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.

And today, what we're seeing is we are able to serve as very simple institutions, we also able to serve financial institutions that are on the bleeding edge of financial services, what they refer to headless, so there's no branches, everything is online, and they're reaching their client base through mobile phones only. And their big need is about innovation and speed.

We've got a great foundation of what we built on by starting off, as we discussed, in Nigeria and the Philippines and so forth, but what we also see ourselves as managing to fill in the gap for a lot of forward looking institutions, those who are wanting to kind of leap frog and compete with fintechs, as well as fintechs themselves. How to deliver new services, how to take what over their clients are asking for and address it, both as a service as well as eventually going back into their products.

There's a great picture we have in the offices, although we're working in rural parts of Nigeria, there's a shot of our core banking system running in a Tesla.

The mobile wallets information I see, in a way, as a parallel option to Open Banking. It's really where somebody's having their financial transactions give us an indication of their income or their ability to spend, as well as some indication of the consistency of salary over time and the income. So I think what we've seen is combining that with the credit bureau data, you know, really provides a really strong indication of risk.

And we talked about the different data sources, some of the data sources we may not be holding within the the credit bureau, but what we're trying to do is actually facilitate so we can provide decision modules where we're bringing together that data that may be held by the telco or the bank in the mobile wallet and combining that with the credit bureau data so it's easier to use to generate those decisions for the lenders.

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.

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.

And slowly and slowly, I think I always had that entrepreneur bug in me and that's what kept pushing me towards fintechs. And I think Revolut really put the gas on the fire and said, go and do it. Because you're surrounded by so highly aspirational people. So the story is still the same, which is I want to help people who want to build their credit, not just in the UK, but in any country.

And validation came actually at Revolut as well. When I was head of lending for both UK the US and I was scratching my head, trying to join up the data from the UK in the US. I met the bureaus, which you are from - not TransUnion, but one of the bureaus - and I tried to force them into a single contract. Why doesn't the credit bureau in the US speak to the credit bureau in the UK and give me a single contract, because it's the same consumer?

They wouldn't. They would like to sulking sisters, they don't want to see eye to eye.

So yeah, to kind of summarise our mission: we want to improve the credit health of millions of people by building the world's best credit builder.

And so how do we do that? We want to make sure people are on the proper path to good credit, which is our tagline. And I think when we started talking to customers, and first of all our customer base tend to be quite tech-savvy Millennial or older Gen Z. And when you chat to them, many of their parents have gone through the 2008 financial crisis and credit crunch. And from that very traumatic experience, those parents have educated their kids to say, 'don't trust credit cards' or 'be wary of any form of interest-bearing products'. And it's very endemic in the mentality of that generation. I think it's 50% of this segment of the population don't trust credit cards.

So that's a really interesting insight. And what we wanted to do was then think about, well, people still want mortgages, right? Our customers still have long term financial aspirations, what can we do to design a product that feels fair.

Well, yes, we've got very many stories. We've got a woman who is physically challenged and is unable to move around and she started a small food business. And for one reason or another was never never able to get credit from a bank or any other financial institution - because they deem her as a high risk. And we stepped in to support her with a micro loan. And now she's grown her business 300% Very, very powerful testimony, which is on video, and a very excited woman.

Indeed, we have several people just to mention, one lady also had a cow, and was giving her 1 litre of milk, and we convinced her to sell it. And she topped up that money for us to finance and get her cow. And now she enjoys 17 litres of milk every day. Now, the beauty of this is immediately after the cow calved down, it was again pregnant within two months. And so I think in the next three months, she would again be enjoying a second calf from the original cow that we helped her to get.

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.

And remember, the consumer is not our customer, the merchant partner is our customer. And if you love a brand, and you buy from them two or three times a year with PayJustNow we may be empowering you to buy more of that product, or more often. I think back to our very first merchant partner -they had no reason to, but they gave us a chance. They're called Freedom of Movement known by the acronym FOM. And they at the time probably had about 20 products, they were above average value, they were durable, they were aspirational, was high quality, and at that time in 2019, the last relaxed memory that we have was the World Cup in 2019. You know, they traded off the popularity of what was their most iconic product and that was the FOM x Kolisi. It was veldskoen shoes, which they made in collaboration with the Springbok captain Siya Kolisi, in the same year that he took our nation's dreams and team to Japan and inspired us all with that scintillating campaign that gave South Africa yet another Rugby World Cup title.

