How to Lend Money to Strangers

We like to talk about algorithms, and big data, and machine learning, but sometimes we’d do well to take a step back and ask about what the business really needs. This is especially true in developing markets, where consultants can forget to bring the organisation along with them when they implement the latest and greatest scoring tech. In this episode 5 of How to Lend Money to Strangers, I speak...

When Dr Ruifeng Liu was transferred to China, it was to help the Postal Savings Bank of China roll out consumer banking for the first time through their 40,000 branches. A decade later, even banks of this size are at risk of being sidelined by a pair of young upstarts. In episode 4 of How to Lend Money to Strangers, I speak to Dr Zhong Liu and Dr Ruifeng Liu - both of whom have extensive credit ca...

The Philippines is home to one of Asia’s best-performing economies, but many of its 60 million adults may be missing out on the party thanks to their limited access to credit. In traditional lending models with manual processes, smaller loans were often simply too expensive to issue, but a new wave of entrepreneurs is looking to set that right. Georg Steiger is one such entrepreneur. With BillEase...

Last week, we set the scene, and in doing so we allowed ourselves to keep the conversation high-level and somewhat academic in nature. In the corporate world, we’re seldom afforded such a luxury, however. Instead, if questions of lending strategy are to be given their due attention from the Board, they need to be shown to be delivering quantifiable value. In episode two of How to Lend Money to Str...

Raymond Anderson wrote the textbook on credit risk modelling, two of them in fact, and so when I was looking for someone to help me lay the foundation for How to Lend Money to Strangers, his name was top of my list. How to Lend Money to Strangers will be a far-ranging show, in time hearing from lenders big and small, and in markets across the developed and developing world, but first, before we em...

How to Lend Money to Strangers is a podcast about lending in all its forms and in all the markets in which it takes place, however diverse those markets may be. In fact, it’s a case of ‘the more diverse the better’ in this show, which has hosted guests from Manila to Moscow, from Mumbai to Madrid, from Shenzen to Chicago, from Swansea to Singapore... I am your host, Brendan le Grange, and I have s...