Resilience and speed, with Svitlanka Sergiichuk
Today is Ukraine’s National Day, so no better time than to support the people in their endeavours to survive and resist the Russian invasion: donate to World Kitchen at https://donate.wck.org/give/499865/#!/donation/checkout or to Save Life in UA at https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/#donate-army-card-monthly
“Launch any lending business in an hour” Normally I write a bit of a blurb here, but really it comes down to that. Launch any lending business in an hour. Actually, as you’ll hear, it’s more like 20 minutes. In a world that is changing, you need to be able to change even faster, which is where no code solutions come to the fore. In today’s episode, I’m speaking to Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk, co-founder at Neofin - Ukrainian tech going global.
Follow the Neofin story over at https://neo-fin.com/
Svitlanka is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/svitlanaromaniuk/
And follow Neofin while you’re there: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neofin-solutions/
You can also find and follow me on LinkedIn (or connect) at: www.linkedin.com/comm/mynetwork/discovery-see-all?usecase=PEOPLE_FOLLOWS&followMember=brendanlegrange
Otherwise, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24
If you have any feedback or questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.
Regards, Brendan
The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 0:00
Slava Ukraini.
I would want to say that we were well prepared, but war is a thing you can never be fully prepared to. So we decided that we need to speed up or plans and nothing like a war shows if you've made the right choices or not.
The FinTech innovations and technologies have been one of the means how Ukrainian financial institutions were actually able to survive that horrible time. The remote verification, remote identification, remote lending and the massive digitalization of Ukrainian financial institutions has become not just a matter of convenience, it has become a matter of survival.
Nobody knew how resilient the Ukrainian financial system is some of the most resilient financial systems with all that it has survived. So when we say launch the lending business in an hour will mean your own lending instance that is absolutely ready to be used for launching any kind of lending product within actually below an hour. Right now we are on the track of getting an instance ready in 22 minutes.
Brendan Le Grange 1:16
12 years ago, actually, pretty much to the day as I record this, I was in Sarajevo, quietened by the experience of seeing firsthand the still seemingly fresh scars of the last international armed conflict in Europe. Except of course, it wasn't the last one.
In November 2013, the European Union and Ukraine were due to sign an association agreement that would converge economic policy legislation and regulations across a broad range of areas and still against the wishes of his own parliament, Viktor Yanukovych cancelled that deal in favour of one with a Russia aligned trade bloc.
The people protested on mass.
Yanukovych was removed.
And Russia retaliated by seizing territory in Crimea.
I am not a historian or a student of political science, so I'm going to leave that there and jump ahead to the 24th of February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of that still unresolved war.
It's a defining moment of our time. It's an invasion that brought with it mass civilian casualties, ecological disasters, reports of unrestrained and horrific war crimes, and what Wikipedia is calling Europe's largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. And it's not a one off thing. It's something Ukrainians are overcoming with bravery and dignity every day.
And today is Ukraine's national day, so if you can help the people in any way, now would be a great time to reach into your pockets and donate generously. There are links to certain good organisations in the show notes.
Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers with Brendan le Grange.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk, co founder and CEO of NeoFin, welcome to the show.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 3:19
Hello, Brendan, I'm excited to be here today.
Brendan Le Grange 3:22
NeoFin is a fully no code lending automation software as a service that allows financial institutions to launch any credit products in a day.
And we'll dive into what that means and how that happens, but first, NeoFin is also a Ukrainian fintech, you are a Ukrainian founder, and this is going out on Ukraine's National Day - so let's first discuss what the Russian invasion and occupation has meant for you, for your loved ones, and indeed, for your country.
There's got to be a better way to ask this, but how are you doing?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 3:52
'How are you doing' is a very complicated question, because there's so many layers to reply to. Because the first reaction is, of course, to say we're doing great because we keep pushing forward and we stay strong. On the other side, everyday, you're dealing with the sort of news you wouldn't necessarily want to deal with.
