How to Lend Money to Strangers

“Buy now and pay in up to 24 monthly instalments using your existing credit card.​ Zero interest. Zero fees. Zero new credit.” With copy that good, you might not actually need to listen to this week’s episode 😉 But please do, it’s a really good one as we hear first hand from one of South Africa’s most exciting new fintech founders.

Float is all about taking a payment tool that you already know and love, stripping away the ...

Always curious, always outspoken, Carolyn Rohm has a deep passion for helping analysts and analytical teams to engage with the wider business and stakeholders to deliver solutions that provide real value and bottom-line benefits. In today’s episode, we talk about her career in credit risk, about the different nuances of credit risk analytics in high-risk and low-risk environments, about credit scores and credit strategies, about an...

The global covid pandemic shut down a lot of things, but new vehicle supply chains were among the hardest hit. A knock-on effect of that was that Taran, an advanced analytics and AI consultancy saw their hot lead for a new contract evaporate. But sometimes setbacks are really opportunities in disguise, and as Taran's leadership team adjusted to put all their eggs in their remaining project, they realised that they were more than a ...

Caleb Maru called M-Pesa the "company that changed Kenya forever", and the crazy thing is, its impact was even bigger than that - because the dominoes that M-Pesafirst tipped over in Kenya, seventeen years ago, are still having an impact all over East Africa. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Nassor Abubakar, an M-Pesa veteran and digital lending expert who is spreading mobile-first digital loans across Tanzania with NMB Bank.

In the world of data science, there are people like me, who have signed up for an online Python course but just not got around to starting it yet, and then there are people like Ayhan Diᶊ, who, given a spare month, create a Python package to succeed the highly successful CreditR by simplifying tasks such as variable analysis, model development, and calibration and validation with unparalleled efficiency 😂

Ayhan Diş is a Qua...

"Data is a bit like the blood of an organisation. It goes everywhere. However, because it goes everywhere, you cannot just silo it somewhere. Of course, you need to have some standards around data, but every part of the of a business has to be responsible for the data". 

Daniele Forni cuts through systems and technologies to solve the complex data issues that otherwise prevent financial institutions and startups from un...

Designers speak about 'the job to be done' - you don’t need a taxi or an Uber or tuk-tuk, you need to get home to bed; you don’t need a mortgage, you need to finance your house purchase; you don’t need to spend every second weekend researching market rates, you just need to be on the best deal you qualify for. In this episode, I speak to Vincent Turner about Australian mortgages, about startups and why ‘early-stage businesses’ is p...

Rwanda is rising as a regional financial centre, catching the East African fintech wave to drive economic and social transformation and to broaden financial inclusion. In today's episode, I'm speaking to TransUnion's CEO for Rwanda and Head of Africa Growth Regions, Sam Tayengwa to hear about the energy and progress that's bubbling to the surface there. We talk about mobile loans, of course, but also the emergence of old classics l...

The story of East African fintech is built around the mobile phone. Not the smartphone, mind you, but the humble feature phone. In markets where all but the most significant of locations lacked an established infrastructure of landlines and local bank branches, these phones leapfrogged both: powered by pre-paid sim cards that often served as a secondary currency and cleverly leveraged USSD technologies. But it has been seventeen ye...

"At its core, Credit Canary is a data platform that consolidates and reconciles multiple different data sources in a standardised way to produce a really rich set of flags and real contextual insights. And the essence of that is flexibility within lending. With the data that we have, there is a great opportunity not just to help make better decisions, but to help make better lending products." - James Fell, Founder and CEO

A...

"It's important that in every interest rate environment, in every market environment, an average family can afford an average home" - Arjan Verbeek, co-founder at Perenna Bank.

The UK mortgage market has long been underpinned by the belief that, as long as the music kept playing, you would be able to refinance from one lender's short-term teaser rate to the next, without ever having to pay the full price... but then the music st...

Big data analytics used to require multiple sources of data, fed into your systems via a complex array of pipes of varying structural integrity: leaks, hassles, and something to be left to only the most advanced of data organisations. In today's episode, we find out how all that has changed:

"As the name suggests, we are one big data pipe with a lot of information flowing through it, and we fuse that with AI to produ...

Japan is an uncommon blend of known and unknown: I drive a Nissan, you might drive a Toyota, my TV is a Sony, and since my time in Hong Kong, my go-to beer on hot days is an ice-cold pint of Asahi... but I know little about their FinTech scene. So, to set that right, I sat down with Morris Iwai, a seasoned business executive with 20+ years of experience in the credit card, consumer lending, and payments industries of the US, Taiwan...

You can't afford rigid systems in a world that moves fast, but also, for a long time at least, you couldn't afford agile systems in a more dollars and cents sort of way. But these days you can.

Timvero's solutions are all laid out at https://timvero.com/ or head towards a demo by jumping straight to https://timvero.com/request-a-demo/

You're welcome to start a discussion with Dmitriy over on LinkedIn https://www.lin...

When you want a model, you typically start with a target variable in mind. But sometimes that's not possible. Perhaps you're entering a new market or expanding into a new niche, you could start lending on a small scale and wait to see what happens. We used to call that a deep risk test, often somewhat euphemistically when a cohort was accidentally approved through a gap in the system. But even if you're happy to take a chance, that...

"Causality is the new explainability."

We all know credit limit increases are one of the most, if not the most, important levers in the card profit model. And we all know the reality of managing credit limits is far more complicated than the theory - every action has a reaction and all of that. So we focus on pulling back and releasing the spring of the pinball machine and then just get ready to react as...

I've got a drawer in my bedside table that is filled with an assortment of foreign notes and coins: euros and dollars and Rands that I need relatively often but that I'll nevertheless forget to take when I travel next; some Indian rupees that have long since been decommissioned; some Hong Kong dollars because how can it have taken me four years to find an excuse to get back; some, what I think are Cambodian riel; and an unseemly nu...

No good deed goes unpunished and no well-intentioned government loan program goes undefaulted upon, even more so when that government program was designed and implemented in the chaotic early days of the COVID lockdowns.

We've all seen the headlines, but what do the numbers say, what sort of businesses have been defaulting on COVID loans in the UK? Well, Dr Maurizio Fiaschetti is writing the paper on it - along with Drs Ahme...

Nearly two out of every three Colombian jobs are in the informal economy! That's a huge number that needs to come down, and no doubt it will, but until then, someone really needs to bring the benefits of formal financing to the small business owners in the informal sector. Enter Quipu with whose AI-powered loan decisions "growing is easier, fairer and more alternative".

You can find Viviana on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedi...