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.

The paradigm of 'let's collect as much information on a customer ahead of time, try and score them, and then provide them with an unsecured product'. We just don't think that works as well as putting an asset in someone's hands, asking them to pay a small deposit. And knowing that once they have access to that smartphone device, it's actually going to improve their ability to make a living. It helps them power the hairdressing salon and helps them advertise their business on WhatsApp, you're actually improving their ability to earn a living and also then to pay back the instalments just a much more compelling and sustainable model for working in the markets where we want to have an impact.

I mean, behind this there is a very sophisticated predictive credit model and we make adjustments all the time to pricing and instalment plans, and we have a lot of investment on the connected estate IoT side. And our loan book actually has been remarkably consistent. And particularly when it looked over the last three years, despite massive disruptions, and it's also been resilient in the face of high inflation.

I mean, it's all a matter of perspective. Actually Creditinfo, in relation to the Experian and TransUnion and so on and so forth, is not as large. However, Creditinfo is a very fast growing organisation, and their focus is very much on emerging markets. And that was the piece that was really attractive, you know, the over encompassing idea is Creditinfo's focus is on providing access to finance within the emerging countries.

That was the main driver for me. This call to work with countries, to work in the parts of the world where everything is so dynamic, everything is so fast-moving, you take an action and you see immediately the impact of that one, you roll up your sleeves and you just basically get on with it.

There's a whole bunch of people out there where the traditional model doesn't work, there simply isn't enough information on these people to make a reasonable credit call...

This is a space where lots of people are working, but very few people can claim results. Because this is also the sort of space where lots of AI propellerheads think they can crack the problem. To some extent, that's true. This is also the classic case where progress is both hindered and aided with experience. It's actually good that some youngster on a beanbag, with long hair, thinks about this stuff completely unhindered by any previous industry knowledge, because that's anyone with too much experience probably thinks too much inside the box. At the same time, with something like credit, you do need to have some other people in there who can say, 'well, yeah, that's cool but you need to take these following five things in'.

That doesn't mean that the thinking needs to be restrained, but someone needs to make it practical in the end. To simply let the same space cadets go mad on this is likely to land you in a heap of problems, if you don't actually understand the lending industry.