Open banking is mainstream, with James Varga

No one will give you a job until you have work experience. No one will extend you credit until you have a credit history. Two absurdities that have existed long enough to become absolute cliches, and yet they somehow persist. And more than that, they’re two hurdles that are easier to overcome if you come from money - maybe you’ve got an aunt who could have a word with the bank’s CEO…

Well, that’s actually changing now. We’ve spoken about Open Banking before, quite recently actually, but in today’s discussion with James Varga of DirectID we really zoom into the impact that analysis all financial data - debit, credit, and otherwise - can have on expanding access to credit, and how it can remove the need for the self-sabotaging credit score management tactics of old.

DirectID is leveraging Open Finance and bank statement data to help lenders understand their customers throughout the credit risk lifecycle, and they’re hiring - so if you want to learn more about the product offering, head on over to www.direct.id or if you want to help build those products, it’s www.direct.id/company/careers

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), while you can find my action-adventure novels on Amazon, some versions are perma-free.

If you have any feedback, 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:

James Varga 0:00

We're not necessarily replacing bureaus, you still want your peps and sanctions and negative data set and historical performance - there's still value in that. Absolutely. But it does augment it and solve the problems that the bureau's find difficult to solve these days: how much do you spend? On what? These are the core questions that a lender wants to ask.

And so Open Banking can get paired with those bureau techs in a really nice, elegant way more efficien way, that saves money.

Brendan Le Grange 0:33

Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers. I'm your host, Brendan le Grange and I've spent the last 20 or so years working in consumer credit strategy across Africa, Asia and Europe. And about half of that time has been spent in credit bureaus. In fact, I helped to roll out the first ever national credit bureau scores in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. So when I would read an article that encourages consumers to open a new credit card to build a credit score, or to not close an old account to save their credit history, I would understand why: it's all score mechanics.

It's not finding risky customers that's difficult when we build a credit score. They don't pay their accounts, it's usually that easy. But it's a lot harder to separate low risk customers from very low risk customers. If you've never missed a payment and I've never missed a payment, then it might well come down to who's never missed a payment for the longest.

But that's not to say I don't also see the flaws in the system. Encouraging somebody to open a credit product might actually increase their risk in the real world, while encouraging somebody to not close an account might increase their banking fees unnecessarily. And that is why open banking powered scores are so interesting to me. Not only do they promise to cater for consumers who choose a debit card, as well as they do for consumers who choose a credit card, but they can see where and how that consumer actually spends - adding a whole depth of data we never had before.

James Varga has been in Open Banking since the start. And now, as founder and CEO of DirectID, he is on a mission to re-define credit risk globally through open banking data, which is why I'm delighted to have him on the show today.

Cool, so James, thank you so much for coming on the show. One of the big reasons I'm excited to be talking to you is that you have been involved with Open Banking right from the start, so before we talk about DirectID and the work you're doing now, maybe we could spend a few minutes just talking about that background, how you've grown alongside this technology to where you are now.

James Varga 2:53

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brendan, my journey with Open Banking started a long time ago, when I started working with Money Dashboard and Gavin Littlejohn in the early days of that. At Money Dashboard we built one of the UK's first big personal finance management tools, using bank data, pulling that information together to essentially a personal balance sheet and view of all your finances.

Brendan Le Grange 3:18

The Open Banking movement has gained some steam, and you left Money Dashboard, and you've gone and founded DirectID where you've got some pretty bold visions: "building a credit risk platform to redefine the industry for lenders and consumers". What are you doing at DirectID to bring that about? And what does it really mean?

James Varga 3:39

Yes, absolutely. Direct ID is a global credit and risk platform where we're leveraging the identity and data people have with their bank account, what we now call open banking, or open banking data, to help our customers - which are typically lenders or banks or companies who need to understand their customers. We help them through that process of understanding an individual's financial profiles.

We live in a fairly broken world from a credit risk perspective, where in order to get credit, you have to have credit, you can have been paying £1,000 a month in rent for the last 10 years and still not qualify for a mortgage because you've never taken credit. And that's the UK, where we have a thick credit bureau industry, most of the world doesn't have that. What we want to do is is redefine that industry to allow individuals to leverage what they already have, which is their bank statement - it tells you huge amount about an individual - and leverage that so that the lender, the business, can really understand that person or that business.

