The innovation of our solution lies in a number of areas, but I'll speak about two key areas: and that is our awareness of the importance that AI plays today in risk decision making; and the importance that data plays in making informed decisions.

On the AI front, Provenir's auto ML product allows our customers to quickly easily and affordably develop new or improved credit risk scores, which are instantly deployable into those credit decisioning workflows on the Provenir platform.

Now, why did I make the choice to go to Kigali or to East Africa? One, the sister of my grandma lived in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, and my grandparents were there to visit them. And they came back with all these beautiful stories. And that sparked my imagination to the fullest, I would say. So in the past years, I went there on the holidays, and I decided to make that move, and to go there. And I really wanted to do something where I could bring my expertise and my experience, and having worked with the biggest banks in Europe, some of them even in America, gave me a good foundation to join Simbuka and to make lending simple, also for the people here in East Africa.

Marquee investors like Warren Buffet, Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son are aggressively investing in FinTech ecosystem and fintech startup.

And the reason it has happened is just one: 10 years ago, the dream of every person after completing the Master's in finance, was to get a job and private equity or hedge fund or investment banking. Now, it is not the case, every person who graduates or comes out of masters wants to get into startup ecosystem, or want to start a new startup.

So you will say that there's lots of ESG scores out there that can be a blackbox, the company will be given a score, but you don't necessarily know that the Inklings behind it.

What we're bringing with our green score is effectively that transparency, bringing in SME climate experts for a single institution and try to build that score around what their views are and how they view it and align it to their pathway to net zero or ESG, or climate risk within within their institution.

Let's just say I find Small Business Finance probably the most exciting topic in the world. And the reason being, if you look at Liberis, we support small businesses with working capital, that directly impacts their livelihoods, it directly impacts their revenues directly impact how many people they actually hire.

So the impact on the wider economy is enormous. And the way we do that, with Libris is as an embedded finance platform, we integrate with big partners. And by integrating into those platforms, we see the actual data, and we underwrite on the basis of yesterday's data, or even last hours data, depending on how you know up to date their data is. And by doing that, we have an 83% accept rate at the moment. And that's enormous.

I mean, it's, it's difficult, because you've had cost of living crisis, you know, we've had COVID, you've had these sort of huge macroeconomic conditions that have made things really tough. But the thing I always struggle with is that when we have this conversation with businesses, you know, arguably, in many ways, your software's free to them. Because ultimately, it's all about their ability to collect their ability to return. And actually their ability to, you know, bring forward working capital improve their customers position.

And the thing that always blows my mind a little bit is that what part of this doesn't make sense to a business? Because if you're a business who've lent £100 million, right, and you've got customers who are in financial difficulties, it never makes sense to write that customer off? Right? It just doesn't make sense.

Everything I wrote in innovation, lab excellence is valid for AI deployment today, you asked a fundamental question. And it was one of the big points in my book, which is buy versus bill. And this is the same advice that I would give for an AI team today, you have to buy this technology, all but the very largest global banks like the JP Morgan's of the world, only a few of them are able to actually build their own technology.

So if you're looking at an innovation programme, or an AI programme, their job is to prove that this stuff can work. All right, their job is not to deliver ready to use code ready to use a AI that is ready for production. Because you really expect them to build their own large language model and know they prove it works.

And then you need to hire, particularly for the likes of AI, one of these larger firms is going to come in and hopefully have enough liability and insurance so that when your chat GPT style chatbot comes off the rails and give somebody the wrong answer. You can you can blame them with the losses.

Ultimately what is important for us is to serve the merchant. So as we hear from our micro small business borrowers and learn a few things, we would love to share that again with the community.

Our realisation and build is the opportunity to serve this cashless commerce segment is so huge, and there's just a massive gap between how commerce has become digitised the recovered how many millions of merchants went online, but at the same time that digital credit hasn't really caught up.

So there is still a huge gap between what is a Shopify merchants ability to go online and sell in like, three, four hours. But what happens to that version, if she wants credit, it's not going to happen every 24 days, this this gap is huge. And you know, we just want to be part of a solution by no means any single entity can solve all of it.

YAt Gaia, our mission is to make the process of IVF, more straightforward, more accessible, and more affordable. So the work we're doing is driving towards enabling more families to have children, and means we have the opportunity to make this truly tangible impact on our members lives.

And so it really is this mission, I think that elevates things beyond just another plain vanila financial services company.

It is a niche focus, but it is a focus that I think goes a long way towards solving this kind of very tangible problem of infertility and helping families build from the ground up. And so our product really is organised all around trying to focus on providing additional accessibility and affordability for IVF through a combination of a loan and an insurance product that allow for an easier entry point for our members to get access to treatment.

You're unifying data from different countries into one single hub, we are standardising that, we are analysing the data and presenting it to a bank's over one single API. So for a bank, it doesn't matter if the customer is coming from Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy.

Typically banks have share of foreign customers 10% to 15%. Okay, 10 to 15% is good enough to care about, but the problem is that this 10% to 15% are not coming from one single country. They are coming from the twenty seven or even more since they outside of EU like the UK, Switzerland, etc.

So quite a long list of a country - this is a problem. And it's not feasible for one single bank. They will build the data pipelines and try to build the knowledge and standardise now it's just too expensive.