So let's stick to the first part of it, we're doing great and we're pushing forward.
What has occupation meant to us, all of the founding team of NeoFin come from Donbass. So this is eastern Ukraine. And this is the area where, as we joke, and probably you as a British person would appreciate the dark humour as we call it, we started getting the rockets before it had become a mainstream - because Russia has invaded Donbass in 2014.
And so for all the founding team at NeoFin, this is at least a second war to go through, and at least a second war to survive as a business and to survive as a community.
So I would want to say that we were well prepared, but war is a thing you can never be fully prepared to. So what did occupation mean to us as a business? Luckily, by the time the war started, none of us were located in the areas that got occupied. We were all in Kiev, we were in the capital. But some of our customers, some of NeoFin customers had to survive the occupation, and had to somehow maintain the operations.
And as surprising as it may sound, but the FinTech innovations and technologies have been one of the means how Ukrainian financial institutions were actually able to survive that horrible time. Because the remote verification, remote identification, remote lending and financial operation, the massive digitalization of Ukrainian financial institutions has become not just a matter of convenience, it has become a matter of survival - because you're so much safer if you do not need to go somewhere if you do not need to go to the banking branch to get a financial service.
So in a way, what is matter of convenience, or seamless user experience, for all the world, for Ukrainian fintech, at some point, has become a matter of survival.
Brendan Le Grange 6:20
If I think back to the very early days, one of the early calls that came out was for people who wanted to help to book AirBnB accommodation, basically to use the payment rails that we were all familiar with to get money into the country. It was obviously fairly random, but it was one thing that suddenly showed me as well that some of these dull things we think about day to day in the office, actually matter.
And well, I think everyone listening would like to help in their own way. But it's not always easy to then know which of these charities or organisations are actually facilitating good on the ground in Ukraine. So do you have any suggestions of organisations that listeners who want to help can really sort of get behind?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 7:06
Thanks a lot for emphasising the donation topic, it's a very important topic because people of Ukraine and fighters of Ukraine do need support still need support.
And we in our team are constantly involved in different fundraising experience, because we feel like this is a duty for every Ukrainian right now. No matter where we are, this is a duty to be involved, and to help our country by all the possible means.
If we speak about the reputable international organisations, that would be worth donations: recently, the Russians have exploded the Kakhovka Dam and 80 Ukrainian towns just went underwater. And people were in an acute need of the drinking water and medication on basic food for surviving just waiting on the rooftops of their houses before they're picked up by the rescuers.
The organisation called World Kitchen (https://wck.org/news/dam-flooding) was the only organisation who has actually dared to come there. It's very close to the military actions, it's very close to the war zone and to the frontline, and they dare to come there and help people with the delivering the most necessary needs.
So if any of you is looking for the International famous international organisation, this is the one that I would want to point out.
I would also want to point out the competent organisations for the military help. And that would be Save Life in UA (www.savelife.in.ua)
But I would say from my experience, that the most effective way of donating and getting fast results is donating to the exact needs of the very people that are involved. So I'm constantly in touch and constantly involved in the communication with people, let's say the volunteer groups that are right now, for example, working on providing the medical help to the people have buckled and been in touch with Ukrainians and asking, hey, what are the current needs of the exact people you know personally and people you trust.
That is the most effective way of the donation because organisation would still have a layer of management and understanding how these funds are going to be directed? How it will go through the paperwork through the management procedures, it usually takes several months from a big international organisation to deliver those donations to the actual place of need.
Brendan Le Grange 9:33
So I'll definitely put those links in the show notes. But also, as you said, you're keeping an eye on this you're always talking to people there on the ground and I see on www.neo-fin.com you've often got news on there and links yourself so anybody who doesn't know any Ukrainians themselves, can check up on the website as well and see if there's new fresh links there.
Bringing us towards the NeoFin business, you've got a fantastically clear purpose: launch any lending business in an hour.
