85% of folks have bank accounts, but only about 20% of them actually use the bank (for borrowing). They rely on other forums to meet their financing needs. These guys don't have access to credit.

As a startup, when we launched back in 2018, the lending market in Sri Lanka was $5 billion - and what we understood this from this 5 billion requirement, almost 40% relied on loan sharks and individuals who have very dubious practices of charging excessive interest rates, as well as very unpleasant collection methods.

And coming from a tech and a finance background, we realised there might be a potential for us to provide credit underwriting through a blockchain solution.

We always take a very commercial and common sense attitude to everything that we're lending on: if there's a solid business story as to why they want the money; if there's a clear route to how we think they're going to pay it back; and if there's an asset that we can secure against to make sure we've got something to go after if it all goes wrong,...then for me that's 95% of the underwriting there.

As oversimplified as that may sound that really is the truth.

Because I mean, ultimately, as a lender, what more do you want than a good business that's got the ability to pay you bac

How do we let brands get in front of first party data customers with the highest intent the world has ever seen? I mean, our click to sales ratio is 55%.

Brands are paying billions in marketing budgets, so that you can see the advert you then clicking the advert getting to their site or going to their store pulling your credit card out and paying billions in interest and fees to credit card companies to buy the products.

What we've done is we've sort of said, why don't we circumvent the middleman? Why don't we let brands rather pay our customers? In other words, use the brand's marketing budget to subsidise the cost of credit to our customer, and convince our customer to buy from that brand.

The whole equation makes more sense. The customer has more sustainable buying power, because the brand is subsidising the cost of credit to the customer. So the brand can make a sale.

It's all sorts of facets of establishing a life in a new country: it's renting a property, you need a credit history to be able to rent a property. If you haven't got a UK credit history, you have to pay six months rent upfront, or find a UK guarantor. So obviously, both of those are just unpleasant experiences.

And mobile phones, we did some research recently with over 1,000, new to country people. And over two thirds want a mobile phone immediately. But again, they need to do a credit check. So they won't be able to get a contract, they'll just get paid you go or ceremony or something like that. So they'll suffer on that.

And what influenced the interest rate is really, first, the inflation and then the unemployment rate. The good news is in the US and Canada, the inflation has peaked from the six months ago, they gradually come down - inflation in the USA right now is around 6%; inflation in Canada, just above 5%. For the unemployment rate, both countries have the numbers at historically low. So good fundamentals. The interest rate hike period is probably near the end, that's the signal from the latest Fed meeting. Actually, Canada already paused once in the March meeting as well.

But obviously, we will see some credit normalizations which means the other risk metrics will go up because we saw that the early stage roll rate began to trend up. But again, when you look at the trajectory, it just goes back to three years ago, right, before the pandemic, so I think fundamentally it's still sound.

Custom Credit was really set up with three mission statements in mind - we always are asking ourselves, does this move us closer to this or further away - and that is (1) to become the most customer centric FinTech in the UK, (2) is to ensure our colleagues better reflect our customers, and (3) to improve financial literacy, both in terms of our customers and the broader community.

I think the product itself is tailored and custom. But to achieve that, the way you score and assess risk needs to be tailored and custom, that's often where the problem is with these other kind of flexible payment lenders, most lenders will make a decision on on affordability based purely on averages to estimate your your expenditure. They will use a combination of the information you've provided to them, and an indicator from the credit reference agencies.

People with very different spending profiles and very different income profiles effectively could be judged to having the same level of affordability. So we've actually taken a different approach in that, initially, all of our customers will have to provide open banking data.

What we're doing is actually really, really complicated, but you can ingest this data and then give it to the bureaus and you know, the keys format, the Insight format, depending on which Bureau it's obviously a very hard thing to build. But imagine if that real time flow of data via an API became something the bureau started to ingest direct from the API.

Step one is to simplify the integration, simplify the reciprocating of data create a common standard, but eventually I think TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian should become real time networks. You know how many customers have a buy now pay later player goes to all the other BNPL players and borrows money in the same month. And if bureau data is stale by a month, two months refreshed once a month, that doesn't get caught in the system, right?

So even though more small businesses are being formed, traditional banks are lending less to them in terms of loan volume.

And that started to get me thinking about how I might join a startup or another company that was trying to solve this problem. I looked around a lot, and I didn't see anyone that was solving in a way that I thought was really equitable.

It's funny, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, people that need to be their own boss ,that feel really compelled to go out and start a company. That was not me, I was a very happy cog in the wheel. I enjoyed working in corporate America, I enjoyed working in a midsize startup. And really, it was just kind of an alignment of my passions, and a problem in the industry that I saw that no one was solving a really satisfactory way. And some good mentors that pushed me into to take that leap and jump into the entrepreneurial world.

