Innovation for interesting markets, with Adrian Pillay
Adrian Pllay has an unusually deep understanding of some of the world's more interesting markets. We've heard a lot about the US and the UK on this show but today, Adrian takes us off the beaten path: having been based at times in Africa and at times in the Middle East, he now oversees both of those regions as well as a little in-between! We talk about what he's learnt along the way, we get teased with the possibility of a future book, and we hear how Provenir is helping banks, fintechs, and other financial services providers make smarter decisions faster with their AI-Powered Risk Decisioning Platform.
Provenir is online at https://www.provenir.com/ (or jump straight to their excellent resources page for their latest thought leadership)
Adrian is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianpillay/ (and last I saw, he was hiring)
You can seek me out on LinkedIn, too, where I'm open to all genuine new connections - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange - and follow the show's page while you're there.
Meanwhile, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is discussed at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24
And finally, I'm also co-creating a new podcast called hAIghtened senses which will look at the intersection between human senses and technology, especially AI-powered technology. You can already start to follow it wherever you're listening to this one - there's only a trailer there at the moment, but we've recorded some of the early episodes and it's going to be a fun ride!
Keep well, Brendan
The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:
Adrian Pillay 0:00
The extreme diversity, I think, is what I love about my region: closed markets like Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to dynamic FinTech markets like the UAE, so strongly driven and backed by government and government support, to high focus markets for investors like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
Africa is often viewed as single target markets, when in fact, I think the complexity needed to be successful here is actually very, very high.
Brendan Le Grange 0:34
I've always loved the idea of traveling. And so early in my career, when I was given the chance to take on a job, they would have put me from time to time in Kenya, Botswana, Ghana, in Mauritius, I jumped at the opportunity.
And that, I guess, is the start of what became an ever more international career. I took a job a little bit later on in Denmark, which took me around the Nordics and Northern Europe, and then moved to Hong Kong, where I spent eight years in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and of course, Hong Kong, helping to roll out the first credit bureaus or credit bureau scores in a lot of those markets.
Eventually, due to some breathing issues my daughter was having, we decided to leave that beautiful but slightly polluted city and move to the UK, where I'm now based. For the moment. This has been a terrible summer, I can't stress that enough. So if you're working in a warm place, and you want me to work for you, it's probably a good opportunity to take advantage of my mood.
But I've always loved seeing how people react differently to the way their markets have evolved different rules and regulations, different cultural norms, different histories, different times at which certain technologies have leapfrogged others to create a unique set of constraints. In innovating around those constraints, we create solutions that might help somebody else maybe to serve a unique niche, or maybe to solve a problem, they didn't realize they had to rethink some of the fundamentals.
And that's a big part of why I've made the show International - our 150th episode was in our 50th country - and why I love getting guests on like Adrian Pillay on, because despite my efforts to make the show International, the majority of my guests are from the UK or the US or the big English speaking Western markets. But Adrian oversees some markets we don't talk about all that often: the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, a set of regions that is very diverse within themselves.
So there's a lot for us to take away. Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers with Brendan le Grange.
Adrian Pillay Vice President of Sales for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey at Provenir, welcome to the show.
Your CV is a who's who of credit information players in the region culminating in this role at provenant, where you're unlocking the secrets to smarter credit risk decisioning. But before we talk about how you and the team are doing that these days, let's start at the beginning and flesh out a bit of their background. What did your early career look like? And what were some of the roles or situations that shaped you?
Adrian Pillay 3:41
Thanks, Brendan, your podcast is one that I've admired for some time so it is an absolute pleasure and delight to be able to join you today. And thanks for the opportunity and the invite.
I actually began my career in business immediately after college and after a few years realized that it wasn't quite for me. And so I got into the corporate world. Interestingly, I started my career in IT sales and pivoted into systems and business analysis when I joined Accenture, and I was working in the then largest clothing retailer in South Africa.
My career trajectory really changed when I got into credit management by joining TransUnion in 2004, and I worked in both the credit bureau and the analytics vertical, and I then have an opportunity to relocate to Dubai with Dun & Bradstreet - or D&B as some people may know them - in 2008. And I focused on the establishment and operationalization of credit bureaus for clients of Dun & Bradstreet as well as for Dun & Bradstreet themselves. And I did this across Africa and Middle East and Asia.
For some reason or the other. I then defected for one year and joined Experian, then rejoined d&b, which culminated in me establishing and operating the credit bureau in Oman.
My family and I got back to South Africa, the beginning of 2018. And I rejoined TransUnion. So that was quite nice: the last company I worked for in South Africa was the first company I rejoined when we returned. And then I was responsible for business development there, in what we call 'the rest of Africa' - so all of TransUnion's business interests outside of the South African market.
And in 2020, literally, just before the pandemic hit, I joined FICO or Fair Isaac Corporation, who are the world's leader in credit scoring. And I was focused on driving stronger adoption of the FICO score in Sub Saharan Africa.
Then that brings us to today, and Provenir, who I joined in 2022. I head up sales for Africa, Middle East, and Turkey.
Brendan Le Grange 5:56
I see that Provenir has just won a data breakthrough award for the third consecutive year. So I think a lot of people listening do know their name, and know it quite well, but maybe not everybody. So before we get into the nuts and bolts of the products you've got at Provenir, and where does your role fit into that big organization?
Adrian Pillay 5:56
Provenir is a US based SaaS credit decisioning solution provider. We have a global footprint, and what we do is we bring together global experts to deliver a world class solution to our customers.
At its heart, Provenir's platform allows customers to automate the end to end lending processes, and help them move away from old manual time consuming approaches.
Our platform enables lenders to make real time credit decisions, in most instances in milliseconds, enhancing efficiency and responsiveness. But it's not only the speed of the decisioning, that adds value to our customers, businesses, but the ability to have consistent objective data driven credit decisions in place. And this really allows them to have confidence in the exposure of the leading portfolios, essentially, in today's dynamic financial landscape.
The innovation of our solution lies in a number of areas, but I'll speak about two key areas: and that is our awareness of the importance that AI plays today in risk decision making; and the importance that data plays in making informed decisions.
On the AI front, Provenir's auto ML product allows our customers to quickly easily and affordably develop new or improved credit risk scores, which are instantly deployable into those credit decisioning workflows on the Provenir platform.
And this really allows our customers to recognize new patterns, and to create more optimized decision making algorithms, allowing them to broaden their customer base quickly, while still effectively managing their risk.
The other offering is our data marketplace that brings together the widest range of traditional and alternative data providers into a single ecosystem. Provenir have pre configured the integrations with these data providers and sole, our customers can actually quickly, effortlessly and seamlessly ingest new data sources and enhance their decisioning workflows with the best data available to them.
By introducing alternative data as an example into learning strategies, financial services providers able to give access to more options. This is particularly beneficial when dealing with unbanked customers as an example, which, you know, we know is still a major challenge in the African continent.
Brendan Le Grange 8:50
Yeah, indeed. And I've had Carey Anderson on here before from a sister company, or cousin company of Provenir, who have actually built their solution on the back of the Provenir AI. And so I knew that it was going to be fully embedded in there. But it's worth exploring that because obviously all the headlines ai ai these days, but this is real nuts and bold staff. And I saw when I was scrolling around on LinkedIn that you've recently completed a poll that found that 36% of respondents see risk assessment as a is biggest impact in lending.
For me, it's interesting, and I wonder if you can unpack what you think about that. But also maybe some insights you might have heard firsthand, from the sort of customers who maybe were responding to that poll.
Adrian Pillay 9:39
Provenir realized early on that one of the major challenges that lenders have is inability to respond very quickly to changes that may impact the lending strategies, but mentioned earlier that I have a background in scoring. From that time at Fico. I understand all too well how long it can take sometimes to come up with The provides score that addresses these changes in the lending landscape.
Sometimes by the time a new score, for example, and strategies deployed, it may be a little too late to bring the maximum benefit to lenders. So we as proven year sought to solve this challenge for our customers. And we knew that AI and machine learning are the best foundational tools to use for this. Imagine this scenario, imagine having the ability to model a new, sophisticated credit score with full explainability. In a matter of days, this process typically would take months, if not longer. And so to then be able to deploy that into existing decisioning workflows instantaneously.
That is what's Provenir has made the reality for our customers already. We had a great demonstration of this a few months back with one of our existing US customers. In real time, we took a small subset of the data ingested into our AI environment, and went on to model the first iteration of a predictive credit score with the no involvement of any data scientists.
Now, I'll concede that this first iteration was perhaps a more simple model. But with more time and a larger data set, the results are unbelievable. Ai allows lenders to fundamentally change how they evaluate credit risk. Those 36% of respondents are 100% accurate. AI's biggest impact in lending is in risk assessment.