It's a very dramatic statement to make right out front on the website, so flesh it out for me, how does NeoFin do this?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 10:12
That's indeed a very dramatic statement. And we are working to make it a reality with a no code approach.
So NeoFin is a no code landing automation platform.
By no code would mean that launching a lending product and delivering it to market does not require any hard coding, when we say launch the lending business in an hour would mean that you can get your own lending instance, with all the work and functionalities for you to use like a Lego constructor and construct any kind of lending product. And this instance is going to be ready, within actually below an hour. Right now we are on the track of getting an instance ready in 22 minutes!
Of course, further customizations and further adjustments - oh, you can see the thunder behind my back. It's very dramatic, I have a tornado behind my back. Today's a very nice Canadian weather day - so there can be a number of customizations and number of adjustments of the product to the actual financial institutions target audience do their style, do their policies, and so on. This can take time.
But still our stats shows that it takes four times less than any traditional enterprise software does, and enhance zero deliveries, because when there's no hardcoding, there's no delivery risk.
Brendan Le Grange 11:38
You know, when we talk about any lending business today, it's all about data, and when you have a one year or six month timeline between when you have the concept of a product and when you roll it out, for that six months or a year, you're not getting any data in - and the customization and all of that is very nice, but - the first thing is to get it out there and see what people respond to see how people pay back. And then to see, okay, where do I need to tweak? Where do I customise?
And that agile approach to business is suddenly enabled when you can do it within a matter of minutes. And I want to deep dive that in two halves.
First, I guess with more conceptual, the term no code, which you spoke about there. It's something that's come into my vocabulary only recently via some people I follow on LinkedIn. Obviously, the name is kind of clear in what it's gonna do. But what is this no code technology that's now coming to the fore?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 12:30
Yeah, no code has become a buzzword.
So right now, technology in general, not just the financial technology, is going through the wave of API's. API's that have enabled the systems to become interoperable, that made it easy to communicate when various external services.
No code is a consequent wave after API, because with an API you still need the development workforce, you still need the development effort to get things done. No code just brings the maximum of the software components to the front end, and make them drummed and manageable.
For example, the risk manager or the head of underwriting of the financial institution without having any software engineering background, can easily go to the new offence underwriting studio. And using the new things drag and drop interface built out super sophisticated, quite complicated decision trees decision algorithm, groups of checks, groups of rules, risk policies and scoring cards. The marketing manager or a lending Product Manager without having a background in software engineering, can go to the new fin site builder.
We call it like a WordPress for financial institutions that provides the templates and the built in functionality for all type of financial product web pages - like lead generation landing page or user flows before user user dashboards, borrowers area and so on.
So the product manager can go to the site builder and using only the site builder front end enabled technologists build out a landing page, or build out the whole customer flow the whole user flow. And it allows the financial institutions that usually have a strong deficit of the development workforce and development power, to concentrate the development power on building out their core business, while all the let's say commodity all the utilities are going to be fully frontend enabled and manageable.
Brendan Le Grange 14:55
It's basically like my boss used to think it was, when you draw on a whiteboard and just say, well, we'll put a score in here and then we'll use that score to drive this, and then leave us to do the work.
But Svitlanka, there's one other aspect to that and that's the practical one. Because obviously, the reason launching a new loan business used to take so long means that there's a lot going on you needed loan origination, loan servicing loan management collections, you've got to bring the data in build scores, use those scores.
So how are you managing to pull all those pieces together so quickly? And indeed, are you pulling all those pieces together?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 15:30
So, when I say twenty-two minutes delivery, I mean 22 minutes delivery of your own personalised lending instance.
Inside this lending instance, there will be access to all the NeoFin solutions. By now NeoFin consists of nine different solutions that cover all the stages of lending products lifecycle: loan origination - inside loan origination, there would be the KYC, there would be all the user flows with the liveness detection and with everything that is needed for remote anti-fraud solutions, there will be an underwriting studio, there will be decision engine, and everything that needs to happen before the credit decision is taken; on the level of the loan management system, there would be the constructor of the products where you would be able to build a product with different settings with different insurance policies with different risk officers was different product types; and on the loan servicing level, there would be everything related to service and London has been already issued, automated communication, loan disbursement, the management of loan repayments, debt collection, and so on.
