Digital marketing was not really a thing. It started by just going out and networking, listening to people, asking them what worked, what didn't work, you know, ringing up estate agents saying, look, I'd love to do your mortgages and walking up and down the high street with my briefcase, really. I just recently went with my cousin who works for Virgin Atlantic on a trip to Austin, and I ended up doing both of the pilots mortgages!

Like all businesses, it's about understanding the customer's needs, their pain points, and trying to work out where we can stand out and make a difference and have an incredible customer experience and good customer outcomes where others can't.

And where I found that problem statement, that focus, was actually when I started working with community finance lenders, specifically, an experienced that really exposed the problem, to me that exists within consumer lending. And that is that very little is given to the customer management side of the credit lifecycle.

And I've had the opportunity to sit within the community finance lenders office, I mean, this was right on the front line. And I remember there was a lady that came in, and she had lots of children with a, she was stressed because she was in arrears. And she come into this lending office to arrange an arrangement with the lender to ensure that she could stay on track with her payments. And I just sat there observing, and she sat there and she was getting more and more stressed, as the advisor was saying, Well, can you afford this much a week? Can you afford this much a week, and having the awareness as to all the data behind the lending decision, and everything that they had about it, I just felt like, there's got to be a better way to engage this customer and use this information to help her make sounder financial choices.

That was my lightbulb moment.

That's why you're hear 'the problem is the deposits', but people don’t need to have to high deposit. Not really, because they only need a high deposit, because you can't lend them enough, because you put all the risks to them. You know, if you change your product into a long dated fixed, you protect the borrower, you can lend a higher amount, they need less of a deposit. Right? It all depends on how you explain things.

And this is what other countries have done for a long, long time: Denmark for over 200 years, the Netherlands for 40/ 50/ 60 years, the US obviously, after the savings and loans crisis, they started protecting borrowers by making long dated fixed rate mortgages the 'cool product', and that protected them over the crisis against these shocks. And that in turn, helps the economy.

And these fraudsters will keep coming at you. And they will get faster and wiser and smarter. But to be honest, I didn't know all the things that could have happened to me until actually I'd experienced them. So it's a massive warning to anyone, you know, whether you're a consumer or a business person, or you have a business and you own a business, or you've got a business partnership, or whatever it is, just make sure you're vigilant about everything.

Don't think that you know somebody, because you might not know them as well. You know, fraud, fraudsters can have lots of different faces and guises. It might be a stranger, like your podcast, but it also might be somebody that you know, so just be really, really careful out there. Reputations take years to build up and it takes a second to destroy.

So going live with Taktile is, I would say, very smooth and can happen rapidly.

Once we sign a customer, our customer success team provides training and support for the platform. However, many of our customers prefer to just building and figuring it out on their own on the platform.

On the other hand, on top of the software, we also have customers to identify the right data providers for their use case and for that customer segment. And we do share best practices from our experiences in the industry. By now we've seen so many products and use cases that we can tell you if you want to launch a lending product in the UK. For that type of segment, I think we have a very good idea of what are the possibilities out there of data source that you can actually use in the end.

Custom Credit was really set up with three mission statements in mind - we always are asking ourselves, does this move us closer to this or further away - and that is (1) to become the most customer centric FinTech in the UK, (2) is to ensure our colleagues better reflect our customers, and (3) to improve financial literacy, both in terms of our customers and the broader community.

I think the product itself is tailored and custom. But to achieve that, the way you score and assess risk needs to be tailored and custom, that's often where the problem is with these other kind of flexible payment lenders, most lenders will make a decision on on affordability based purely on averages to estimate your your expenditure. They will use a combination of the information you've provided to them, and an indicator from the credit reference agencies.

People with very different spending profiles and very different income profiles effectively could be judged to having the same level of affordability. So we've actually taken a different approach in that, initially, all of our customers will have to provide open banking data.

So where does Lenuity fit in? Well, financial services and construction are the two most important things to get the UK out of a recession. Construction is building wealth for the economy. It's providing homes. For people, these are really important things, it's providing jobs, this is an incredibly important thing to drive us out in a recession. And what we're doing is enabling them to thrive in the current environment, to sell like they've never been able to sell before. Not even in boom times.

When you if you take a look back at what happened to the car industry, when they started financing their customers, it was just a massive boom for them that they could create better offers, their business became more profitable, that they had a reduction in costs. Now, when you get into house building and construction, this is magnified for bigger reductions in costs, an area of waste that they never even talk about that, you know, they talk about waste on the building site, we're talking about the financial waste of holding costs, we're talking about the difference between completions that take three months, four months and five months coming down to two weeks.

I mean, this is not just doing data science, but actually looking to bring together and harness really advanced analytics, modern methodologies to really bring forward business strategy on that side. And that is something specifically on the credit risk side, which I'm seeing more and more, where if you actually start at the board level thinking about why do certain things not quite work? Why why are we losing market share? Why are we not growing as fast as we can? I mean, once you actually get into the engine room, you open the door, very often you find data related topics, modelling related topics, infrastructure process topics are really at the heart of what's not working.

We're able to bring in this reliable view on the world, that growth is actually still there and very important, but I would strongly recommend not just to continue in an undifferentiated way, what you've been doing over the last 10 years, characterised by low interest, low inflation, and so on and so forth, the environment is definitely changing. We see our clients adopt to that very quickly.

But adopting to it does not mean slamming on the brakes, it actually means getting more sophisticated in the analytic space, getting more sophisticated in terms of how can I assess the affordability of a loan for a specific retail customer, for a specific SME customer on a case by case basis, in a scalable fashion. That is really where we see really a lot of interest, and a lot of movement over the last six months.

We are on the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea where this is going to end. It's endless the level of opportunities here, and it's going to need to be fueled with credit.

I think the key is to bring the approaches that have been here for millennia, but in reality, cross them also with the new technology. We don't have to have centralised banks performing all these kinds of operations or pawnshops, as we have in the past we can have this retail approach it is going to be a very interesting exploration that we are doing in other companies are going to explore the market also in bring completely marvellous solution.

So we are super excited in reality, on top of the innovation dream on top of building the next frontier for finance, it also has this deep meaning of helping people that work with different rules typically don't have access to banking. If we look into the most Western countries, this now is a niche product for very specific purpose. But in the future, we will have people on countries where this kind of solutions, help them maybe to fulfil the dreams that they have, can be life changing.

I had a conversation with the Mortgage Club yesterday and it's the same conversation. It's, you know, how do we make sure how do we bridge the gap between the innovation that we're bringing to the market versus what they know, and what their what their their fears could be based off of past products that have been a market. So really, it's it's right now. It's about communication. It's about patience. It's about empathy for us. And we want to make sure that we partner with these intermediaries because they provide the crucial advice to first time buyers who are vulnerable in this process. They've never bought a home before and the home buying process is to put it simply an absolute nightmare to go through. So a broker that can, you know, take a accurate financial snapshot for that customer, break down the process a bit for them, make them feel comfortable about them, you know, making the largest purchase their life is important for our customers. And that's why we want to make sure we partner with them.

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.

And this was in an effort to try and control each of our debt. And it's the only time in all my years working with the credit card data that I've seen the number of decreases actually being higher than the number of increases. But with the initial rise at the beginning, we saw similar trends in the 2008 recession as well. And the average credit line during the pandemic peaked in June 2020, and then sharply decreased in around the vember of that year.

Since that point, though, it's been steadily increasing, and it's now in January stands at £5,450. And the average credit line is now actually higher than it was pre-pandemic levels. So, you know, it's business as usual. Now, when it comes to limit management programmes, so with the right strategies in place, there should actually be fewer accounts needing or being allowed to go over limit in the first place, we saw a similar picture in the US with limits reducing, so they reduced through most of 2020 as well, when the issues put them in, they increase programmes on hold, although now it's not quite as high as it was pre pandemic, the average limit isn't far off now in the US. So it's standing at $7,789, if we look at January figures,

Open banking essentially is allowing fintech companies to offer innovative products and services on top of the traditional banks. In many countries, the legislation has pushed open banking, and an example of this is the European Union where PSD2 is forcing banks to expose certain API's to fintechs that have the appropriate licence.

However, we seen this trend not only in Europe, but globally. Because of open banking, we're seeing the platformication in banking, which is similar to the one we witnessed in the lodging sector (with Airbnb), Booking.com, Expedia, etc. Consumers and businesses utilise the best products according to their needs from different banks, and they interact with them through FinTech companies that are offering a much better user experience. Some examples of fintech companies that are using open banking are companies offering account aggregation; personal and business finance management; payment initiation; buy now pay later solutions; and credit scoring applications.