Brendan Le Grange 11:37
You've got the Middle East and Africa - and Turkey as a sort of a nice midpoint of the two geographically - it's quite an interesting region, or the show, given my roots, I do try and make sure we speak about African innovation fairly often. But the Middle East is not a region I hear a lot about naturally, a lot of stuffs happening in Africa that just goes unnoticed as well, working with deca, corns and unicorns. And really in that sort of hub of innovative lending from the ground from this region, we maybe don't hear enough about, are there any standout stories or anything like the ways in which lenders are maybe taking these tools and these technologies, and rethinking that whole lending model,
Adrian Pillay 12:20
We've been fortunate in establishing a very diverse set of customers in this region. And I think the power and flexibility of the provenir platform is showcased by this. Today, we have customers that use all solutions in this region for most consumer lending use cases, including mortgage vehicle asset finance, credit cards, personal loans, micro loans, we have customers who use our platform for SME lending, customer loyalty decisioning, digital banking, furniture, retail lending, mobile subscriber contracting, buy now pay later, and even those that use us primarily for the power of our data orchestration capabilities.
And all of these use cases span across onboarding and KYC to fraud, as well as to customer management. And the extreme diversity, I think, is what I love about my region. You know, we have closed markets as an example like Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, we have not yet adopted public cloud, at least within financial services, to dynamic FinTech markets, like the UAE, which is so strongly driven, and backed by government and government support to high focus markets for investors like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
Some time back, I started penning my thoughts on my time working in Africa. And then although I haven't made it into anything publishable as yet, the working title says a lot about my thoughts about this continent, not the United States of Africa. This was intended to be a reflection on that diversity of the continent. Africa is often viewed as a single target markets, when in fact, I think the complexity needed to be successful here is actually very, very high. Egypt has almost nothing in common with Nigeria, which in turn is very little in common with Kenya and South Africa is something entirely different altogether. Right?
If we look at the Middle East, the GCC countries have a lot in common, but then very little in common with the rest of the Middle East, and then other Turkey, which while it's probably closer aligned to Europe from a overall lending perspective, we as proven yet understood that it was best managed together with the Middle East, since it is also such a closed market and as such, our product strategy and our go to market strategy is closely aligned to what we have in place today for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where, you know, cloud solutions for financial service providers, is quite restricted.
And we got a couple of great examples of that solution to fit your needs. comment that you made in your question. And two of our newest customers to go live on proven here in South Africa are great examples of that. And they are MTN and Autocheck Africa.
MTN is the largest mobile network operator in Africa. And what we were able to demonstrate with this implementation was the versatility of our platform scalability, ability to integrate into a complex infrastructure, and the capability of our technical team to deliver quickly and with excellence, there was definitely a challenging delivery, as I'm sure you and audience can imagine, but a successful one nevertheless.
And I love the Autocheck story, pretty much in that order check is a used car marketplace. And they identified a lending gap that prevented their customers from successfully concluding a deal. So this is, you know, a buyer and a seller coming together, ready to make a deal, but really unable to find the financing to meet that and enable that transaction.
So auto check expanded the offering to offer finance to buyers on the platform. What we demonstrated most effectively with this deployment was the ease of using the prevenir platform, you know, we as prevenir delivered minimum viable product runway MVP, one towards check, which was a single product in two countries. And we did this in 15 weeks, the customer then independently without any further involvement from proven years implementation team went on to expand to five countries and three products all on their own.
These are the types of advancements that automation and solutions such as proven years are allowing customers to to implement and adopt in their businesses and in the territories that they cover.
Brendan Le Grange 17:19
I'm a bit biased myself with having worked internationally throughout my career, but also with this show. One of the goals that I have in reaching out to so many different marketplaces is that I think when you're working across such diverse region, you work in all these markets that have enforced constraints.
So my wife was trained in supply chain management, and they've got this theory of constraints. But essentially, if you're working in a market you where there's no cloud, or you're working in a market with Islamic banking laws, or you're working in a market that doesn't have landline phones, or doesn't have street addresses, all of these things have created evolved situations that are different. And people have come up with different solutions as a result. And I think there's a huge amount of value in that they kind of natural experiments that have arisen. And we may not have the same constraints and the market we're sitting in now. But the way that somebody solved that problem could be really useful for you in getting around a problem.
There's some solutions in Islamic banking that actually work really well, just in any open banking situation, or any kind of banking situation. Likewise, like the Buy Now Pay Later model with its sort of not needing interest to run as a profitable model is a great transition over across in the other direction.
