I think where AI excels is in trying to emulate what could be a human interaction.

And, by definition, what we do, and specifically do for mortgages, is dominated by human interaction. Across the world - so we're talking not only about emerging markets, but developed markets as well.

You have mortgage brokers that talk to customers. They do simulations. They explain what the bank offers that they can get approved for, and so on and so forth.

So I think the real need here was how do you bring that human experience into a place where you have thousands of islands and very remote locations and where the people buying properties are not necessarily concentrated around the large cities.

But what they ended up doing is, okay, if you want to take this thing without a credit card, bring your salary statement, bring your bank account statement - I don't have any of this, right?

One of the huge issues was, and still is, the access to finance in Laos. There's hardly any infrastructure, too. You don't find a paved road everywhere.

And the people live in their village, in their community, but they have to travel like two hours to the next bank. And then they talk to this bank and they want to get a loan and it's not possible.

Every one of our customers, though, is credit scored. we have 16 data points, starting with age, profession, if you live close to a border with a lot of trade between Thailand and Laos, might be very different than to a very rural place in the middle of the Mekong - we have some islands in the Mekong that don’t have electricity, don't have Internet, but they have a village bank.

It doesn't matter if you're from China or if you're from Brazil, if you're from the US and from UK, from Italy. There's people with ideas, there's innovative founders, and then there's other people that, like myself, I needed a job, so I can't necessarily become a founder, my life trajectory has run differently, but then equally, I have this creativity in my brain that I love sharing with peopl because I know that the founders that I share with and the passion that I have for the things that I actually invest in, it helps them accelerate certain things.

And potentially, I'm the crazy one that goes to conferences as well and then speaks at places. But I know a lot of people that are similar to me, that are very good at their day job but also want to invest.

It unlocks two other elements :the first one is the real-time sharing of information which otherwise would be impossible, but the second one is that when we are connected by API to a financial institution, every time we ping their database, they actually have a record that allows us to pay them. Essentially, we pay on a portion of the fee that the network captures back to the same financial institutions.

Now, that means that they can either run this as a data monetization channel - and by the way for some of the landers that we work with in the Philippines that's been the case - or it also means that they can use the same payments for then increased consumption through the platform. The increased consumption then reduces their data pool cost, and ultimately that makes it two to three times cheaper than any other alternatives.

In the world of crypto, a few months can be a lifetime, and, in the most recent few months that’s not been the easiest lifetime, and yet, Milo has just issued its largest single transaction ever: a $12 million crypto mortgage. The demand is real, from high net worth individuals buying homes with Bitcoin to clients tapping home equity to buy more, and, if anything, the recent dips in crypto prices reflect a story of growing resilience rather than one of growing volatility, and that's a very good thing for the industry.

Smarter advice leads to smoother lending, so today I am sitting down with James Tucker, CEO at Twenty7tec Group, talking about how his solutions, helps lenders maximise product visibility, streamline applications, and improve adviser engagement.

60% of businesses just gave up halfway through a loan application, which is crazy.

I think that indicates how much of an obstacle the process is in itself, which I think then speaks to a system that is built, probably more for institutions in terms of debt funding, rather than a system that is built to support small businesses.

But all we're really trying to do is answer three simple questions for clients. Is this presented identity, a genuine identity? Am I interacting with the owner of identity? And are there any risk factors associated with that identity I've been presented with.

In the 90s, inflation in Brazil in one year was over 1,000% so literally, if you got your money today and you didn't use it, you didn't run to the supermarket, you buy it, you lost money. And so Brazilians really got good at moving money fast and spending fast. And the banks had to learn how to do those things since the 90s, the liquidity of the system, the security of the system, the solvency of the back like all those things, had to really be at a very good level, otherwise the mess would go into the economy

I think one of the most challenging parts of being a business, it doesn't matter what size you are, is that you tend to place a portion of who you are as a person, your value, in the outcome of whether somebody pays or not.