All of that is right now under one new use in umbrella.
Most of the current existing solutions would be either covering one part of the credit products lifecycle, or there would be the all in one solutions that are quite big enterprise style solutions that would not be flexible and open to the external services - the longest external integration has ever taken us, was five business days, because we have prepared the ready API code to be integrable with any external source.
So that's why even when something additional was needed to be implemented, it takes much less time.
Brendan Le Grange 17:30
Yeah. And in that spirit of openness, and that the world of API's, that means it doesn't matter where I am in the world, doesn't matter which credit bureaus I might want to link to or external data sources, you can bring those in, it's not as sad as married to one day to provide a where I've got to put all my eggs in one basket.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 17:48
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And if we'll look at our first half of 2023, we have entered and started working in Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, in Jordan, in the United States of America. And just the last day of Q2 2023, we signed the first product in Kazakhstan. And we have couple more countries right now in the line, this no code approach that is fully admin and front end enabled, it's much easier to expand internationally, and much easier to serve the needs of our international customers that have operations in several countries.
Brendan Le Grange 18:31
I do like that image of the boss who could just draw it on the whiteboard, because that's essentially what you do, you're getting rid of all the things that used to get in the way of common sense where it should be simple to have originations, talk to loan management, talk to collections, and have all that data in one place. We know that for most of us, those bits never spoke to each other, some legacy systems are still like that but this is what a new way of doing things looks like. And I think it really does enable fast experimentation, and then the customization on top of that.
And there's full dashboards and things like that, too.
So I do encourage anyone listening to go look at www.neo-fin.com.
That said, like, I want to sort of sombre the mood again a bit and come back to some of the other business lessons learned from your time and a war, you would have woken up in February 2022 now, once again, being invaded. It's incredibly traumatic, obviously, on the human level, first and foremost, but also from a business point of view. Any kind of planning you've done, any thinking of the future is just shattered.
So inside NeoFin as a business, in those early days, what was the feeling and what was your reaction to that complete chaos? And how have you grown and adjusted the business to take that into account?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 19:44
Yeah, February 24 2022, was, well, the date of a big change for Ukraine as a whole.
And for Neofin as a product, Neofin as a business, we were celebrating at the beginning of February 2022, we were celebrating becoming break even - on our own, being a fully self-funded business. On February 25 2022, we realised that we're nothing close to breakeven, because most of the customers at that time were Ukrainian financial institutions and Ukrainian banks.
On February 2024, we have received about 20 emails from our customers, saying that we're stopping our lending operations because nobody knew how long the world will last. Nobody knew how resilient the Ukrainian financial system is. After the war, I think that it's one of the most resilient financial systems, with all that it has survived, but at that time, nobody knew about that. So we just received about 20 emails from the key customers saying that they're closing their their lending operations, and they just stopped paying.
And we sat down with a team, we understood that we had a team that we were gathering all over Ukraine and all over the world, we have the little dev Centre in Kuala Lumpur, we have the little development hub in Germany, and Ukraine. These are all the financial talents that would definitely want to keep inside the company and been fully revenue funded, we would not be able to do that.
And at the time of the crisis, every business has two scenarios. Scenario One is to keep working the same way it used to and disappear. Scenario two is to start doing something you have never done before and get a chance to adapt.
So we decided that we need to speed up or plans with international expansion. That was the first decision. We have urgently started the work on internationalising the product and making it cloud agnostic. The regionals that we've selected were initially were Middle East and North America. Why the Middle East? Because a lot of Ukrainian financial business owners have connections with the Middle East.
So we had this word of mouth. Being a fully self funded business, we did not have any budgets for marketing or for sales. So word of mouth was an a steal one of the important engines powers the new things business. So just the customers that are happy with what they gather recommend us to their friends, FinTech founders. So Middle East was the first step.