So what I love is that bird's eye view of this region that does vary so much, not just theory, you're comparing Africa to the Middle East, but within each of those regions as well. Having that diversity, it really gives us a chance to learn, and why I think there's always something to be found by talking to organizations or people such as yourselves who have seen it in different ways, and maybe testing some of the assumptions that we just work with day to day. And do we really need to do things this way or that.
So I'd encourage anybody who speaks to you or your team in the future, to also just talk about maybe some interesting ways that other markets have found solutions or being forced to find solutions to the same problems. But yeah, we won't keep you too long on that topic. I see that you've recently delivered with some colleagues and some partners, a webinar entitled navigating the future, unveiling the keys to successful digital transformation in financial services. So I think every time in history, it feels like we're at a very difficult time to predict the future.
So any insights in the space always greatly appreciated? What were the highlights of the talk? What were the key themes that you and the others were discussing there?
Adrian Pillay 20:10
I think firstly, I'll say what an enjoyable experience it was for me. And I think I love being on the other end of the panel. And I probably realized from that webinar that I enjoyed moderating far more than being a speaker, I was fortunate to have a really great panel, and cashmoney. Here, Timo and deswik, sessional. I think we covered some valuable and important questions. And more importantly, we've got some great questions from our audience as well.
Perhaps for me, the big takeaways were that it's not an easy process, when we talk digital transformation, and that institutions need to have a well structured plan and strategy in play, that helps them meet the expectations of their customers. I think in today's digital world, any plan, any strategy that doesn't put the customer at the corner at the center of that plan, from an outcomes perspective, is going to fall short of the maximum value and benefit that they can deliver. I think an adequate budget for this is critical to ensure that they can in fact deliver that best in class improvements that they need and the customers are expecting.
And then I think also with the rapid rate of change that digital transformation is taking place. It's critical that organizations manage that change process internally, so that the maximum expected value can be ensured by their customers, and more importantly, then the internal change management process. It's ensuring that regulations keep abreast with the demands that digital transformation places on these organizations. I think customer centricity was a very, very key and important topic that we discussed.
And around that the importance that AI and analytics play in delivering that customer centric experience. As an offshoot was the importance of having the right data with the right quality and being available to them at the right time. And how important that is, in allowing exceptional customer experience.
A probably I think the last big takeaway for me was organization's ability to be agile, respond quickly to the changing demands of customers, the economic environment, or regulatory landscape, and changing dynamics in the credit appetite of the market at play.
Brendan Le Grange 23:07
We do need to be super agile these days. And you know, when those headlines started coming out, it can sometimes feel a bit intimidating that AI is this thing just for the super technical people sitting in a back room somewhere. But the fact is, like if they're using chat GPT to create images for you, you're not doing it because you think chat GPT can make a better picture, then a artists good or graphic designer, you're doing it because they can do it within a few seconds.
And it's about speeding up the work that you need to get done. And ideally, it's about speeding up the work, that's not adding any real value to you. And AI has just so much potential there in not completely changing the business you're doing not need to you need to hire teams and teams of Google trained data scientists, it's about getting rid of a whole lot of unnecessary work that was being done by these teams that was getting in the way of the real work, the innovation, the product delivery work. And so getting your head around that finding systems that are agile, that allow you to get your work done quickly, that allow you to put in place what you need for the market you're in at the moment. Yes, key to to all lenders.
And it's always, I think rewarding to put in place the sort of systems for your staff that can then be freed up to do what they love. So awesome to hear that are some really good pointers for people to think about their own organizations against him, or where they may be needing to focus a bit. That's the case.
Adrian, I see that you're growing your team. By the time the show comes up. Maybe you're not hiring still but you're growing your team. You're doing interesting work. You're delivering great results. You're working with interesting clients. You're working with really cutting edge technology, so there's a lot of reasons that somebody's listening may want to reach out to Provenir, or reach out to you more directly. If somebody wanted to do that if they wanted to see more about the solutions, if they wanted to see some of those use cases, or if they wanted to start a conversation with your team, what's the best way for people to do that? Where can they find you online?
Adrian Pillay 25:22
I think the best way to reach out and connect with my team is to head over to www.provenir.com/contact
And they can either fill out our Contact Us form, and my team will be in contact from there, or better still, book a meeting directly online with my team. On that page with the guidance of our helpful bots. It's an excellent way to schedule time for a direct conversation with my team or myself.
From my perspective, I'm always looking for great talent, and always looking to connect with like minded professionals in the industry, as well as from potential customers and partners that we can help transform and improve their business, the best way to contact and connect with me is LinkedIn, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, pretty responsive, and love to connect and chat on it. So it will be there.
