And that was a big, big shift, right? Because all alternative lending platforms were profitable, when rates were at zero, they started to go up, most of them are going past. The reason I think that we are noticed. And obviously we didn't do this, anticipating that this was going to happen. But rather, it was just our strategic focus at the time, we decided to cover the full spectrum of working capital of our clients, right?

So we started as, hey, we get cheap money, we lend it digitally to clients. But then as we interacted with those clients, and we recognise that they had a broad range of needs, we decided to cover the whole spectrum. So we moved from, hey, how can I give you money, to how can I simplify your operations through money, right? And how can I make your financial operation simpler, smoother and more effective and efficient through money

So what is driving the default of an SME on a loan? We focused on three potential drivers: the firm's resources, board level factors, and the loan attributes.

I don't want to bore people going through all the variables that we considered but we have three categories of variables and within the categories we have a bunch of other variables. So what we found basically is the following an increased amount of financial resources and increased size of the board and a longer board's tenure, all these three elements are decreasing the default rate of firms. This is quite reasonable, right?

The size of the board is maybe a bit less intuitive. We are talking about the board size, we're not talking about the firm's size, which plays an extremely important role. But our focus was on the board size wich speaks to corporate governance being important there is a debate about corporate governance, many people make it more complex, but that is helping sharing the responsibility. So you may come a sounder, maybe a more bulletproof decision.

More than 50% of the economic activity is informal in Latin America, and so, because of that, they don't have access to capital for growing their businesses.

And what we are trying to do is to help out to Yeah, to make it a little bit more fair for economic growth for everybody.

Obviously, you can do it with a pen and paper, but you know, I can say from experience, or at least the experience that we have, that doing it manually really doesn't work! And so really our scoring, what we are building, is to try to analyse the informal business.

And there were two things I didn't like. The first was I was never in control. So a lot of times I got incentivized with equity and when it came time to pay out, that equity never happened.

Then second - and more to what really bothered me - was there was a lot of times that clients were too qualified, or it wasn't the right programme for what these companies offer. So when this happens, clients need other programmes. And these big FinTech companies don't have them, most of the banks don't have them - like, if you walk into Chase and ask them for invoice factoring, or ask them for equipment financing, or something very specific that your business actually needs, that's the right programme, they don't have it. They don't know it.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of this country, most people are employed by a small business, and we still produce most of the country's GDP. And it feels like the last three years small businesses been under attack. Without small business, a lot of the opportunity that we have in this country is gone. And that's why I put this stuff together. That's why I care so much.