More than 50% of the economic activity is informal in Latin America, and so, because of that, they don't have access to capital for growing their businesses.

And what we are trying to do is to help out to Yeah, to make it a little bit more fair for economic growth for everybody.

Obviously, you can do it with a pen and paper, but you know, I can say from experience, or at least the experience that we have, that doing it manually really doesn't work! And so really our scoring, what we are building, is to try to analyse the informal business.

One of the key highlights for me is not necessarily something that you see in the impact report and on the first paragraph, but what do you do, for example, with war in Ukraine, and I remember that we had a project life funding, Mikro Capital Moldova, microfinance institution in Moldova. And I think we'd launched it on like a Sunday and Monday morning, the Dutch national news broadcaster as a headliner, will Moldova be next? Right?

That's not the greatest marketing for an investment product that you can get. And so we had an internal discussion, right? Do we pull the project off the website, because we always have to weigh investor risk versus what we think is right, the right balance for our crowd.

And we actually decided to leave it on there, but to allow all the initial investors already in there, we send them a message, we updated the project description that they could get their money out if they want, but we will keep the project on. And actually, it was one of the fastest funded projects on the platform for this company.

The paradigm of 'let's collect as much information on a customer ahead of time, try and score them, and then provide them with an unsecured product'. We just don't think that works as well as putting an asset in someone's hands, asking them to pay a small deposit. And knowing that once they have access to that smartphone device, it's actually going to improve their ability to make a living. It helps them power the hairdressing salon and helps them advertise their business on WhatsApp, you're actually improving their ability to earn a living and also then to pay back the instalments just a much more compelling and sustainable model for working in the markets where we want to have an impact.

I mean, behind this there is a very sophisticated predictive credit model and we make adjustments all the time to pricing and instalment plans, and we have a lot of investment on the connected estate IoT side. And our loan book actually has been remarkably consistent. And particularly when it looked over the last three years, despite massive disruptions, and it's also been resilient in the face of high inflation.

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.

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.

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.

And then the credit scoring engine started taking shape. And over, you know, Covid, after Covid, we started bringing defaults down from 50 to 40, 40 to 30, 30 to 20, 20 to 15. And then, you know, the tougher bit came because it was not only about the credit scoring, it had to be a lot of engineering, then it's about the experience of the consumer, how is the product structured, you know, the first interaction of the consumer with the company till after he or she has repaid, everything matters. How the lead generation happened, how is the customer support interacting with the customer, or what has been experienced in app, what is experienced at the point of repayment, you know.

We've seen many times if the customer faces challenges in repaying whether or not it was our issue or an issue at the wallet side, the customers could turn rogue.

There was so much to it that we learned over time. And you know, when we actually closed our lending book pre-acquisition, the latest cohort actually close it under three per cent default

We use the same standard of care across the credit spectrum, and we actively seek new ways to innovate the scoring process. It's the architecture of our model that allows us to score approximately 37 million more individuals than conventional models. And interestingly, to note about that 37 million, approximately 10.7 million are members of the Black and Latino communities who have historically often been underserved. And approximately 3 million of those have scores that are above 620, which is generally considered those that will be eligible for traditional lending products.

So inclusion and broadening access to credit and being predictive have been guiding principles for VantageScore since its inception.

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?

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.

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.

So what I actually did was, I saw this potential for people who were underserved in a multitude of different ways to actually be empowered and take control of their own future through social impact businesses, which I think microfinance really comes under. And so what I started doing is leveraging my background in ERP solutions and tech platforms, and got involved in microfinance or banking tech platforms. And so it was really combining the two.

But what was really interesting was that, everywhere I went, despite the fact that countries were so different geographically and demographically, that I saw this underlying resilience and determination amongst people who just didn't have opportunities presented to them on a plate, and that given the right support, and the right tools at the right time that they could actually then forge their own futures, pretty much everywhere I was going, which was from Sierra Leone to Pakistan to Vietnam.