So, about the history... actually, Russian retail lending is relatively young, it started less than 20 years ago and it made a huge jump from where we were - just basic stuff 15 years ago - to the state that we have now.

There's a positive outcome of this short history, we don't have much of the legacy technologies, etc, that some of a large international group experience that, take core banking systems, they don't have something that was developed 50 years ago, they're in a more or less modern state.

Yeah, it's definitely shifted away from what can be a very pressurised conversation where you're there, you're speaking to the agent, you're you're under pressure to share those numbers, and maybe sometimes sharing incorrect numbers because of the pressure. Some utility companies, they want evidence of certain parts of the I&E to be shared, like documentation - so our system has that.

So the patterns we're seeing are very interesting, and the journey they go through in order to share that I&E, they revisit their I&E several times before they finally share the I&E with the with the lender, you can see there might be two or three times they're going back and forth to the I&E. They're updating it on our system, doing it in their own time. And then right at the end, maybe after a day, or two or maybe a couple of hours, they then share their I&E so it's a much more fulfilled I&E to then have that conversation with the agents as I said, it's a more mature to conversation. Obviously they share that I&E then with all lenders as part of building that I&E network, which is what we're here to do.

Another indicator that is significant is that BNPL meant around 3% to 4% of the total e-commerce sales in Spain, while in Sweden it is around 20%. So we see significant growth expectations for the years to come.

Then also remember that if I'm a merchant and my aim is to maximise my sales, and suddenly I have to talk to five different lenders, or negotiate with them, I may not have the skills nor the time, to do it. Well, we do that for you. So you just have to focus on what you best know, which is selling through your, your webpage, and we take care of the rest.

And what we shouldn't forget is that, you know, the banks don't want fraud to occur. They don't go looking for that. And they're spending huge amounts of money to defend and protect against it. And trying to balance that with making sure that the service they provide to customers is convenient and easy because you just talked about the frustration of being stopped from getting access to something when that happens, they don't want to inconvenience you, or they also don't want you to be a victim of fraud. We shouldn't forget. And it sounds like I'm a massive supporter of banks, and I am to some degree, but I often read articles and I think the article is completely ignoring the fact behind all of this there's a bad guy, there's a fraudster who's gone out and committed fraud, committed deception. They've taken money out of that, or whatever it might be, the bank didn't ask for that don't want that. I'm just trying to protect against it.

Because I've seen a lot of fintechs out there, which had maybe a fantastic proposition, but it lacked a few elements to be really, really successful. We do see some smaller banks that have opened with a very clear digital strategy. They have been very successful to attract customers with a very strong marketing campaign, very visible in the media, and very visible in the streets, etc. What I do think in order for them to be successful, they need to make sure that the bank is not only marketing, colourful websites and apps, but they also need to make sure they integrate the risk policy, the credit risk policy.

Yeah, it was about helping a friend to get on the property ladder. She's done very well in her career now, but at that point, she needed some help. And she was like, I really want to stay in my local community, and I really want to buy with my husband here. And she just asked us on WhatsApp if we'd lend, but it was just a lot of money to a group of people at that time. And it was like, how are we going to get paid back because we were all recently graduated. So although that loan didn't happen, that's kind of what inspired the idea for JustLend. I wanted to provide opportunities to people could do what they wish to do.

…there had to be controls that were appropriate, but manageable in an environment where you've now got people working from home, and speaking to customers on a daily basis. The peripheral technology around the collection systems needed to be able to distribute into those people's homes... What I found really fascinating is, there had already been a shift to digital, and to using digital interaction points – we’ve seen it a lot in the acquisition space, we've seen a lot in the management space, but, historically, the collection space have been very slow to follow up. But what we're really seeing now is a more significant shift to allowing customers to interact through digital portals, and to set up payment plans, and to be able to access information about their accounts so that they can make an informed decision...

we have spent a lot of time recently looking at the infrastructure between data, applying analytics, and we're applying machine learning through our data-driven decision engine, to then differentiate how treatments are applied in the operational systems. And the real key for me is that ecosystem should be fully integrated. And it should be a continuous loop so that you continually are learning from the outcomes that you get from the actions that you apply to those customers, whichever segment they fall into whatever treatment you apply, understanding what's been successful, what hasn't been successful, introducing champion-challengers wherever you can, to test new options, but also to ensure that the quality of the data that you're pulling in to help with those decisions is at the highest standard…