The challenge, of course, is that people forget the answers to those questions, and also a motivated fraudster can go ahead and find the answer in many cases through different methods. And you do actually see that in some cases, you get organisations like Equifax, that can go a little bit deeper, they can do what's called dynamic knowledge based authentication and maybe they can look at your bank statements and ask you have you done a transaction for this amount on a certain day? Or how much do you pay against your mortgage each month, etc. and that's a little bit better.

But ultimately, people often don't get those questions right, especially when it's on the spot.

So the approach we took was to say, what is something that you should know, that you should always know you'll never forget, that we can present to you that isn't just memorable, but it's also frictionless or very easy, and in some cases, enjoyable for you to do. And we took this concept of, okay, if you live at a certain place, or you know, a certain area, then why don't we go ahead and grab different images from that area. And we're talking Google Street View images, in many cases, these are images that aren't easily searchable, you'd have to walk around and try and get to know a place if you're going to do it yourself.

And then there's another model, which is lighter, I call it the wine payback. Instead of investing €5,000, you would just finance for example, €500 and you will receive for three years €200 worth of wine, so you get €600 of wine and you've only paid €500 for it. And every year you receive the new vintage you, you start to create a connection with the wine estate.

And when you share the wine with your friends, it's completely different. Because you have a story to tell, like you've seen some of the project you mentioned with the vineyard planted in its purest form. And there's always lots of fascinating story you can tell the way wine is produced the way wine is enjoyed falling in time.

Very often I've said that WineFunding is not a crowdfunding platform, WineFunding has a crowdfunding platform. And it's very different.

And then the credit scoring engine started taking shape. And over, you know, Covid, after Covid, we started bringing defaults down from 50 to 40, 40 to 30, 30 to 20, 20 to 15. And then, you know, the tougher bit came because it was not only about the credit scoring, it had to be a lot of engineering, then it's about the experience of the consumer, how is the product structured, you know, the first interaction of the consumer with the company till after he or she has repaid, everything matters. How the lead generation happened, how is the customer support interacting with the customer, or what has been experienced in app, what is experienced at the point of repayment, you know.

We've seen many times if the customer faces challenges in repaying whether or not it was our issue or an issue at the wallet side, the customers could turn rogue.

There was so much to it that we learned over time. And you know, when we actually closed our lending book pre-acquisition, the latest cohort actually close it under three per cent default

As we grow Smarter Loans, both Raf and I we're also learning about the lending industry and understanding that there's a lot more to it than just personal unsecured loans, than just unsecured business loans. So we started developing relationships, and then that got turned into motorsports and farming and equipment financing and buses and coaches. And today we have people financing aeroplanes and aviation. So it all grew over time.

And now if you look at it, yes, that's how we're able to say 60 lenders because they represent different verticals, you know, they're not all in like personal, unsecured loans, they represent a spectrum of different types of products and services.

When you have a contract like ours, in which you gently transfer the value of the property to the tenant, there is no capital gain or very limited capital gains. So now the yield differentials are stark: why is it that you can get 30 million pounds per billion invested over and over again, in London and 100 in Middlesbrough, compared to 30 over and over again for two human generations?

I don't think those portfolios are worth the same. I don't think ordinary people (if you took the capital gain away) would say, well, I'm quite comfortable getting 100 in Middlesborough and selling that and getting 30 in London, over and over again for two human generations.

Those properties are not the same. The one throwing out 100 million is worth more. It just is. And people look at you blankly and say how can a an apartment in Middlesborough be worth more than you can buy and sell an apartment and Middlesborough? The answer is, well, it's not, the apartment is completely perfectly priced but 10,000 apartments where the rent is commingled and you've broken that asset into two economic units, one which wobbles around and one which is stable, one is a bond and one is equity, and if you separate them out until the equity, it's like, I'm an M&A banker, right? Broken up companies and sold them in pieces. And the two pieces don't add up to the whole, they just don't.

When you then take the rent and tranche it and this is a repeat of the theme, it take a little bit of time to absorb the simplicity of it.

Entrepreneurship is a profession, a profession that requires close attention to details, and discipline on multiple facets of the business. And if it is justifiable for a person to get an MBA and transition from finance to product management, or transition from product management, to consulting or transition from sales and marketing to something else, then it absolutely is justifiable to get an MBA to mass not to master maybe, but to be a jack of all trades of all of those aspects.

The likelihood of starting a company and being successful is very low already. So arming yourself with education that is tailored specifically for that purpose, that sounds to me like a very good investment.