Brendan Le Grange 4:40

And before we dive too deep into DirectID and how you're solving those problems. I see you're based in Edinburgh and this is just anecdotal but looking on LinkedIn, I've seen more and more fintechs that seem to be based there. So is there a strong startup culture, a strong FinTech culture emerging in Edinburgh? Or am I just coincidentally noticing a few of them because I was about to talk to you?

James Varga 5:04

Probably a combination of both. But financial services has always had a strong association in Scotland, right. Edinburgh is a very financial services rich city - about 20% of the population probably work in and around financial services, which is great. And that bleeds into the startup community. It brings a certain level of awareness to early investors around financial services and it definitely has a certain pedigree around financial services that has helped establish that FinTech startup scene that we have here now.

Plus, we now have FinTech Scotland over the recent years helping to bolster that industry, that community, and some great universities like Edinburgh University and Napier and Heriot-Watt, which are putting a lot of talent into the local community. So I think it's a combination of a few factors... beyond is a great place to live!

Brendan Le Grange 5:57

Yeah, I'm sure, I did spend a rather fun weekend there once as a as a student.

But if we go back to DirectID now and take a little look under the hood, as it were, you talk about accessing bank data through 13,000 connections across 65 countries supporting 1.5 billion people through one integration. You know, not many years ago that would have seemed a truly impossible act. And obviously, we've heard a lot about bricks and mortar and branches fading away, but not everybody's fully familiar with what's replacing it, and how this Open Banking connection actually works. So how are you connecting that data? And what does that look like to see this wealth of data in in one place for your customers?

James Varga 6:38

Yeah, the world changed a lot in the last four or five years. If I go back to the conversations I was having with businesses 10/ 11 years ago, it's fundamentally shifted now. And that's because the UK has done a fantastic job of putting itself at the forefront of Open Banking. And having been involved throughout that process myself - I mean we were were founding members of Innovate Finance, and FDATA, the global lobbying group around open banking, I chaired the data subgroup for the original open banking working group paper to government four or five years ago now.

And it is very much a global trend, I think 30 plus countries around the world have launched regulatory based open banking programmes. And the more that trend continues, the more access there will be for businesses like us to leverage this hugely valuable data on behalf of the individual. So it's always consented activities. So the individual has to authenticate to their banking, consent to share a read only copy of their data, opening up access digitally, to individual's bank statements, which is a big part of open banking.

The other part obviously, is pay through your bank. But as that trend continues, we're just going to see more and more use cases.

Brendan Le Grange 7:53

Yeah, and one of those use cases, when when I was working with an open banking team, one of the messages that they would try and get across very often was around open banking's use in income and affordability checks. I'd come from this background where we were always trying to estimate an income. And what they got me to realise is actually, when you're doing that income and expenditure estimation, income is the easiest thing to estimate.

Now in the UK, it's even easier because credit bureaus tend to have current account data so you can get a good look at what someone earns. But even in other markets, you know, based on where you live, based on your credit card limits and your credit card spend, you're can kinda estimate what somebody earns. But what they.. the message they got across was that people's underlying expenditure's where the big variation comes, you and your neighbour on the street, probably earn a similar amount, but you might spend wildly different amounts and in different ways, you know, in different categories. And those change the picture so dramatically.

Are you seeing a shift in how people look at affordability? And how much more we know now with open banking?

James Varga 9:02

Absolutely. There's a huge amount of opportunity. And even as a business that's connected, you know, millions of bank accounts so far and has spent the last four or five years looking at what information you can derive from someone's bank statement - I think we're still very much scratching the surface.

You're right, bureaus have been able to derive some information around income, at least in the UK and US. And it is the first question that you would ask. But I think bank statement data allows you to go even further with that. And instead of estimating someone's income, actually evidencing that an individual's been paid, you know, £1,000 a month for the last 12 months from this source.

And even extend that beyond the standard monthly salaried individual into the big part of the market, which actually needs the financing. So we're talking about the gig economy, the students, the multi jobbed piece of it, the self-employed, the trades people, which have been traditionally neglected in the industry. And actually, where most of our customers are consumer or business lenders, when we looked at our own data set and building our income verification tool, we realised actually about 20% of the population in the data set -so these are people that have used the platform - had a standard monthly income, 80% didn't. And it makes sense, because those are the individuals that are looking for financing when they need to.