And you know, as much as you like to try, if you've got enough people not paying, it does actually become a demoralising feeling.

I think people are realizing that it's not always someone's fault if they are having financial difficulties, and I think that message is changing, albeit sometimes I still have frustrating conversations with people who don't necessarily see it that way.

And I think overall, the lenders, the collection agencies, debt management plan providers, whoever it might be, are wanting to be able to treat their customers in a better way, give them the experiences that they deserve, but they just don't have the systems to power that.

If you're an individual and you care about the climate, the biggest impact you can have is what you do with your money: where you deposit your money, how you spend your money, and where you invest your money.

That is by far the largest impact you can have. Much more than buying a solar system, putting on your house, though, that's a good thing to do, and it's much, much more, by the way, than buying an electric vehicle, though that is also a good thing to do.

And this is not a niche market. Fully 40% of US adults identify themselves as highly concerned about the climate and seeking ways that they can make an impact in their own life.

Unbankable is an investigative documentary exploring whether Africa's innovation, tradition, and tech can revitalize the West. It examines mobile money, digital lending, and Bitcoin, challenging economic norms and amplifying voices from the Global South.

As I started to play with GenAI more and more, I started to understand that, hey, if I ask questions the right way, it actually gives me reasonable answers: it's not about it being good or bad, it's a question of what it's good for and what it's not.

The other big one is tech implementation, and the key questions becomes: one, nobody really knows how to validate a large language model, and two, if these things always sit on some sort of external cloud environment, well, where is my data going to sit? Am I sure that this environment in which this thing is based is actually safe from a data privacy perspective, et cetera?

The ability to react to small business capital needs, and to underwrite it in an efficient way, is challenging, and that's what I think we have learned to do well with cash flow underwriting.

That's not to say that we don't look at the credit profile of our customer, we do, but it's a much smaller percent of our proprietary scoring models than the cash flow.

One of the UK banks that we work with, they have 17 lending systems. That’s really complicated to work with. People can change. Technology can change. What doesn't change is the process. So you have to adapt to every banks process. Technology has to adapt to every process. So essentially, people adapt, and technology adapts. But the process is something which doesn't change, and that is something which is the learning process for everyone when you work with a particular institution.

AI is emerging as a as a transformative force, which is redefining banking: from digital lending to advisory, to research, it’s across all its different business units.

The nice thing about digital lending, really, is that you have full transparency over individual loan applications, and I feel like that, rather than buying a blind pool, or a securitization backed by some some collateral pool of loans that you don't really have an influence on, you can now, with the technology and the emergence of the digital lending segment, go way further and actually have perfect insight into what's going on in the collateral pool.

So ultimately, we are directly integrated into the underwriting systems of the originators that we work with. So essentially, we see the same data that was used from the originator to process the loan application, and that enables us to form an independent view. And in addition to that, we usually get also the entire historical track record of the originator, which allows us to then also fine tune our risk models to the specific types of products and the specific type of underwriting that the originator is doing, in order to then form an opinion on a loan by loan basis, or borrower by borrower basis,.

Our take is that the system has crazy waste, An to that is that, when I built Vezeeta, I consumed around $60 million, but if I knew then what I know today, I would have built the exact same company for less than 50% of the money. And I think that would have been way more beneficial to myself as a founder, and even more important to the investors and the shareholders.

The second thing is, not all the companies are created equally. This is the, basically the thesis, and that's why we built In Vitro Capital. And even the word in vitro, is we're giving birth of companies. We're artificially doing that because we're not an investor. We build these companies hand by hand with the co founders. And that's when we share equity, support funding, no waste, no wasting the time to raise money, no waste in trial and error, because we are helping on those, and then we take it from there.

There's about 80% of European household left that haven't transitioned to renewable energy installations. And for them and financing is a very important part. So that's how we come in. We help our installation partners, first on the software tuning side, but then also kind of coupling that with end customer financing.