So what is driving the default of an SME on a loan? We focused on three potential drivers: the firm's resources, board level factors, and the loan attributes.

I don't want to bore people going through all the variables that we considered but we have three categories of variables and within the categories we have a bunch of other variables. So what we found basically is the following an increased amount of financial resources and increased size of the board and a longer board's tenure, all these three elements are decreasing the default rate of firms. This is quite reasonable, right?

The size of the board is maybe a bit less intuitive. We are talking about the board size, we're not talking about the firm's size, which plays an extremely important role. But our focus was on the board size wich speaks to corporate governance being important there is a debate about corporate governance, many people make it more complex, but that is helping sharing the responsibility. So you may come a sounder, maybe a more bulletproof decision.

Okay, so I knew that if Nigeria was going to grow and the middle class was going to emerge, there has to be a credit culture, right?

And I knew that one person wouldn't be able to do it. One lender wouldn't be able to do it.

Because when you look at Nigeria and look at why credit doesn't work, you need to understand that is a lack of consequences that killed credit. In Nigeria today, if you took money, and you don't pay it back afterwards, nothing happens to you. Now, one of the things that Lendsqr is doing is that, by having a technology driven consequences, then that problem is going to go away.

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.

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.

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.