If you have to remember what we talked machine learning AI today is not something that's come around today, right? What has changed today is our ability to store enormous amount of data economically. Number two is the processing speeds we have today. You know, you want a search bar before you type, your third word is already telling you what it should be. So think about it. And there are millions of people doing it at the same time, any second. And the third thing is the speed of transmission of information.

I think those three in combination literally are the most fertile ground to bring AI to life.

And that's what we've essentially done. But be mindful that when you're doing things at that speed, there are things that could happen which go out of your control.

And of course, very often a financial product, or some finances around this will be the consequences of what you're trying to buy or get in your life. And so that's really the approach that we've taken with our algorithm as well, that allows us to predict how much money a customer will earn over the next five years. And we've developed in essence, a platform on progress that allows users to set up financial goals and find personalised paths to either earn safe abode the way to the goals. And basically at ProGrad we use, as I mentioned, our proprietary models that matches users with solutions from different providers that could help them achieve their targets, including side hustles, flexible work saving accounts, credit card, car finance and many more products.

All of this with the idea that a customer never comes to progress looking for a specific product. Unlike other websites, where you come to your website, looking for specific credit card specific alone, we really think this approach will want to educate young people on different financial topics, and then really serve them with the right solution for their problems or for their goal. So customer can come to ProGrad, tell us 'ProGrad, I'm looking for £5,000 to buy a car'. Awesome, how can we help you get this? Yes, car financing is one option but can we maybe have a combination of you earning a bit of money through one of our partners, on top of you saving a bit of money and you borrowing a bit of money? All of this will allow you to find the most optimal way for you to have a solution to your needs.

It really started in analytics when I first joined. And I think for me, as you know, if you want to learn, strong analytics really helps you to make better credit decisions. So we really worked with Experian on scorecards, but we built out a very strong analytics capability in the business. I guess that goes from the data warehouse through to the frontend with dashboarding and all the analytical tools that you use, as well as, like the actual people capability that we bought in.

And it's helped us to understand our loan portfolio performance at a very granular detail and be able to tweak our scorecards very, very, very quickly to respond to to any credit risk portfolios to be seen. And it's helped us from a margin perspective has certainly helped us a lot to grow the business sustainably.

At the end of the day, what happens is that all the companies that were doing peer-to-peer lending, had to stop because the business model was not able to continue in the way the central bank wanted to do it. Fortunately for us, we were able to keep up our business: we already had a really good platform, that today is a loan management platform that we are offering to banks, to startups, financial institutions, to onboard to originate new credit lines, and to administrate manage those loans.

So basically from 2018 to today, and we will continue on this path: developing and selling our loan management system as a software as a service.

And beginning with Prezzta, what we're trying to do here is try to think and trying to innovate and help people. And as we like to say, without a doubt, we help to develop the FinTech industry.

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.

I had to borrow a lot of money from my peers to be able to pay my rent. Which, as you can imagine, was not a very pleasant experience. Because you have to ask, 'can you lend me a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there' and have to remember who you borrow money from.

And I was dreaming of having an application that could solve these kinds of issues for me. And back then Tinder was already popular among kids, if it can say so. But there was no Tinder-like application to just match with people for the sake of borrowing money from them. I ended up building it myself after not finding it available.

It's been four years since I started building Lendwill, and it is extremely difficult to build a good peer-to-peer lending platform that would allow individuals to borrow money from each other. So I can understand why there had not been any product that I wanted back in the day because it's really hard!

I mean, this is not just doing data science, but actually looking to bring together and harness really advanced analytics, modern methodologies to really bring forward business strategy on that side. And that is something specifically on the credit risk side, which I'm seeing more and more, where if you actually start at the board level thinking about why do certain things not quite work? Why why are we losing market share? Why are we not growing as fast as we can? I mean, once you actually get into the engine room, you open the door, very often you find data related topics, modelling related topics, infrastructure process topics are really at the heart of what's not working.

We're able to bring in this reliable view on the world, that growth is actually still there and very important, but I would strongly recommend not just to continue in an undifferentiated way, what you've been doing over the last 10 years, characterised by low interest, low inflation, and so on and so forth, the environment is definitely changing. We see our clients adopt to that very quickly.