So I think along the way, partnering with merchants, storied merchants that have a following was quite an important thing to get right from the beginning. And then we needed to overlay that with consistent, predictable, transparent service to the consumer that could build trust.

Convenience being such a huge motivator means that we don't need in my view to educate people on what open banking is, we just need to provide the reasons the benefits, especially around convenience, that get people to connect their bank account. And as you said, it is safer sharing that data through a secure channel as a regulated business like like us than, you know, photocopying or printing out your bank statements and then sending them into the post to some unknown place.

And these are all topics that have been talked about for a long time. But it is great to see the use cases start to develop the market start to mature, our understanding of these topics really starts to develop the fact that we don't need to educate consumers on what open banking is we just need to provide them a reason to call to action that makes sense. And if we do that, they get where they need. The business gets what they need. The regulators are happy because there's more richer data to personalise and, and really provide that responsible approach to to those lending situations and, and we just get on with their life. It's exciting.

So we had a different business model, we said, 'look, this is what we do. These are all the systems we do'. Now, you might be an individual at home, and you might have an apartment, and you're renting it out via Airbnb, or some other platform. So you want to do a check on your new tenant, to make sure that this person is of good standing, what system will you use? Because you're not going to be paying for 25,000 checks a month, it doesn't make sense.

So we went with a pay per use system where you can come in first verify that you are an individual, which we can work with. But once that is okay, then you can use our platform to do your individual checks yourself. For your own business purposes, let's say a customised KYC roadmap. So you can come in the system and you say, 'the checks I want to do are: an individual or first name, last name, date of birth, blah, blah, blah. So these are the compulsory ones, because without it, we can't give you a good result, and over and above I would also like a selfie with a handwritten note so that I know that it is relevant, and a video saying, "I would like to use your product", for example. So you select those, it creates a customised KYC journey for you, you can white label it, put on your logo, or your name or your product. So a person knows that he's doing this KYC for you. And then he will also get access to a portal where he can come in and see the data that he submitted in retrospect.

Just to quickly add onto the innovation. So I spoke about data and it's big for us, but the system and the technology side is equally as big, if not bigger. We've insourced our loans management system, which was a big challenge, but a very good decision for us. We centralise the cost between the different operating entities, which certainly takes away some of the pain and we've made a lot of effort to integrate directly into the large mobile network operators that are across Africa (MTN, Airtel, and SafariCom) to be able to do realtime integrated mobile money, collections and payments. That gives our clients massive convenience.

So even though we have a new client requirements to present yourself to a branch and to enrol your fingerprints and take your photo, once new clients are enrolled, the majority of people actually transact subsequently through a USSD interaction that's fully integrated with mobile money. Cashless, paperless contactless. So you could sort of see the theme here of traditional start, and then very quickly move people into an online and tech interface and a channel with limits growing and prices coming down.

So in terms of our platform, we're only listing coins that we think are going to be around in 10-20 years time. And at the moment there's only three assets there. Bitcoin, Ethereum, what's called US dollar stable coins - which for 99% of crypto investors, that's enough. Bitcoin most people have heard about. Ethereum is a fascinating coin, all of the innovation, all of this decentralised financial products that you're seeing, that are appearing in the market, they're all being built on Ethereum, pretty much. All of the volume, all of the kind of innovation, all of the development that's going into building this crypto investing ecosystem is within the Ethereum blockchain.

Which is why a lot of analysts in the space are calling this year to be its breakout year where it's going to start really outperforming Bitcoin. But who knows, every time someone seems to say that Bitcoin seems to go up incredibly, but there's some solid use cases. And you can see in terms of the fees that miners are earning, they are 10 times the fees on the Ethereum blockchain this year than they did on the Bitcoin Blockchain. Ethereum is is the internet of money. This is all part of has it got valued over and above just being a speculative asset.

