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.

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.

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?

There is a mix, but the really large crypto holders tend to be ones who were just very early to the space. They are an underserved market and a lot of their holdings remain in crypto.

A lot of these people didn't get into crypto to then move back into fiat, they go into crypto because they think they're going to stay there for the rest of their lives. So it's more that they're dabbling in the world of fiat, but living their lives in crypto as opposed to the reverse. |That's the kind of odd customers that, I say odd customers, is the kind of customers that we're seeing that typical banks just don't have exposure to which I think will make it quite an interesting space in the future. Especially if they begin to move into the space themselves.

Because again, credit scores really don't resonate well for that customer, but the fact that I can access more loans and more services from the bank makes a lot of sense, right?

So, the messaging itself can we change, make it more people friendly, make it more empathetic, again, is is an important factor that we keep working on. So understand the behaviour the formats, the messaging, and then devise and develop a complete strategy around customer engagement, what is the life cycle that we can build? So segment and perhaps micro segment the customer and build optimised life cycles for these micro segments of customers that we are onboarding and all that is to ensure that these people understand their loans make their payments on time?

There shouldn't be any instance where you know we have to limit the access to the device. So the idea is never to reach that hence, how do we use AI and ML to create very effective and efficient life cycles, messaging journeys for these people. So that, you know, the delinquencies are in check.

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.

It's one of the areas that we do differentiate ourselves, and it's something that we have built up over the last 10 years. So we are in over 45 countries at the moment, representing 45 countries, and what's significant about that is we've worked on obtaining various bank connections. So we've got over 13,000 bank connections over these 45 countries. And that's significant, in other words for some of the global clients that we've signed up, so when you move to a global client, and they want to use open banking, that richness of data over to three countries that don't necessarily have to start from scratch, and especially if they've partnered with a global decisioning provider decision system provider, we can then facilitate the same relationship and agreement across various countries. So that's something we worked very hard on doing.

So it's not just UK-based.

It's a good point that you make because I think that that's a very key differentiation. Alternatives will make money by consumers not paying, we make money by consumers payng us back. It's about using it in the correct fashion -customer defaulting, right, we're not making interest, we're not compounding that interest. So for us, it is ensuring that the customer remains within their spending limit, budgeting properly and using the platform in a responsible manner. In that way, our our vision and what's what's healthy for the consumer is very much in line.

So I think in the beginning of this business, we realised that we have to put in some real time in order to prove that with potential customers. So we've been at it for just slightly over two years. And we're able to not only back tests from source data, but actually test or run our models on real data.

And the results have been quite impressive, if I say so myself, we're happy with that confidence of 86%. We do provide then a boolean results where you know, it's a Yay or Nay, We realise we don't want to reinvent the wheel with another score that one has to contend with.

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'.

So Simon talked a little bit earlier about us being impact focused since day one, and our pivot to our expansion into this HR space has expanded that value to include the actual employer. So we know that employees have this issue with cash flow, and that on demand pay can help them a lot. And we need the employer on board in order to do that, we have to go through the employer. And what we were finding is that, as Simon said, the employer wasn't seeing any direct benefit in it for themselves.

But if you actually just talk to the payroll team - the very people that you're trying to sell this on demand pay product to - very quickly you find out that they are really inundated with manual processes, and they spend their lives doing repetitive tasks. One of the biggest ones we found is payslips. So in the very early stages of this product idea, we came across a corporate that prints 18,000 payslips every single month, carrying them around the country to the various branches. And it just completely blew our minds that this was the case.

So here you had a market where we needed a little bit of cooperation from payroll in order to offer an on-demand pay product, but we had the ability to save payroll literally days of work every single month by taking those payslips and offering them on our exact same channel, which is via WhatsApp. And so what we found was that these two products were actually really complimentary, they could sit comfortably in one sale together.

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.