But you're also absolutely right. And that affordability is is the more nuanced or drastic side of that question, as well as, as you can spend, you know, £50 or £500 in food a week, just by going out for dinner a bunch of times, right. So understanding how people spend their money and where they're spending it, and how they're managing their finances is really important, not just from an affordability point of view, but I'm a huge fan of cashflow, it's okay for you to spend that much eating out, if you can afford it, right. And that might be part of your lifestyle, or just because you spend X on travel or eating out or shoes or gadgets or whatever it is doesn't mean that you're financially distressed or unable to make the right choices.

And actually, the opportunity around open banking data is to really dig into that bank statement data in a structured, fairly automated way where, you know, it's not gonna take an underwriter an hour to type a someone's bank statement into Excel and categorise and do things. You can take that that same process that we've always used in something like mortgage underwriting, and you can apply it to buy now pay later, because the data is there, it connects in seconds, it comes through enriched with all this wonderful information. And you can not just do a manual underwriting process. But you can even automate some of those checks, which is really, really exciting. The impact that we see around bank data is incredible. And what we're seeing in the industry, especially when you look at Buy now pay later and credit card propositions is ever increasing pressure from the regulators, not just in the UK, but around the world to help protect consumers. And affordability checks is at the heart of a lot of that conversation.

Brendan Le Grange 12:19

It echoes some of what you spoke about in your introduction, that idea that used to come from a world where you had to have credit to to get credit, and it gave credit products, a stickiness but also the sense of necessity that could be dangerous at times - where consumers were encouraged, if they had a longer term plan, perhaps, to buy a house and would need a mortgage down the road, then open a credit card today, to build that credit history. Now I understand why that data is important and why it was needed to build a good score, but at the same time, I can see that that could be problematic to push somebody to a credit product they don't necessarily need, you're introducing some risk. Now some people that risk is tiny, but for some other people that risk is a little bit higher.

Now, with open banking, you know, the message was going to make it more competitive but the fact was, you were still wary of perhaps closing a old credit card you had because you wanted that credit history. And so it made it not as competitive or not as easy to move about as it could have been.

Whereas really when open banking is fully freed up, my spend could be on one of my credit cards, it could be one of my debit cards, it could be on a buy now pay later, it could be transactions through any one of the many apps and they all get pulled into that one place, I just need to have control of those, and I could be in control of five or six accounts, none of them need to be credit.

James Varga 13:45

The more I understand about the industry over the years, the more it frustrates me. I completely understand the necessity of that 'give to get' model that, you know, you have to exist on a bureau profile somewhere to make sure that they can understand at least a little bit about you, to be able to know that you're not fraudulent or that you're not bankrupt or something like that. I get that. But I think the impact socially is much greater than that, we're desensitising generations of people to credit.

And of course, we live in a credit based society if in order to do anything, you have to have had credit in the first place. There is a fundamental issue there that I would love to change, at least in some small way.

Where we tell people to go to university get a credit card, or to pay off their the rent from their student loan just to get a credit profile - and that's something that the government money advice services, knowledge institutes, as a as a culture, we tell people to go and do this because at some point in the future, you might need credit! And what we should be saying I think is go to university, or get on the job ladder, or whatever it is, but be responsible, save a little bit of money and when you graduate, take that financial behaviour with you to prove the the last couple of years, you've been able to save 100,000, now you have a job where you didn't before and so forth.

They you should be able to get that car loan to have your first car without, without having to have had a credit card and an access to credit for the last few years.

Brendan Le Grange 15:18

And I think there's - it's something I've said in one of the other episodes as well -but one of the problems that I think has been woven into the way we see credit scores is they've become synonymous with kind of a reputational score. And they've taken on a far more personal judgement than that they should be. They're simply, you know, the mathematical model that says people with your data history have this probability of going into delinquency. And it's not this all encompassing judgement.

But it used to be the only thing in the game, if you wanted to make a loan, you needed to see their credit data, because that's where you could get structured data with monthly patterns. Whereas now, everybody's gone online. So from your gym, to your Netflix, in theory, you can be using Uber payments, you can be using anything that's got a pattern. And it's been a while for that to catch up. As said, I'm from the credit bureaus, I still keep an eye on what's happening there. I know that they're more and more incorporating different bits of data, but our way of transacting has become so different. It's time to reflect that. And it's not just saying, replacing one with the other. It's saying I don't need to look at credit only: as you say, look at my savings, why is that not something that's taken into account?

