to either earn safe abode the way to the goals. And basically at ProGrad we use, as I mentioned, our proprietary models that matches users with solutions from different providers that could help them achieve their targets, including side hustles, flexible work saving accounts, credit card, car finance and many more products.

All of this with the idea that a customer never comes to progress looking for a specific product. Unlike other websites, where you come to your website, looking for specific credit card specific alone, we really think this approach will want to educate young people on different financial topics, and then really serve them with the right solution for their problems or for their goal. So customer can come to ProGrad, tell us 'ProGrad, I'm looking for £5,000 to buy a car'. Awesome, how can we help you get this? Yes, car financing is one option but can we maybe have a combination of you earning a bit of money through one of our partners, on top of you saving a bit of money and you borrowing a bit of money? All of this will allow you to find the most optimal way for you to have a solution to your needs.

We are on the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea where this is going to end. It's endless the level of opportunities here, and it's going to need to be fueled with credit.

I think the key is to bring the approaches that have been here for millennia, but in reality, cross them also with the new technology. We don't have to have centralised banks performing all these kinds of operations or pawnshops, as we have in the past we can have this retail approach it is going to be a very interesting exploration that we are doing in other companies are going to explore the market also in bring completely marvellous solution.

So we are super excited in reality, on top of the innovation dream on top of building the next frontier for finance, it also has this deep meaning of helping people that work with different rules typically don't have access to banking. If we look into the most Western countries, this now is a niche product for very specific purpose. But in the future, we will have people on countries where this kind of solutions, help them maybe to fulfil the dreams that they have, can be life changing.

I'm a firm believer of being mortgage free should be achievable for everyone.

It shouldn't just be for the wealthy because just the concept if you go to like www.sprive.com, just three pounds a day, five pounds a day, you'd be amazed that if you just regularly chipping away the impact that it can have.

The next feature that we're launching next month is this concept of Shop with Sprive, so everyone has to go to their weekly grocery, whether it's Morrison's or M&S or ASDA and so every time you shop with Sprive, using this Sprive app, you went to Morrison's you spent a £87 on your weekly shop, you then pay that via the Sprive app, you get a code that comes up, which you're going to use at checkout to pay for the basket and immediately get extra cash that goes towards helping you pay off your mortgage faster. It's almost like cashback on steroids.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we really encourage those open discussions with our registered firms.

And in fact, we have some forums where we bring together registered and non-registered firms to discuss things like that. And I think one of the things I just want to be clear on, as a self-regulatory body (and from what I understand of regulation) is that no one really wants to stifle innovation, but I know that it can be really hard.

I think we're seeing some really good use of data and EMI and whenever we move to using algorithms to try and predict customer behaviour, etc.

But from our side of things, I think the main thing that we're seeing is however clever you want to be about it, however many propensity scores you want to use, however you want to segment your own collections portfolio and look to engage with people, if you're not able to contact that customer, it's going to be very difficult to get a good outcome for either you or for the customer themselves.

So because of those front-end online application journeys that we're capturing data from, and because of the recency - we're updating our full database - we already have a significant coverage of UK contact channel information, which we're able to help financial services firms get access to and to engage with their consumer, so they actually can get that conversation started. And they can try and get that resolution for them. But then if they if they can't have that first conversation, the rest of the clever stuff that they can do kind of goes out the window a little bit.