So to give you a bit of background, when manufacturers and distributors are bringing on customers, they ask them to fill out a credit application. That credit application is a very simple document. Typically it's a PDF or Word Document. But things completely spiralled out of control from that point. There's just a lot of back and forth, there's missing and inaccurate data, and companies get credit that shouldn't get credit, and companies get denied credit that deserve credit.

These other companies that we had before we realised it was a problem, but at Nectarine Credit, we've automated this entire vendor credit application process.

Yeah, you know, we're definitely helping these companies scale quite a bit. Not only are we decreasing their cash conversion cycle so they could just build cash on their side, which is important to them. If we can actually get these customers to a negative cash conversion cycle, then cash will just build. But I think more importantly, we're able to double to triple the company's revenues. And then, you know, company could either take that money to reinvest, or you could parlay that into raising a larger venture round, which then they could hire more people, potentially introduce new products, and continue building the brand out there. I think that's definitely the best feedback we've gotten.

And in some cases, customers have staved off venture capital completely, because like, hey, now I don't need to raise money for inventory or for marketing. So I could use this debt solution/ working capital solution to meet that, and I'll never have to raise another venture round again. And thus, I could keep more ownership of the company. So it just really depends on the route they want to take to grow their company.

So we had to tweak it and move it to image-based selection. And one thing led to the other and ConfirmU evolved from something which is good for the English language but is not scalable for 207 dialects in India, to an actual gamification, which would be much more engaging for people at the bottom of the pyramid. So what better way, you know, of engaging people in that kind of a segment. And our initial pilot was with Experian the nd Grameen Foundation in India, which is really exciting, because in my vision, Grameen Foundation is financial inclusion.

Now, as you said, ConfirmU started out as prop tech before expanding into financial services. What does the product look like today?

What we take pride in is the fact that we collateralize and localise the game to any market that we go to - credit at the end of the day is a matter of cultures, and we need to embed that within our game. So we will do a pilot and we will build a bespoke model for those lenders based on, you know, our understanding from the lender of the practicalities and the characteristics of that audience. And then we would send the link.

Yeah, it's definitely shifted away from what can be a very pressurised conversation where you're there, you're speaking to the agent, you're you're under pressure to share those numbers, and maybe sometimes sharing incorrect numbers because of the pressure. Some utility companies, they want evidence of certain parts of the I&E to be shared, like documentation - so our system has that.

So the patterns we're seeing are very interesting, and the journey they go through in order to share that I&E, they revisit their I&E several times before they finally share the I&E with the with the lender, you can see there might be two or three times they're going back and forth to the I&E. They're updating it on our system, doing it in their own time. And then right at the end, maybe after a day, or two or maybe a couple of hours, they then share their I&E so it's a much more fulfilled I&E to then have that conversation with the agents as I said, it's a more mature to conversation. Obviously they share that I&E then with all lenders as part of building that I&E network, which is what we're here to do.

Well, let me paint a picture of the banking landscape at that time, the banking landscape in the 90s in Ghana, West Africa, we were just beginning to wake up to the advantages that digitization could bring in terms of transforming from manual processes to technology-based processes. And more of automating the manual process, rather than looking at the processes end-to-end and transforming them. Very, very basic accounting, very basic bookkeeping, and all of that.

And nothing really digital as we know it today, because still if you wanted a banking service, you had to go to the bank physically, all that really had to change was that we're able to do a lot of transactions in a shorter period of time. And our books were more accurate.

But by the mid-1990s, I had started getting a little adventurous with what we could do with the technology stack that we had.

… one of the reasons that immigration is so essential to the US economy and to the US labour force is that our domestic population is not replenishing, our birth rate in this country is no longer outpacing the demographic shift as the older generation exits the labour force. And what that means in terms of US population growth is that today, immigration drives over 50% of the US population growth...

There are more people today that move to the US than there are people who turn 18 and enter the financial system… and so not having a dedicated strategy for how to attract and retain the recent immigrant segment is a formula to demographically lose market share over time.