It really does feel like the right time for this to hit the stage.

James Varga 16:41

You're absolutely right, the bureau's have become a proxy for reputation, but reputation where you don't have control. A friend of mine's partner applied for a peloton bike on financing six months ago, and she was declined, and now she has a decline entry on her credit profile when it had nothing to do with her, they ran out of their line of credit for that date. And we hear examples of these things all the time.

So, I think it is a broken model, right? Those are UK examples and US examples. There's countries around the world that have no bureau industries, which has been the only way to do it.

But absolutely, financial services is a global trust network. Bank statements are the same all over the world.

Brendan Le Grange 17:25

You're listening to How to Lend Money to Strangers. If you're enjoying it, please hit the little plus button to subscribe and share it with your connections on LinkedIn. Now, let's get back to the show.

James Varga 17:37

Bank statements have a huge amount of information. If we sat down with my bank statement, you would know a lot about me (yeah), right? And any lender, whether you're consumer or business, they want to issue more products at a lower cost at a lower fraud/ risk rates. And that's that's the impact we see DirectID having, where we can go back to almost that personal level again, those basics, and go 'how much does James make? Where does he spend his money? Can he manage his finances? He might like to eat out, but he doesn't need to eat out'.

It's about really understanding that individual or that financial profile, if that makes sense.

Brendan Le Grange 18:13

Yeah, it is coming full circle to the old, probably romanticised, view of the bank branch manager in the small community who knew you from when you were a kid, and knows who you spend your time with, and what you do, and thenn making a personal judgement. Then we had to scale everything up, but now technology's caught up where we can bring it back.

And I think the other thing that is worth calling out here, because it is a big strength of open banking, is the natural delays that are built into the credit bureau data. December account data, the bank, they process it in January, they send it to the credit bureau in February, we've got to update our databases. It's February or maybe even March that you're getting December's data available

James Varga 18:58

Or June or July by the time it goes and synchronises to the other bureaus, because most lenders compare the datasets between bureaus to make sure that is as accurate and up to date as possible. Absolutely. You have this inbuilt delay, the world's become a lot more chaotic.

Brendan Le Grange 19:14

And certainly now is a really good example of how chaotic the world is. But even if we forget about global pandemics and world wars and all that's happening in the last few months, even just generally, it's all just a lot more fast-paced.

And yeah, so talk about three months to six month delays. When we build credit scores, we're always weighting the most recent data because we know that the most recent behaviour has got the biggest impact on your current situation. And we do that knowing that actually the most recent 3/ 4/ 5 months are blind to us. Whereas Open Banking, that data has, at least to my understanding, is essentially immediate. As soon as I click the button, it's whatever I've done up to that point.

James Varga 19:54

For all intents and purposes, absolutely. It's real time. It's 'what information has the bank registered for you, when you authenticate and share your bank data - ignoring small differences, like pending transactions and so forth'. But absolutely, it's around real time data, right. And a lot could have happened to somebody in the last six months. So now, more than ever, that real time data is critical.

It's about looking at the data today and the individual in the business today, I think there's a huge opportunity. And we see this with some of our customers and there are use cases around SME and corporate financing as well. In that world, you had to rely on Companies House data, which is even older than that. They can be a year or two old. Why would I invite you for a barbecue this weekend because last year, on this weekend it was sunny - it just doesn't make sense when you put it in perspective like that.

Brendan Le Grange 20:48

Yeah. And it does feel like the time is about right for Open Banking. And I think what's interesting with Open Banking is shortly before the pandemic, Open Banking was in a lot of headlines. And then more recently, it's all about Buy Now Pay Later, that can lead people to think okay, so Open Banking sort of fizzled out. But if you look at the take up rates in the UK, it is growing every month store, and I'd say 80% of the people I interview on here are using Open Banking or looking to use Open Banking technology, it's just moved a bit to the background. Because it's more about enabling products or enabling services than a thing that you sell to a customer. What would be the right message for people wondering where the momentum is in Open Banking?

