Building an all-in-one credit platform, with Ash Bhatt
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.
Active credit building, with Sho Sugihara
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.