And then we targeted North America, the decision was ultimately taken in May 2022. And in June 2022, we have figured out that, hey, Equifax, the biggest credit data provider in the world, has announced the applications admission for the second cohort of their accelerator, and it was solely for the US based businesses with the US targeted operations and with some background in the US financial operations. At that point, we had zero US financial operations, we had zero US customers and zero experience of deploying our product in the US. At the same time, we have passed all the three stages of selection, and finally made it to top 10 of the equal tax accelerator.
And that was the first step and the first introduction, we're still very thankful, because US has organised for us such an intensive, deep dive into the US Lending Scheme. That was the beginning of our journey. It was December 2022. And everyone was telling me that it will take you at least two years to sign the first customer in the financial industry in the US. And it will take you at least a year and a half to get all the compliance that is needed to work in the US market with me a thing because we were so motivated. I mean, we're motivated to survive and to act as fast as possible, we managed to get all the compliance and certification that is needed for the US operations within half a year. And by December 2023, we signed the first US customer, this is how the international journey started.
So we have selected the way of jump into the unknown, try to do something that you have never done before, and just bring the product to the new level!
Brendan Le Grange 24:07
I'm no longer surprised that you're able to get down the time for loan opening so quickly, because obviously there's a energy in the team that's great at doing things very quickly in general!
And across the top of their website there when you go to www.neo-fin.com you see made with love in Ukraine, operating globally, which captures that spirit. And there's a lot of lessons in there for people listening as well hopefully never go through something quite as extreme, but that these knocks that they get in in their day to day businesses. There are ways to work around them and to come back stronger.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 24:41
I must say that the war is still teaching us the lessons. I'm still learning every day. Some of the lessons of the first days of the war were the way you're managing risk, the way you're managing data protection and the data security of your projects is the basis of the your business's survival and the fact that we have created kniffin as a fully cloud hosted and cloud agnostic product, where there's no single customers instance, that would be hosted in the same cluster that another customers instance, has enabled us not to have a second of the downtime on any of the customers instances during the work. This is something that we're very proud of.
And even the Ukrainian customers, we had a number of financial institutions that we just stopped billing, but we kept their working instances for them. And after 9/ 10/ 11/ 12 months of the word, these customers, these banks were coming back to us and saying, hey, it feels like we're ready, we're ready to start issuing credits back. We're like, okay, we're happy. And they're assuming they become the billable clients again. But it was important for us to just keep the product working and to keep it running.
So data security is a very important point in the business continuity, then there is a very important point about the personal security of the team members. There were different stages, there was a stage one, Russia has selected a strategy of bomba in the Ukrainian energetical infrastructure. So every day there were long been the electricity power stations, there were a lot of blackouts. Sometimes the Ukrainian team or my family could stay without electricity for like 35 hours, then in this point, the lesson is react fast and do the needful. The sooner you get a generator, the sooner you supply the team with all the working conditions, the better for them, the better for you, the better for your business, it's very important to react super fast.
And the relegation and the diversification of the wrist one, our team, the core team was on the way of the relegation, the international colleagues were like begging up feeling up for them, and just saying, Hey, I will work day and night like I will work two days in one day, let's say 16 hours, 17 hours just to let my colleague replicate, to make sure that the projects do not stop. So that was the dedication. And another lesson is that people, the humans, I can't even call it the human resource, I would just call it the people that you surround yourself with in the business are also the basis of your survival. And nothing like a war shows if you've made the right choices or not.
Brendan Le Grange 27:30
Yeah, but I mean, here, you're now sitting with a hurricane outside your window. I think in all the corporates I've worked for, we've had these business recovery plans. And I said, what if this floods and we used to go through these very boring processes that somebody would make the company do so they could tick a box and say, we've got a disaster recovery process?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 27:47
No, it's not boring, trust me, when it happens it's not boring at all.