James Varga 21:33

So for me open banking has moved past those exploratory, new idea, new concept days. And we've migrated now past the early adopters and the buzz of it into real world use cases. So for me, Open Banking is becoming mainstream. You know, when you look at the 5 million people in the UK that have connected their bank account through open banking, now, we're starting to hit that critical mass. And our understanding of where the value in open banking and bank data is and starting to mature now where we can make a bigger impact.

So moving from early adopter and pioneer sort of conceptual projects into things that have a real world impact, we see conversion rates increase, you know, 45 - 50%, we've seen fraud rates reduce 7.5%, costs effort taking a manual process that was two hours, three hours, in some cases down to 30 seconds. Those are benefits that you can't really argue with as a business.

You know, contactless payments, arecontactless payments dead because we don't talk about them every week? Absolutely not. They're becoming the norm. Yeah, I think for me, Open Banking is going from strength to strength, you know, we're seeing more and more momentum, because the value of it is there and you can argue with it.

Brendan Le Grange 22:59

When I was first in the UK, we did a rental affordability check by open banking, I did it again, when I moved to the place we're staying now, but it was just a small landlord qnd he just wanted to see the bank statements. And it made me really uncomfortable, because I really don't want to do that I'd much prefer that structured world where it's fully controlled, you know, I'm still making all the necessary information available to the landlord. But in this controlled, and as you said, consented way, it's not a case of having to show a printout of my bank statement to a potential landlord. So people want that data to be able to move easily, so that they can transact

James Varga 23:40

Convenience is such a huge motivator, whether they're individuals or businesses, you know, if your fridge is broken down, and you walk into John Lewis, if you can walk away with a new fridge and get it home this afternoon... it doesn't really matter what the use case is.

Convenience being such a huge motivator means that we don't need in my view to educate people on what open banking is, we just need to provide the reasons the benefits, especially around convenience, that get people to connect their bank account. And as you said, it is safer sharing that data through a secure channel as a regulated business like like us than, you know, photocopying or printing out your bank statements and then sending them into the post to some unknown place.

And these are all topics that have been talked about for a long time. But it is great to see the use cases start to develop the market start to mature, our understanding of these topics really starts to develop the fact that we don't need to educate consumers on what open banking is we just need to provide them a reason to call to action that makes sense. And if we do that, they get where they need. The business gets what they need. The regulators are happy because there's more richer data to personalise and, and really provide that responsible approach to to those lending situations and, and we just get on with their life. It's exciting.

Brendan Le Grange 24:58

And I think what's also worth calling out in this environment where we've got good, comprehensive data, the people that want and need and qualify for loans can get them. And we avoid giving them to people where that loan would be damaging. It takes these costs out of the system. And, you know, we can say, well, it's making the banks more profitable, but it's really about reducing the cost of borrowing.

Because if you are in an invisible or hard to score population at the moment, people in there that are just deemed high risk, because there's not enough information to show they are low risk. And they're actually paying the burden of this lack of information, they're paying a higher rate, because no lender knows how to see that they are low risk. And so creating these paths to say, okay, I can now shine a light on this consumer, and those consumers can borrow at good rates. It's really getting out of the system, all these inefficiencies.

And the fraud. I mean, I think the fraud angle is also a really big one. Because, again, we talk about banking headlines, at least in the popular press today, it seems like it's either by now pay later or fraud. In a world where we have to be fast and convenient to consumers. Yeah, how do we do this without opening up to fraud, and it's great to hear that you're seeing not just fraud, staying the same in a more convenient world, but actually reducing...

James Varga 26:20

Not just reducing huge reductions, you know, things like application fraud and impersonation fraud, 80 - 90% of that disappearing. Because if I'm connecting my background, I'm not gonna lie about my income, right? You know, I'm not gonna say, I make 50,000 when its really 42 and stretch the truth just to try and give myself as much chance of getting that loan as possible.

The impact of the individual is fantastic, it might provide more profitability for those banks, or whatever. But the fees we pay of consumers of these financial products, build in the cost of customer acquisition, the fraud risk, the default risk, all the costs. So if we can reduce those costs and the fraud and all the rest of it, then in a competitive world, which Financial Services is, propositions will come along to offer you better rates. I would love a credit card that was 10% instead of 25%.

