Whereby from the report we see that 7.5 million people in Tanzania do have bank accounts. And with the presence of mobile money operators, we have 24.4 million mobile money wallets currently opened by these telcos talking into the lending space.

In particular, the banks still dominate the biggest share in terms of value, but the market has seen a new narrative of digital loans, which is mostly dominated by MMOs and fintech players through their micro lending services, which still requires banks collaborations by funding for regulatory approval, as well as managing the provision side with the help of the FinTech players will bring onto the table, the scoring and big data capabilities.

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.

So we did this that at the beginning, the very first experiments, the very first beta test, is if you want to borrow from Credilikeme, you need to post on your wall and have 10 friends vouch for you.

And then, like that, we came up with this term of crowdsourcing your credit score.

Definitely, that was non-scalable.

It was challenging, operational wise, but we learned a lot of the willingness, we learned a lot about the willingness of people to prove they're credit worthy when there isn't enough information. And we learn that if we create this circle of trust with our user base, they would be willing to share stuff with us.

Mukesh Bubna 7:30

Sure. First of all, we've done a slight pivot and "led grow, borrow grow" we've changed that very recently, so it's not on our website, but we moved to "delivering financial happiness".

What does that mean? From an investor point of view, in India, the fixed deposit interest rates have plummeted in the last two years from 9% to 5%, while the inflation rate runs close to 6% officially (unofficially it runs much higher). And then there's a 35% tax on the interest income. So you can imagine anybody keeping money in a bank on a fixed deposit is losing money in India. So our proposition to them is risk adjusted yield - we should be able to give you 2x of fixed deposits. And that's happens, right? Your money is growing. And that's a good thing to happen for you.

We tell our consumers to diversify across at least 100 borrowers. Now, that gives them a comfort of ability to absorb any shock from delayed payment or delinquencies.

Second is that we also have certain innovation, what we have launched also is a monthly income plan. So if somebody brought somewhere around 5 million Indian rupees on our platform, we are able to give them an income of 50,000 rupees a month, which goes back to their account for their own need, whether they want to shop they will travel, whatever they feel like. No, it is not 50,000 like a fixed deposit system. It's an arrangement giving you a ballpark on our app. Investors can start investing in less than two minutes, and can fun transfer 24 by 7, I don't have any human intervention required anymore for any investor, individual institution to on board themselves.

Now on the show, we love a credit score and the Thai credit bureau score is one that I'm obviosuly very fond of, having helped roll it out initially a few years ago. But for those that are unfamiliar with the market, who are maybe in the US or the UK, is that a score that's going to be very familiar to them? that looks and operates like a score in a big developed market?

Marco Chu 15:30

It would feel pretty much the same. I mean, it is still a credit score, it gives you a number that tells you how risky that particular consumer is. Nothing has really changed in that aspect. But in the back, there's a lot of changes, different countries have different credit markets, and each is a little bit unique in their own way. I mean, for example, in the US, you will have vast amount of auto loans, because you need to have a car in the States versus in Singapore or Hong Kong where not everyone will have a car.

And so is Thailand, right? Thailand is, I would, say credit under-served. But considering the size of the adult population, and among people that actually have a credit history, you can expect that a lot of them don't have conventional consumer lending products we would imagine in developed countries. One thing that's very interesting that they have, and we recently included in the score is, agriculture loans. Thailand have a good part of the GDP in agriculture, and farming loans work differently compared to most consumer loans. And we simply need to add that to serve our credit inclusion mission.

When people look at your website, they're going to see the line "we provide repayable finance to help social enterprises" and for most of us, the first time we read that line, it's going to stick a little bit and people might be thinking why "repayable"? Why are you lending money to these charities, isn't it nicer to give a donation that doesn't have any strings attached?

Yeah, so lending has a few advantages over grant-giving in certain situations. What we're trying to do is to help organisations become better at doing what they do, becoming more efficient, so that either they can do things they weren't able to do before, or they can do them more efficiently - because they've been able to build some infrastructure, or expand into a new area, or possibly set up some trading activity which generates income, if that's what they're looking to achieve.

We try and fill a gap. It's very difficult to raise grant funding for anything that isn't directly related to a charity programme. Anything that has the word 'admin' in it is the anathema to many philanthropists. And that's where we come in, because we believe that a well run organisation needs opex, it needs capex.

So even if that exists, it's very hard to get women to complain. And often the complaint process puts the person that complains, the woman, in the limelight, or investigates the complaint in an insensitive way. And so there is, you know, there is all incentive to stay quiet and just stop using the service. And that's a problem, because what we need to see is actually greater use of the service. And that then leading to better life outcomes in some way.

So there's a lot that needs to be done by policymakers and regulators in creating easier complaint processes to check if the information that's being asked for by lenders is necessary and proportionate to the services that they provide. So does the lending app really need access to my phone messages or phone gallery or call records? And if you are accessing that information, then how you're going to use it, which then leads us to think about data rights. So there's a lot that needs to be done, you know, in unpacking, what does the safe and secure online environment mean? And how do we create that?

Well, yes, we've got very many stories. We've got a woman who is physically challenged and is unable to move around and she started a small food business. And for one reason or another was never never able to get credit from a bank or any other financial institution - because they deem her as a high risk. And we stepped in to support her with a micro loan. And now she's grown her business 300% Very, very powerful testimony, which is on video, and a very excited woman.

Indeed, we have several people just to mention, one lady also had a cow, and was giving her 1 litre of milk, and we convinced her to sell it. And she topped up that money for us to finance and get her cow. And now she enjoys 17 litres of milk every day. Now, the beauty of this is immediately after the cow calved down, it was again pregnant within two months. And so I think in the next three months, she would again be enjoying a second calf from the original cow that we helped her to get.