Brendan Le Grange 27:51
Exactly.
And I think I mean, it's also a great advert for cloud and the modern technologies, you know, not worrying about running around. But when COVID hit here in the UK, I won't name names, but there were organisations that didn't have laptops for half their staff. And they had to do things like shuffling around laptops, so which people needed them. So if you didn't need one, you had to send it in so they could send it to someone else. And then all the access is just all about data security, like people couldn't log in and do work. And yeah, again, lots of transferable lessons.
Svitlanka, as I said, on the website, when you go there, I see they can sign up for a demo, and they can learn more about the product. What does it look like for them to interact with Neofin.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 28:36
The process is very simple, they absolutely can sign up for a demo or book a call with us get a product walkthrough, where we show the product we would go in and deep discussions of the lending product that they're wanting to launch, the salary in advance product, or the personal loan, or the student loan or the small dollar loan or life event loan, and so on.
So we would discuss all the details of the business case, we would identify where the pain is, and request the list of the external services or technologist tag they're willing to be integrated with, and then we would come back with their proposal. After proposal we have the contract stage and there starts the subscription. The first stage in the subscription is usually the customization and setup, the customization and setup dependent on the customization requests and rules can take a month or two or three. And after the customization and set up, they can just go ahead and do their lending
Brendan Le Grange 29:31
As easy as that.
So if anybody listening would like to start that conversation or simply learn more about you and the business and follow that story, where can they go online to see Neofin and what it's doing?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 29:45
They can absolutely use the 'book a demo' functionality through our website. And I'm always open I'm there on LinkedIn on my email, always open and always want to have a talk and help make the new interesting lending use case happen.
Brendan Le Grange 30:00
I'll add to that, that you're very kind of responsive on LinkedIn. And so anybody who is interested in feels a bit nervous about approaching strangers on their do, do not be scared, but Svitlanka, before I let you go, I learned about Neofin and yourself when you were speaking at Money20/20, you've since been on a number of other stages, as you said, you've been in accelerators. You've been in awards. Lots is happening. Having heard about the team and the energy, they are not so surprised. But talk to me about Neofin and yourself as a founder. As you look forward to the future. What are you investing your energies in?
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 30:36
Oh, there's a lot of interesting things coming out. We are developing very actively the embedded lending product offering that we are already offering a couple of embedded lending use cases. And we're just willing to make it more international and making more widespread. Please stay tuned, because there will be two very interesting countries and nouns where new fin is going to launch its operations. So I will not make a spoiler right now. And of course the deeper and deeper integration into the US financial climate. Right now we are a part of the BMO Harris Bank's Women in Fintech programme, which is very exciting. Being in the accelerator of the six biggest bank in North America certainly brings a lot of value. So right now we're learning a lot. We're just trying to absorb all the information as a sponge and we're building out something interesting for the US bankers, and specifically the banking segment.
So there's a lot, there's a lot going on, and we will surely be keeping you posted.
Brendan Le Grange 31:45
I'm going to be following that story. For sure. I wish you the best of luck for that, but mostly wish for peace in Ukraine as soon as possible. So we will make some donations to the causes you mentioned. And definitely put them in the show notes. And I encourage anyone listening to do the same and hopefully we do see a turn to better times. So Svitlanka, thank you so much for your time.
Svitlanka Sergiichuk 32:05
Thank you very much. And since it's the Ukraine's independence day today, I have to finish with one important phrase, which is Slava Ukraini
Brendan Le Grange 32:15
Slava Ukraine indeed, and thank you all for listening.
Please do look for and follow the show on your favourite podcast platform and share the updates widely on LinkedIn where lending nerds are found in our largest concentration. Plus, send me a connection request while you're there.
This show is written and recorded by myself Brendan le Grange in Brighton, England and edited by Fina Charleson of FC Productions.
Show music is by Iam_wake, and you can find show notes and written transcripts at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show and I'll see you again next Thursday.