Funding growth in modern economies, with Ritwik Ghosh

Ultimately what is important for us is to serve the merchant. So as we hear from our micro small business borrowers and learn a few things, we would love to share that again with the community.

Our realisation and build is the opportunity to serve this cashless commerce segment is so huge, and there's just a massive gap between how commerce has become digitised the recovered how many millions of merchants went online, but at the same time that digital credit hasn't really caught up.

So there is still a huge gap between what is a Shopify merchants ability to go online and sell in like, three, four hours. But what happens to that version, if she wants credit, it's not going to happen every 24 days, this this gap is huge. And you know, we just want to be part of a solution by no means any single entity can solve all of it.

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Transforming the credit landscape in Central Asia, with Abdullo Kurbanov

And I actually want to take a step back here, if you don't mind, and just make a few remarks about people in Alif overall, about about our efforts in combining technology and education. I don't know if you if you knew this, but the average age of our employees is 25. We have a lot of students, recent graduates. We train them ourselves. So to give an example of specific training, IT skills is an area where we felt that we could contribute to the education system in Tajikistan. So we established Alif Academy in 2017, as a nonprofit where we promote it education. So we provide free programming courses, including special courses for girls, for kids, for Afghan refugees.

So far, we've had more than 2,000 graduates of these courses, and some of them working, at least some of them work in other companies. And hopefully now in the new countries we had, and we have the privilege of being able to attract some of the most bright, kind, noble, energetic individuals throughout all these years, we had more than 50,000 applications to to our vacancies. And we've chosen and retained the very best.

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BNPL in the Middle East, with Ziyaad Ahmed

It's a good point that you make because I think that that's a very key differentiation. Alternatives will make money by consumers not paying, we make money by consumers payng us back. It's about using it in the correct fashion -customer defaulting, right, we're not making interest, we're not compounding that interest. So for us, it is ensuring that the customer remains within their spending limit, budgeting properly and using the platform in a responsible manner. In that way, our our vision and what's what's healthy for the consumer is very much in line.

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IDEAS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

We feature guests from around the globe, sharing their best lending strategies and knowledge.

Click on a pin to listen to an episode, or scroll down to find them all