If you go back to the 1980s, the Space Shuttle was effectively the first freighter carrier, if you like, to take things into space. And the cost of getting just one kilo into space was around 60,000 US dollars then. So when you think about the size of these enormous satellites, which were going up into, you know, 35,000 kilometres into the sky and into a geostationary orbit, where they effectively cover the same part of the world all day round. Those are enormous costs to get those things up.

Now, what we're seeing, is clearly that the world has changed, technology has improved and Elon Musk and SpaceX, to be fair, has been a major catalyst in actually reducing the cost of access to space from that crazy $60,000 a kilo down to something closer to $6,000 per kilo.

What happened was that, when we started providing the service, we guarantee the bad debts in the service. And that's why we start actively use different kinds of analytics to develop the different kinds of scoring systems. And these scoring systems will work very fast on the fly will make the scoring on the fly. We start from the basic one, and then we start to improve it till we now use machine learning for our scoring.

The technological approach for this task grows year by year.

In the first three days we provided over 700 credits in Azerbaijan with our first operator - we were not expecting such success.

We're talking in India of about over 50 million customers. So numbers are huge.

And this is only in India we're talking about. But even here, in Canada, also, you have some microfinance, a lot of people are involved in this. And there's some very large institutions in India, which does this.

And I happened to be in a room where there was, I guess, $3 billionaires. And I said to myself, 'why am I a room full of Nigerian billionaires celebrating Nigeria, and the only thing I have to offer them is other people's businesses to invest in, right? Like, why don't I have a business for them to invest in? Why don't I have more equity in the things I'm doing?

I was very young. I was very hungry. So, knowing that, I wanted to have a deeper and richer relationship, I then presented an opportunity to the firm I was working with and to other investors, and I said, hey, I want to do this thing, this is a business.

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.

But actually, I'm going to defy the odds, I'm going to still find alternative ways to grow my business.

And they've come to us, we've got them the funding products they need. And then the same banks that said no to them when they first started, now that they're doing 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ 10 million in revenue, have come back to us, Lendoe as a platform and said, 'how do we now work with these clients?'... and that's why we call them underestimated.

And we have a number of examples like that.

There are great founders out there. They're great at doing what they do, which is running their business, but what they need is someone who can actually break down all of the options that are available to them, but also someone that can give them that confidence to actually apply once they've broken down those options - because the fear of rejection, the fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing what you're getting yourself into, is often what prevents people from going ahead and saying, 'actually, I believe I can do this'.

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.

85% of folks have bank accounts, but only about 20% of them actually use the bank (for borrowing). They rely on other forums to meet their financing needs. These guys don't have access to credit.

As a startup, when we launched back in 2018, the lending market in Sri Lanka was $5 billion - and what we understood this from this 5 billion requirement, almost 40% relied on loan sharks and individuals who have very dubious practices of charging excessive interest rates, as well as very unpleasant collection methods.

And coming from a tech and a finance background, we realised there might be a potential for us to provide credit underwriting through a blockchain solution.

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

The market changed completely.

Certainly the processing time for applications, whether it's cash loan mortgages is reduced significantly - I'm talking about Poland, but in fact, these are the processes that I'm seeing across Europe, it's pretty much the same way that everybody's taking but some countries it takes longer time than others to to do that - but the market is now undoubtly very heavily regulated by the Polish regulator and most of the sector is subject to supervision.

How do we let brands get in front of first party data customers with the highest intent the world has ever seen? I mean, our click to sales ratio is 55%.

Brands are paying billions in marketing budgets, so that you can see the advert you then clicking the advert getting to their site or going to their store pulling your credit card out and paying billions in interest and fees to credit card companies to buy the products.

What we've done is we've sort of said, why don't we circumvent the middleman? Why don't we let brands rather pay our customers? In other words, use the brand's marketing budget to subsidise the cost of credit to our customer, and convince our customer to buy from that brand.

The whole equation makes more sense. The customer has more sustainable buying power, because the brand is subsidising the cost of credit to the customer. So the brand can make a sale.

A broader philosophy could be formulated as working together in order to achieve better decisions. And as Jonathan mentioned earlier, these decisions should lead to fairer and more inclusive financial services and the world in general.

I think the topics of the past conferences and the forthcoming talks really reflect this focus on the final objective.

Yeah, of course they are are many purely technical talks about the new machine learning methods and new sources of data. And of course, you can't build credit scoring models without technology and without data. But there will be also papers focusing on fairness, my direction of research, financial vulnerability, affordability, over-indebtedness... climate risk is becoming a huge topic recently.

It's all sorts of facets of establishing a life in a new country: it's renting a property, you need a credit history to be able to rent a property. If you haven't got a UK credit history, you have to pay six months rent upfront, or find a UK guarantor. So obviously, both of those are just unpleasant experiences.

And mobile phones, we did some research recently with over 1,000, new to country people. And over two thirds want a mobile phone immediately. But again, they need to do a credit check. So they won't be able to get a contract, they'll just get paid you go or ceremony or something like that. So they'll suffer on that.

And what influenced the interest rate is really, first, the inflation and then the unemployment rate. The good news is in the US and Canada, the inflation has peaked from the six months ago, they gradually come down - inflation in the USA right now is around 6%; inflation in Canada, just above 5%. For the unemployment rate, both countries have the numbers at historically low. So good fundamentals. The interest rate hike period is probably near the end, that's the signal from the latest Fed meeting. Actually, Canada already paused once in the March meeting as well.

But obviously, we will see some credit normalizations which means the other risk metrics will go up because we saw that the early stage roll rate began to trend up. But again, when you look at the trajectory, it just goes back to three years ago, right, before the pandemic, so I think fundamentally it's still sound.

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?

Lenders want to wait until somebody has established their track record some place else, really proven themselves to be able to manage their debt, and then they want to jump on them and create a loyal relationship... well, that's a very expensive proposition, because it means you have to dislodge somebody from where they've been previously.

That's one of the things that we wanted to shine a light on is to understand, are these people really riskier? In other words, do you need to wait? Or do they reveal themselves pretty quickly.

And that's really what we found, is that based on the performance of consumers, when they open those subsequent products over the first two year journey, in many cases, they actually perform better controlling for credit score performed better than those that have established that track record.

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.

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.