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.

Open banking essentially is allowing fintech companies to offer innovative products and services on top of the traditional banks. In many countries, the legislation has pushed open banking, and an example of this is the European Union where PSD2 is forcing banks to expose certain API's to fintechs that have the appropriate licence.

However, we seen this trend not only in Europe, but globally. Because of open banking, we're seeing the platformication in banking, which is similar to the one we witnessed in the lodging sector (with Airbnb), Booking.com, Expedia, etc. Consumers and businesses utilise the best products according to their needs from different banks, and they interact with them through FinTech companies that are offering a much better user experience. Some examples of fintech companies that are using open banking are companies offering account aggregation; personal and business finance management; payment initiation; buy now pay later solutions; and credit scoring applications.

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.

We're a platform that connects people with the professional help they need to become debt free. We help people with credit cards, medical bills and student loans. So the user, they'll go on to our platform, we have what's called our Smart Debt Analyzer. It asks the user questions about their types of debt, total debt, what their main goals are, whether it's to lower their monthly payment, lower their interest rate, raise their credit score, and then based off the answers to those questions, we connect them with the relevant company, or companies, that can best assist them with their debt.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for anyone in debt, everyone's got a different credit score, everyone's got a different income, everyone's got different financial goals. So we want to lay out their options in front of them, you know, the pros and cons of each. Whether it's credit counselling, debt settlement alone, we want to be that educational partner, inform them on all these options, because once again, a lot of people aren't sure the difference between those three, and then ultimately, they can decide for themselves what's best.

I've been wheeling and dealing since I was a kid. And I started thinking about the other assets that you could possibly lend against, why aren't people lending against cars or wine or boats or aeroplanes, or pretty much anything? What restricts them? It really sort of started from there, to be honest with you, the bank's inability to function following 2008. They were pulling the rug out from under some really good people's feet, people that are halfway through development sites are having their loans called in, we were hearing stories of doom and gloom. You know, I have friends of mine that were playing golf with a bank manager the day before, but then the bank manager was calling them in the morning saying this is that £25k bank overdraft you've got it's going to have to be repaid.

And I thought, well, this is actually quite a good time to start this business. Because banks aren't lending people can't get their hands on money, but they have had quite a few years of growth. They've all got, we're not all, but I'm from Surrey, there's a lot of Range Rovers, Ferarris, people with expensive pieces of art or wine collections. Wouldn't it be great if they could secure a loan using some of those assets?

And that's really how it all started.

I think you're absolutely right that credit scores in the US are better understood. We're told that Americans ask lenders 'my score is 750, what can you offer me?' and they discussed it openly with friends over dinner - it hasn't quite penetrated the consumer psyche in the same way here, but what's been really positive to see recently, though, is there's definitely a growing awareness of the importance of regularly monitoring your credit information.

And that's been particularly evident through the pandemic TransUnion has been conducting a consumer pulse study to track the impacts of the pandemic on consumer finances, and we found at the end of 2021 that almost half of UK consumers are now monitoring their credit score at least monthly. And that's up from a third at the start of May 2020. Downside is our data has also shown that a quarter of people have never checked it, which is worrying given the important role that this information plays in helping people get access to finance and protecting their identity.

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.

As examples, in a number of Asian countries customers will not pick up the phone if the call comes in as an unidentified number - or if they know it's the collection department number. SMS has worked very well in India. In China, for example, a lot of the interactions are via mobile phone applications, like WeChat. SMS is something antiquated, like Facebook, for many young people in Asia, because they've all got mobile phones now.

In Mexico, a personal touch is still required, so if the customer can't pay, in most cases they turn to their family to get them help and so the solutions take a bit longer. In Hong Kong time is money, so if the customer picks up the call the duration is a lot shorter, as is the resolution. And in a place like Australia, mentioning the word 'hardship' means the customer gets preferential treatment due to the customer protections in place. So that usually it comes up early in the call, if the customer is aware, which most of them are.

And therefore, you know, the situation changes and the people handling the call need to move into that mode of understanding the customer situation a lot more.

To authenticate a document is just one step of the entire digital identity verification. The next step is to identify if the person was a live person, no, the liveness detection to compare the person against the document. There are some industries or some financial institutions that ask more than that, for example, proof of residence, you know, you can upload a document, we can authenticate any type of document, like a utility bill or bank statement to make sure that the address that is on that document is your residence address, in order to do any business now.

Or if you want to open an account in United States, and you say that you are here in Miami, you are a Florida resident. It's not only that you are a USA citizen, but you need to prove that you are a Florida resident. So we can authenticate the proof of address, we can authenticate any taxpayer document like Social Security or bat at this point, you know, it can be as simple as just do one step simple one step like for the car rentals.