If I was doing a daily risk assessment, versus what currently happens, they do a bureau check. And then 20 years later, I'm still using the same card. But if that business, if that credit card, or that lending product, kind of real time source of data, maybe a weekly or even a monthly view of me and my finance, and that would benefit me as an individual, I have a really strong credit score, because I'm in the industry. And I've still failed credit risk assessments on places like Apple Store, for a phone on financing, it's a £1,000 loan, £30 a month, and I've still failed that check because my bureau doesn't really understand me as an individual, it makes some assumptions which aren't true.

And this is where I think the rub is actually I think, people requiring access to these financial products, the support, the financial inclusion, the whatever, people moving around the thin credit files, the new to countries, the people that just never had to get loans. Actually, the people applying for these products are probably the 80% applying for these online, digitally first consumer lending business lending products of one sort. So it's not the minority, I think it's the majority of people that can benefit in context that people that need access to these products can benefit from things like open banking, not to mention that sort of global challenge that we have, you know, we have a huge refugee situation right now where people are migrating across Europe. How do we support those people? Right?

How do we give them access in their new countries and new locations, to the products and services that they need? How do we give them the ability to rent an apartment in the UK or France or Spain, something as simple as that can be a huge challenge.

Brendan Le Grange 29:06

As long as you've got your phone, essentially, you've you've got your data, which I think is far more in tune with the world. And I think we mentioned it briefly. Often we talk about convenience, because in the UK in the US, that's a big selling point. But in terms of developing markets, this is often more about leapfrogging some of these mistakes that were made in the old setup.

I spent quite a lot of time working in the Philippines. It's 110 million people, quite a young country. So I'm just going to guess now but say 50 million adults, there's only 3 million adults, 4 million adults on the credit bureau. So there's this huge gap of people that aren't on one of the big name High Street brands, but they're still transacting, they still financially active. We've got one or two routes, you know, we could either wait until all the banks start expanding access to credit. And 50 years later, you've got a fairly operational system. But otherwise we can bring it open banking, and leapfrog all that and just look at those transactions look at that data from day one, it really does seem like a no brainer to be pursuing.

James Varga 30:15

And even if we did leave it up to the industry to solve in the way that you described, in 50 years we would still have the same problem where, if I exist in the UK I don't exist in the US. So as a global opportunity, if we flip that paradigm, me being able to share my bank statement data with whoever I want, which is what I do today, you know, it's just a different channel.

But by empowering the individual to do that, it doesn't then matter if I'm in Canada, or the UK, South Africa, Philippines, whatever, I should be able to share my bank data, the lender, or the person I'm sharing it with, knows it's coming directly from my bank, so can trust that data. And they can use that to understand me, this is what's always been so exciting for me around financial services being this global trust network, it exists today, banks, trust banks, Bank Statement data is the same all over the world. And we can empower individuals to use that data to get easy access to the products and services they need. At the same time is benefiting the business. Why wouldn't you embrace it? And it's been a journey over the last 10 years. Absolutely. You know, the conversation today is fundamentally different than 10 years ago, but the proposition is still the same,

Brendan Le Grange 31:29

really a lot of growth momentum still there, which is I guess why you're growing at direct ID as well. You seem to be on a nice upward growth spurt at the moment. If people want to find out more about direct ID either to come and participate in building that business or to work with you as a client or just to learn more about what you do and open banking data. Where's the best place for them to go to learn more about you?

James Varga 31:56

Absolutely in any any conversation with being welcome. So if you want to find out more about director the GooglePlus come to Director ID less or URL look us up on LinkedIn or, or any number of channels or get in touch with me through LinkedIn and I can I can point you in the right direction.

Brendan Le Grange 32:15

Great changes. Well, thank you very much. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it. As always if you're enjoying the content, please do rate and review on your podcast platform of choice. It really does help the show to grow and share it on LinkedIn. While you're there feel free to send me a connection request hard to lend money to strangers is written recorded and today edited by myself Brendan le Grange show music is by I am weak and show notes written transcripts and more content can be found at WWW dot how to lend money to strangers dot show and I'll see you again next Thursday.

Hi, it's me again. You may be aware that I've also written a couple of pulpy action adventure novels dragon said along the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic and butterfly Hill set in Hong Kong where I spent a wonderful eight years both of which are available on Amazon and also extra on my bookshelf. So I would always like to learn more about my listeners. And if you don't mind sharing your address, drop me an email at Brendan at how to lend money to strangers dot show. And I'll put one in the post