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.

So, a typical mortgage is kind of what it is, and there have been attempts and some regulatory stuff prevents a lot of innovation, but the only way to innovate is customer acquisition. And I don't want to sound super absolute there, but the opportunity so you get, like, a Rocket Mortgage, right? It's an acquisition play. That's how they're disrupting.

In B to B, it's different. There is innovation on both sides. There's innovation on how you distribute your product, customer acquisition, there's innovation around product structure. There's innovation around reducing losses.

We live in a world of 3 billion malnourished people: 1 billion are starving, 2 billion are overfed with the wrong calories.

Conventional agricultural lending is based on yield and predictability, but we're in the middle of trying to reset that story, so we're walking that land with that farmer. So we also get a sense of, do these people know what they're doing? Are they deeply committed to it? Are they applying the knowledge and the experience and the wisdom of the ecosystem? And I'm oversimplifying, but the idea is that a farmer that is embracing regenerative practices needs time to transition, and there's going to be some unknowns then that transition period, and so we need to stage capital in the right way.

So what happened in Zimbabwe is, one, it started becoming a lot more informal. That means in the formal market is shrinking. You don't have data, so now the credit bureau market is shrinking as well. So this was the problem I'd been battling with since I took over.

Is there a need for credit scoring, or credit risk management, or financial risk management in this kind of environment that is more informal than it is formal?

And I looked at it. And I thought about it, and I said, yeah, there is a need, because those people are still economically active, just not in the way that Western markets are structured. So that's how actually CrediSafe came about…

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.