Scaling impact, with Adriaan Schiphorst
One of the key highlights for me is not necessarily something that you see in the impact report and on the first paragraph, but what do you do, for example, with war in Ukraine, and I remember that we had a project life funding, Mikro Capital Moldova, microfinance institution in Moldova. And I think we'd launched it on like a Sunday and Monday morning, the Dutch national news broadcaster as a headliner, will Moldova be next? Right?
That's not the greatest marketing for an investment product that you can get. And so we had an internal discussion, right? Do we pull the project off the website, because we always have to weigh investor risk versus what we think is right, the right balance for our crowd.
And we actually decided to leave it on there, but to allow all the initial investors already in there, we send them a message, we updated the project description that they could get their money out if they want, but we will keep the project on. And actually, it was one of the fastest funded projects on the platform for this company.
Craig Smith is lending money to friends and family
Yeah, it was about helping a friend to get on the property ladder. She's done very well in her career now, but at that point, she needed some help. And she was like, I really want to stay in my local community, and I really want to buy with my husband here. And she just asked us on WhatsApp if we'd lend, but it was just a lot of money to a group of people at that time. And it was like, how are we going to get paid back because we were all recently graduated. So although that loan didn't happen, that's kind of what inspired the idea for JustLend. I wanted to provide opportunities to people could do what they wish to do.