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.

So we've created a first-world infrastructure, but it's been an uphill battle to get lenders to embrace the use of bureau data and credit scores and bureau scores to make mass decisions. In Nigeria, it's a legal requirement that you perform two credit inquiries, but that's not to say that you must make good use of the data you're given, as long as you know, you've met your legal obligations. So there hasn't really been an appreciation of how that data can help you improve your decision making. So that's the journey that I've been trying to help my clients to realise - it's been as an educational upskilling, a sort of training project as much as much as a hands-on rebuild the bureau score project.

I think one of the cultural changes that's required is the willingness to invest money in order to save money, that thinking hasn't really been that prevalent in Nigeria, in the past at least. Curiously, that's the first time I've ever encountered a situation where lenders have questioned, well, why are we paying for a credit inquiry if we ended up rejecting that customer? Why would we want to pay for that? Which kind of misses the point of the protection that screening for risk gives you.

And I just found it to be fascinating, because I saw the talent level of these individuals. I knew what their future potential was, even just with our company. And I realised that someone had to have been trying to solve this problem. At the time, this was just when a lot of lenders and neo providers in the US were popping up to give folks alternatives, but I really didn't find anybody on an international level... until I came across a young nascent brand in Prodigy Finance, based in the UK and with a big presence in South Africa, because our founder, Cameron Stevens, is South African. And I just reached out to understand what they were doing.

And came to learn that Cameron Stevens, who had attended INSEAD and himself encountered some challenges with putting together how he was going to pay for school, had that classic story of going to the bank and saying, hey, will you help me with a loan for school? And them saying, sure, no problem, go ahead and put the same amount of money into the bank as collateral and we'll give you a loan based on that... and he said, well, if I had that money, I wouldn't be coming to the bank for help with financing! And then once he ultimately got to school, the following year found that not only was his story pretty common amongst others, but there was a considerable amount of students who had applied to school that actually couldn't even consider attending, because they didn't have the ability to put the funding together. And so it really just resonated with me and what they were trying to do.

when we are looking at new data sources, we have four acid tests that we run through.

The first is the reliability of the data - so is it from a trustworthy source? Is it compliant? Is it of good quality, all those sorts of factors. The second, as you said, is the predictive nature of the data, is it proving out or identifying the hypotheses in the insights that we expected and is doing something which existing datasets can't? The third one is about its scalability, which doesn't mean it has to be the whole population, but for the actual target audience that we're trying to benefit, does it have enough coverage? And the fourth one is, is it understandable, which I think is increasingly important for us.

And we deliberately set the bar understandable rather than explainable because they're different. My science teacher, much to his frustration, spent hours explaining the basics of physics to me, unfortunately, for me, it wasn't very understandable. But actually, that is a really that's a really important point, because it comes back to this control and transparency. If people do not understand it, then why would I trust it? So for us as organisations with new data and new insights, then we have to be able to help people understand why we're doing it and, and the inferences we're drawing.

So, about the history... actually, Russian retail lending is relatively young, it started less than 20 years ago and it made a huge jump from where we were - just basic stuff 15 years ago - to the state that we have now.

There's a positive outcome of this short history, we don't have much of the legacy technologies, etc, that some of a large international group experience that, take core banking systems, they don't have something that was developed 50 years ago, they're in a more or less modern state.

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.

Another indicator that is significant is that BNPL meant around 3% to 4% of the total e-commerce sales in Spain, while in Sweden it is around 20%. So we see significant growth expectations for the years to come.

Then also remember that if I'm a merchant and my aim is to maximise my sales, and suddenly I have to talk to five different lenders, or negotiate with them, I may not have the skills nor the time, to do it. Well, we do that for you. So you just have to focus on what you best know, which is selling through your, your webpage, and we take care of the rest.

And what we shouldn't forget is that, you know, the banks don't want fraud to occur. They don't go looking for that. And they're spending huge amounts of money to defend and protect against it. And trying to balance that with making sure that the service they provide to customers is convenient and easy because you just talked about the frustration of being stopped from getting access to something when that happens, they don't want to inconvenience you, or they also don't want you to be a victim of fraud. We shouldn't forget. And it sounds like I'm a massive supporter of banks, and I am to some degree, but I often read articles and I think the article is completely ignoring the fact behind all of this there's a bad guy, there's a fraudster who's gone out and committed fraud, committed deception. They've taken money out of that, or whatever it might be, the bank didn't ask for that don't want that. I'm just trying to protect against it.