But in our case, it is okay, because if we are building this infrastructure, we can sell it to different banks, and each bank is paying their share. But of course, there are plenty of hurdles not only technology hurdle, various legal hurdles. Also we have European Union one same, same legal framework, as it said, there really is in the details. So in different countries, it's still a bit different than we are solving these hurdles.

Digital marketing was not really a thing. It started by just going out and networking, listening to people, asking them what worked, what didn't work, you know, ringing up estate agents saying, look, I'd love to do your mortgages and walking up and down the high street with my briefcase, really. I just recently went with my cousin who works for Virgin Atlantic on a trip to Austin, and I ended up doing both of the pilots mortgages!

Like all businesses, it's about understanding the customer's needs, their pain points, and trying to work out where we can stand out and make a difference and have an incredible customer experience and good customer outcomes where others can't.

Just to rewind a little bit, this whole BNPL craze was exploding. I hadn't seen anything like it: interest free credit didn't really make sense to me and was very excited about the prospects of this business model. But at the same time, a lot of the people I spoke to in banking and lending were just like, the last thing South African needs is just more unsecured credit being piled on top. This isn't Australia, isn't Sweden where Klarna is from.

So I did take that to heart and looking into the BNPL space realised that in countries like Brazil, Mexico being two significant examples, point of sale interest free instalments have been there for ages offered by most retailers. Yes, it's now become tech enabled. But in those markets, it's done very much off the back of a credit card. And the bank is the key issuer of their credit, they understand the consumer and what they're earning. And the thesis was that the South African use case was far more similar to those markets, developing markets, high interest rates, very disparate levels of income. In some places, you'd argue over indebtedness of the middle class, as opposed to a massive need for financial inclusion, which is the narrative.

Yeah, and I just thought that that product would fit so well here, we just have to find a way to technically adapted and created here.

So that's why we work with Airtel to say, let's bridge this gap. Let's try to be the boundary between the lenders and the borrowers. And the only way you can do that is having standardised credit score.

So Airtel provides all the transactions when you buy airtime on your phone, when you buy data, pay a bill, you know, that information tells us probably you have some responsibility in your house, you're moving around, probably you have some kind of mobility, are you having so many people different one sending to you, tells you you're making sales.

But if you're just receiving from one person, we can can infer probably your law student getting some update from the parents.

And where I found that problem statement, that focus, was actually when I started working with community finance lenders, specifically, an experienced that really exposed the problem, to me that exists within consumer lending. And that is that very little is given to the customer management side of the credit lifecycle.

And I've had the opportunity to sit within the community finance lenders office, I mean, this was right on the front line. And I remember there was a lady that came in, and she had lots of children with a, she was stressed because she was in arrears. And she come into this lending office to arrange an arrangement with the lender to ensure that she could stay on track with her payments. And I just sat there observing, and she sat there and she was getting more and more stressed, as the advisor was saying, Well, can you afford this much a week? Can you afford this much a week, and having the awareness as to all the data behind the lending decision, and everything that they had about it, I just felt like, there's got to be a better way to engage this customer and use this information to help her make sounder financial choices.

That was my lightbulb moment.

That's why you're hear 'the problem is the deposits', but people don’t need to have to high deposit. Not really, because they only need a high deposit, because you can't lend them enough, because you put all the risks to them. You know, if you change your product into a long dated fixed, you protect the borrower, you can lend a higher amount, they need less of a deposit. Right? It all depends on how you explain things.

And this is what other countries have done for a long, long time: Denmark for over 200 years, the Netherlands for 40/ 50/ 60 years, the US obviously, after the savings and loans crisis, they started protecting borrowers by making long dated fixed rate mortgages the 'cool product', and that protected them over the crisis against these shocks. And that in turn, helps the economy.

I agree, I think is a game changer.

And I think what's interesting as we as we looked at the financial inclusion score more we realised how important lifestyle was as well as behaviour. And that sort of led us down to something were developing to the moment which is really based on geographical havior and customer blueprints for more targeted marketing strategies, we derive a lot of this information directly from the mobile, someone's behaviour on that phone and their choices and their lifestyle patterns and gleaning all that information from the mobile, which is all anonymized data at one point.

It's still dominated by your credit card issuers.

So most people if they have Apple Pay or Google Pay, they have loaded their credit card and that's probably the most popular form of payments, but these QR payment providers who have their own mobile apps is very, very popular. And it's accepted everywhere. And while they still represent a very small share in terms of total purchase volumes, they are by far the fastest growing, and that is why issuers are very, very concerned.

And these QR payment providers are also going into that credit space, where they're offering a small credit of maybe $500 to $1,000. But they're using very basic information - just your name, phone number, email - so it's much, much faster and easier to apply for that new QR payment credit versus a traditional credit card.

First of all, most of the brick and mortar banks just don't understand, at a granular view, which products and which segments are really making them money.

In general, they can tell us, sure, but they have a lot of different customer segments, right, different products and sometimes they struggle to understand where they need to adjust.

So in this sense, our advanced analytics is helping banks to understand how does existing products work, and then give a different insight and basically all of these just allow them to be more agile, and to run business in the more well controlled and data driven way.

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

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.