And I have to say it was it was an immense investment in myself.

And I actually want to take a step back here, if you don't mind, and just make a few remarks about people in Alif overall, about about our efforts in combining technology and education. I don't know if you if you knew this, but the average age of our employees is 25. We have a lot of students, recent graduates. We train them ourselves. So to give an example of specific training, IT skills is an area where we felt that we could contribute to the education system in Tajikistan. So we established Alif Academy in 2017, as a nonprofit where we promote it education. So we provide free programming courses, including special courses for girls, for kids, for Afghan refugees.

So far, we've had more than 2,000 graduates of these courses, and some of them working, at least some of them work in other companies. And hopefully now in the new countries we had, and we have the privilege of being able to attract some of the most bright, kind, noble, energetic individuals throughout all these years, we had more than 50,000 applications to to our vacancies. And we've chosen and retained the very best.

I mean, a lot of it's the same from a credit perspective. You're very much looking at the borrower and their underlying financial situation. So you know, as a lot of customers are in the boating space are directors or have their own businesses, there's a lot of reviewing, you know, financial information, profit and loss accounts and balance sheets and the business's performance, looking at the management team as well and their experience and how the business has performed - just as you would do if you were lending on a truck or a piece of machinery.

The difference then comes more around the use of the asset and obviously the asset itself - where lending to businesses for assets that are income generative or crucial to the operation of the business, a leisure yacht doesn't tend to tick that box.

And so there's a there's a nuance in the in the way that the asset is used in the way it's going to benefit the business. And then also there's the asset itself. So understanding the inherent value of the asset, its depreciation, the impact that that has as well.

And of course, as you mentioned, digital has played a massive role.

You know, back in the day, people were just happy to get credit. Now, people are much smarter, they want things like loyalty, they want things like rewards, it's not just about the access to credit, they've got more choice. So certainly the space have become more competitive. The banks are still not there, but certainly a lot more non bank lenders have come onto the scene, people that are able to service customers quicker, faster, more efficiently than the banks.

And of course, if you look, now you've got products like buy now pay later that attracts specific segments of customers.

If I'm looking like 10 or 20 years back, when we were basically as a FinTech organisation the majority of our decisions were relying on the application form. So credit application form. And nowadays, it's leaning to the direction where you ask very few questions from customers. So from a UX point of view, from a customer experience point of view, it's much smoother.

And it can be super automatic - meaning by that you're able to work with a very lean organisation to support 10s of 1000s of customers. It all comes down to what kind of data sources you're able to use. So coming back to this credit application, you might have had 50 or 20 questions on a credit application 10 years ago, today, it might be that you are asking just for identification, which in countries like Finland, Sweden, Estonia, it's automatic. So basically, you're using bank IDs to do the automization.

And once the automizationis is done, then you're able to start calling different data banks, credit bureaus, all kinds of third party data banks, bank transaction history that you're also able to get through the same identification method, although it's a different call. But anyway, you are able to get so much information to support your decision making and you're able to automate the size from the beginning until the end, meaning by that in a previous life, when we were making the risk assessment, we were using application scorecards.

So where does Lenuity fit in? Well, financial services and construction are the two most important things to get the UK out of a recession. Construction is building wealth for the economy. It's providing homes. For people, these are really important things, it's providing jobs, this is an incredibly important thing to drive us out in a recession. And what we're doing is enabling them to thrive in the current environment, to sell like they've never been able to sell before. Not even in boom times.

When you if you take a look back at what happened to the car industry, when they started financing their customers, it was just a massive boom for them that they could create better offers, their business became more profitable, that they had a reduction in costs. Now, when you get into house building and construction, this is magnified for bigger reductions in costs, an area of waste that they never even talk about that, you know, they talk about waste on the building site, we're talking about the financial waste of holding costs, we're talking about the difference between completions that take three months, four months and five months coming down to two weeks.

So, in as much as I was a salesman who was always supposed to be pushy at all times, what I needed to also understand what was the problem that I was solving for them, right and try to solve that for them.

Now, wearing this new hat for me as a salesperson, I'd already prepared me for what it was going to look like when I moved to a company like Fair Money. And if you look at all three co founders, we actually were all at Fair Money at the time. And we moved out just to go to this. When I got into Fair Money, and then the COVID era just hits, we basically began to see one new thing, which was that the guys who were doing collections for us at the time, were still doing collections, like it was 2018 - where the customer just needed a call for them to remember to go to make the payments.

They did not need you to help them structure payments, you know, create a payment plan; they did not need you to help them with any educational of any sorts. They were not in any mess whatsoever.