But adopting to it does not mean slamming on the brakes, it actually means getting more sophisticated in the analytic space, getting more sophisticated in terms of how can I assess the affordability of a loan for a specific retail customer, for a specific SME customer on a case by case basis, in a scalable fashion. That is really where we see really a lot of interest, and a lot of movement over the last six months.

We are on the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea where this is going to end. It's endless the level of opportunities here, and it's going to need to be fueled with credit.

I think the key is to bring the approaches that have been here for millennia, but in reality, cross them also with the new technology. We don't have to have centralised banks performing all these kinds of operations or pawnshops, as we have in the past we can have this retail approach it is going to be a very interesting exploration that we are doing in other companies are going to explore the market also in bring completely marvellous solution.

So we are super excited in reality, on top of the innovation dream on top of building the next frontier for finance, it also has this deep meaning of helping people that work with different rules typically don't have access to banking. If we look into the most Western countries, this now is a niche product for very specific purpose. But in the future, we will have people on countries where this kind of solutions, help them maybe to fulfil the dreams that they have, can be life changing.

And so in this instance, Brendan, you decide, you know, I really want to get out of the podcast space. I want to get into making movies. You take your money and you go and make a film in Georgia - every dollar or you spend in Georgia in a specific way, you're eligible to earn a tax credit.

The problem with that tax credit that you would earn is that you don't have any tax liability in the state, and so we're going to move it to Coca Cola or Home Depot or Delta, or one of these big players that want to reduce their tax liability.

The hot take on someone like Elon Musk, is everyone thinks Elon Musk sells cars. Elon Musk is a broker of tax credits. That's it. Tesla is incredible company, but his core business is the spread business of tax credits. This tax credit economy, creates 1,000s of jobs, brings tourism brings art and culture to the state. It does so many positive things to the United States and specifically to these local state economies.

So we did this that at the beginning, the very first experiments, the very first beta test, is if you want to borrow from Credilikeme, you need to post on your wall and have 10 friends vouch for you.

And then, like that, we came up with this term of crowdsourcing your credit score.

Definitely, that was non-scalable.

It was challenging, operational wise, but we learned a lot of the willingness, we learned a lot about the willingness of people to prove they're credit worthy when there isn't enough information. And we learn that if we create this circle of trust with our user base, they would be willing to share stuff with us.

We put this map on the wall, like an actual physical map, and we got pushpins, and we said, 'where should we go'?

And we each had some pins, and we started putting them in. And by the end, we were like, 'this is a lot of places'. And I started doing research. And I've never even thought about the fact that you could take a very extended trip, you could you know, pack your bags, and the budget you need - I think we each spent about $7,000 each for seven and a half months. And I know there are lots of people listening where $7,000 is a lot, but there's also a lot of people who are, like, I planned a trip for three weeks that was $7,000.

That trip was, I would say, a very pivotal moment for me. Because travelling around the world really showed me a lesson that I didn't know existed, which was: everyone in the world does things differently, and it works.

And there were two things I didn't like. The first was I was never in control. So a lot of times I got incentivized with equity and when it came time to pay out, that equity never happened.

Then second - and more to what really bothered me - was there was a lot of times that clients were too qualified, or it wasn't the right programme for what these companies offer. So when this happens, clients need other programmes. And these big FinTech companies don't have them, most of the banks don't have them - like, if you walk into Chase and ask them for invoice factoring, or ask them for equipment financing, or something very specific that your business actually needs, that's the right programme, they don't have it. They don't know it.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of this country, most people are employed by a small business, and we still produce most of the country's GDP. And it feels like the last three years small businesses been under attack. Without small business, a lot of the opportunity that we have in this country is gone. And that's why I put this stuff together. That's why I care so much.

I'm a firm believer of being mortgage free should be achievable for everyone.

It shouldn't just be for the wealthy because just the concept if you go to like www.sprive.com, just three pounds a day, five pounds a day, you'd be amazed that if you just regularly chipping away the impact that it can have.

The next feature that we're launching next month is this concept of Shop with Sprive, so everyone has to go to their weekly grocery, whether it's Morrison's or M&S or ASDA and so every time you shop with Sprive, using this Sprive app, you went to Morrison's you spent a £87 on your weekly shop, you then pay that via the Sprive app, you get a code that comes up, which you're going to use at checkout to pay for the basket and immediately get extra cash that goes towards helping you pay off your mortgage faster. It's almost like cashback on steroids.