Brendan Le Grange 26:19
I'll put the links to you and to the prevenir website in the show notes as well. There's one last part that's particularly interesting and a reason people should be following you. I think and that's the sort of innovation that can come out of this region where you've got some of the markets that have the very developing markets coming off the back of mobile money success, building some interesting products there for young, highly populated low income markets. And the other end of your region, you've got cities like Dubai that are characterized by completely different landscapes.
So you are at the forefront of seeing learning innovation of all types. For a view of that an easy way for the rest of us to stay up to date with what's happening there would be to connect with him on LinkedIn, and get that early insight into what's popping up there. I guess maybe it's just worth checking if you have got any trends or businesses or anything exciting that you're keeping your eye on in that region that maybe the rest of us should pay particular attention to anything
Adrian Pillay 27:22
From my perspective, I'm excited to see what fintechs continue to deliver across the region, waiting for more unicorns to emerge, and even deca, cons and you know, my personal opinion is that fintechs are moving financial services forward in a way that Tesla move the electric car industry forward, right.
And I think that they will continue not only to just deliver excellent innovation themselves, or what I love is that tension that they place on legacy lenders, and fintechs, in turn are the catalyst that drives these legacy lenders to introduce better innovation themselves into the marketplace.
I think that we are seeing fintechs fundamentally change how institutions are able to tap into so many segments that were previously invisible to traditional lenders, whether we look at agri tech or health care, or micro lending, right, short term loans, payday loans, all of these things they're probably 10 years ago, would not have made economic sense for a traditional lending target. And so these core fundamental needs that existed in the market will lift, ignored, and unserviced. I've had the privilege and the benefit of working in Africa specifically for probably close on two decades now. And having been in industries like credit bureaus, scoring solution delivery, like what we are proven to do.
I've had the privilege of a front row seat to see how getting the right money to the right people at the right time, irrelevant of how little or how much they need. How this can fundamentally N transformation really change the lives of people across this region. So you know, from my perspective, I think that's the big one. And I think next would probably be around the digital world.
We spoke a little about it earlier, I think in this new digital world where the likes of Netflix, Spotify, and even Amazon have really set a really, really high bar for seamless, personalized experiences. consumers around the world are expecting nothing less from the banks and the lenders and the financial industry. chusions I think according to a recent McKinsey and Company study, it said, banks using custom analytics have seen a 20% increase in satisfaction scores, and a 15% revenue boost, I'm better to be there 15%. So I think that customer experience, and tailored and personalized offerings are really where efforts need to be right now, if lenders want to capture and retain the next generation of customers, those customers want and must feel understood. Yeah,
Brendan Le Grange 30:35
And that's where these tools come into it as well to interact and use alternative data. Because if I go back to your use case, with the second hand car sales, banks wouldn't finance an old second hand vehicle, because in the auto loan process, we would say, well, the valuations too low and too many potential problems.
But we would give an unsecured personal loan, which invariably would be used to fund the same vehicle, we were just making ourselves blind to some of these situations. And perhaps in the old days, we didn't have the ability to really participate right upfront, but we were kidding ourselves, if we were thinking, we were not exposed to a lot of the risk anyway, as of maybe a pricing difference. But in a lot of cases, we were just not seeing what was happening. Now we do have those tools to step in there, embedded finance, but also just this understanding of the customer getting closer, using the right data to make that work for them. And to be able to achieve these client expectations.
Because you're right, we're all able to go on to Amazon, one click, and somebody gets sent to my house, I don't have to do very much. And it's all done. You can't live half your life like that. Yeah, it's just a Netflix you sit down, turn the TV on, it's got shows for me to watch. And if I go on my wife's on, it's entirely different menu of of products, we move from one experience, the other end, lenders need to do the same. And if we mark doing it as a Big Bang is we're getting get different decks coming in and doing that for us and changing the customer expectations until we have to.
So exciting times exciting region, definitely encourage people to go across to prevenir to look at the products and to find you on LinkedIn and follow you because the real benefit is getting the view through your eyes of one region I guess in your terminology, three regions maybe geographically, but region so full of diversity and diversity of different levels.
So thank you so much, Adrian for making the time. Really looking forward to seeing what comes out of your team and Provenir ore broadly in the future.
Adrian Pillay 32:49
Thanks again for having me on, and great conversation.
Brendan Le Grange 32:54
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.