I started very idealistically, I think, with this mental model that people want and need to borrow money, right? Like, I think that's why many of us are drawn to this industry, right? Because we see that if you need to borrow money, it's good to have options.

That was my mental model coming into it.

Overtime, I started to see really that so much of what was happening to consumers wasn't driven by how much they wanted to borrow, it was really driven by how much the bank wanted to lend. And I really wanted to understand those dynamics more.

We use the same standard of care across the credit spectrum, and we actively seek new ways to innovate the scoring process. It's the architecture of our model that allows us to score approximately 37 million more individuals than conventional models. And interestingly, to note about that 37 million, approximately 10.7 million are members of the Black and Latino communities who have historically often been underserved. And approximately 3 million of those have scores that are above 620, which is generally considered those that will be eligible for traditional lending products.

So inclusion and broadening access to credit and being predictive have been guiding principles for VantageScore since its inception.

The refugee population is very much not a monolith, right. In fact, it's a very diverse group. It's 90 million people who broadly are all tied together by the fact that they've been forcibly displaced from their homes, whether to another country - and thus have become refugees - or within their existing country - and are those internally displaced. So if we're looking at this population of 90 million people, similar to any other kind of group or population of the size, the needs are going to be diverse and differ from different people and from different communities.

Refugees come from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are or were doctors, lawyers, restaurant workers, employees, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and so on. And so we often see in the media this image of refugees in a refugee camp, living out of a tent - for many refugees, that's not the reality, right? They've settled in a city or a town or a village. They're not in a camp where they're receiving direct humanitarian assistance, they're looking for opportunities to start small home-based businesses, retail out of home, selling food products, sewing businesses, and so on. Many are looking to start small shops or kiosks even refugees in camps, right?

There is a mix, but the really large crypto holders tend to be ones who were just very early to the space. They are an underserved market and a lot of their holdings remain in crypto.

A lot of these people didn't get into crypto to then move back into fiat, they go into crypto because they think they're going to stay there for the rest of their lives. So it's more that they're dabbling in the world of fiat, but living their lives in crypto as opposed to the reverse. |That's the kind of odd customers that, I say odd customers, is the kind of customers that we're seeing that typical banks just don't have exposure to which I think will make it quite an interesting space in the future. Especially if they begin to move into the space themselves.

Because again, credit scores really don't resonate well for that customer, but the fact that I can access more loans and more services from the bank makes a lot of sense, right?

So, the messaging itself can we change, make it more people friendly, make it more empathetic, again, is is an important factor that we keep working on. So understand the behaviour the formats, the messaging, and then devise and develop a complete strategy around customer engagement, what is the life cycle that we can build? So segment and perhaps micro segment the customer and build optimised life cycles for these micro segments of customers that we are onboarding and all that is to ensure that these people understand their loans make their payments on time?

There shouldn't be any instance where you know we have to limit the access to the device. So the idea is never to reach that hence, how do we use AI and ML to create very effective and efficient life cycles, messaging journeys for these people. So that, you know, the delinquencies are in check.

The learning aspect is probably the most important we eat volatility for breakfast, we make love to volatility!

That right there describes our structural - and I think unassailable - advantage in a world that has suddenly become quite a bit more volatile than it has been for the last number of decades, under which my friends in the conventional 1.0 version of the bureau's operate. And global interconnectedness or the globalisation of economies means that things happening in the Ukraine, from which my ancestors hail, to the gas pumps in North America is a pretty direct connection. And so whether it's gas pumps or groceries that are becoming much more expensive, you have consumers feeling it.

And therefore, to my lender customers, those same consumers need to be scored properly in the fullness of all of the environmental macro factors, as well as the micro factors down at the borrower's level.

That's the way this has been for the last 20 years in the United States. And it's only the last five years that things have really kind of changed. Unfortunately, we've been at the front of it, we're enabling the bank account opening. So a bank account origination for any companies within the United States that are looking for bank accounts, either in hemp hydroponics, cannabis, any kind of frontier industries, those kinds of markets are very difficult for those guys to get bank accounts, we have multiple banks, we can introduce them to and then on the backside, where we make our money is in the lending process.

So when somebody like Brendan wants to expand his store, or he wants to go grab some inventory, or he wants to buy some lights, and he needs to finance it, you'd come back to Payzel all after you've gotten your bank account all squared away, and you'd say and I'd like to have some access to some lending.