How to Lend Money to Strangers

Corporate cards, payments, accounting, and credit for growing businesses in 25+ countries - there's a lot to cover today, and then we also chat about Brazzilion fintech and Guga's impressive career! If you're in Mexico as this comes out, I think you can still catch the Jeeves team at Mexico Tech week (https://www.mexicotechweek.mx/). If not, you can try Jeeves over at https://www.tryjeeves.com/br...

If you're fed up with chasing unpaid invoices and debts, iCollect's DIY debt collection software might be the solution for you. You don't have to be a lender to have creditors, but you often have to be a lender to afford a full team to chase those creditors when they start to default - that's where Amanda Morrison steps in. icollect is at https://www.icollect.co.nz/ Guardian Credit Services are at...

Getting out of debt has never been harder, and, yes, a sluggish economy and the cost of recovering from a global pandemic play a big role in this, but lenders are not entirely blameless. For too long, it felt cheaper to deliver rigid and unpleasant collections processes, because 'it's not like the customer has a choice'. But they do, they have the most important choice available: to pay or not to...

Suren Rastogi started his career in financial services, but, called to do something a little more exciting, he has broken away to pursue his dream of launching a board game. We'll talk about his roots, his pivot, and what it took to create Burnout : a chaotic strategic party game about mental health and the daily grind. Head on over to https://www.burnoutgame.com/ to get on the waitlist, it's the...

Banking that's good for you and the planet. You can see the GreenFi offering first-hand at https://www.greenfi.com/. GreenFi helps you save money, earn cash back, and plant trees - all while keeping your money out of fossil fuels. No mandatory fees. No greenwashing. Just a better way to bank. You can follow Tim on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothynewell/ Follow GreenFi at the saem ti...

Luke Willms is an award-winning writer, director, and producer... and he's interested in lending. Unabnkable is the culmination of a seven-year, seven-country journey to unravel whether Africa's rich tapestry of tradition, innovation and experimentation to find out if it holds the key to Western economic revitalisation. Find all the details at https://unbankablemovie.com/ (or watch it on https://t...

McKinsey recently surveyed senior credit risk executives from, among others, nine of the top ten US banks, and they asked them about their organisations’ adoption of GenAI, its current use cases, their future plans for it, and the challenges they expected. Twenty percent of the respondents had already implemented at least one GenAI use case in their organizations, and a further 60 percent expect t...

Simplified funding for SMEs: pre-qualification in minutes, funded within a day, this is not the business lending of yesteryear. Credibly is at home online at https://www.credibly.com/ You can find Ryan on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-rosett-262b642/ While Credibly is there at https://www.linkedin.com/company/credibly/ I am on LinkedIn, too, at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanleg...

I've just added a new section to the website, featuring affiliate links to all the books written by the great guests we've featured on this show - https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/recommended-reads . If you scan that list before you listen to this show, you'll find among them  Dr Michael Orkin  with  What Are the Odds? and Probability & Statistics Made Interesting . Dr...

Very early in my career, back in the days when the details from paper forms had to be typed into a computer to get the application process started, I heard about companies scanning application forms and then sending the files to India to have the data capture done there. A decade later, the guy I was chatting to in a hotel bar in Nairobi promised me he could build a collection call centre in India...

You can't lend money if you don't have capital. And you can't grow your capital if you don't deploy it. There have long been matchmakers to link those two sides together, but traditionally they've only come into play when the numbers involved started b's or even t's. Exaloan closes the global funding gap for individuals, entrepreneurs, and SMEs by connecting institutional capital with the digital...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with high ability on a given task tend to underestimate their competence, while those with low ability overestimate theirs. It's typically examples of the second half of that antithesis that make the headlines, but the first half is problematic, too, because sometimes the experts best placed to start a new business are the ones most held b...

This is an unscientific guess, but I have to believe that the vast majority of us would prefer to get our power needs met by renewable sources in our own backyards - cleaner, yes, but also free from the price shocks that have become so common recently. That said, heat pumps and solar panels are expensive and complicated - a daunting combination that holds many people back, myself included. That's...

Recorded live in Austin, Texas at the offices of Billd , this episode of HTLMTS explores the ways in which Christopher Doyle and his team are removing financing friction from the building process. Few of us look forward to a building project, but all of us make use of the end results, so let's take a look behind the scenes at how the money does (and doesn't flow) between lenders, general contracto...

"I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it." - Wendell Berry The world that Robbie Vitrano and the team at Mad Agriculture is striving to create is so vastly different than the world that is, that nearly everything that they do bears certain madness. From heart to head, poetry to...

Twenty years ago, the economy of Zimbabwe hit global headlines for its hyper-inflation: Wikipedia tells me prices rose 89.7 sextillion percent in 2008. And while the decimal point here may create the illusion of something measurable, in all real terms, it is an incomprehensible number - something which The Zimbabwean Newspaper cleverly circumvented when it ran a protest campaign using a trillion d...

A cross-over episode to celebrate our crossing over from 2024 to 2025 😜 a time we traditionally think about goals for the future. But while goal setting is common, goal achieving tends to be somewhat rarer - I'll personally be entering my 20th successive 'Year of the Body' with nothing but an even softer belly to show for the previous 19 years of good intentions. In this episode, we sat down with...

I've been busy with the kids' end-of-year activities, with a bit of camping, with a bit of drinking in Belfast, with a bit of planning for a trip to Paris for the Olympics, with a bit of everything except podcast editing 😉 So, to fill the gap until next week, here's a taste of my other show: hAIghtened senses . From drones scanning the forests of Sweden looking for early signs of pest infestation...

Adrian Pllay has an unusually deep understanding of some of the world's more interesting markets. We've heard a lot about the US and the UK on this show but today, Adrian takes us off the beaten path: having been based at times in Africa and at times in the Middle East, he now oversees both of those regions as well as a little in-between! We talk about what he's learnt along the way, we get teased...

"If my mom asks me what I do, I say I work for a company that helps financial institutions worldwide to make lending simple". Paul Weiss is talking about Simbuka in this quote, a young and passionate software development company, focusing on financial institutions that operate in developing and emerging markets. And since the name Simbuka originates from the Kinyarwanda language, what better locat...

In the last five years, one hundred million Americans have started to monitor their credit reports with TransUnion for the first time. One hundred million. And the same thing is happening all around the world. But just because everyone is doing it, doesn't mean they're doing it for the same reason: some consumers are in a bind and looking for a way back to good credit; some are planning a major lo...

"So as I as I always say, Brendan, India is now the coolest party in town and if you are late, you might not get in!" The story of Indian fintech is one of almost unimaginable speed and scale, and watching it from the front lines was Kabeer Chaudhary . So I sat down with him to talk about digitising loans and learning from banks and fintechs to deliver a project that works with loss rates that all...

As an industry, we've been using scorecards as objective and comparable measures of credit risk for generations. We've used this experience to get more and more accurate in those models, but there are other uses, too, like maybe an objective and comparable measure of environmental risk... I'm sitting down with Daniel Mclean , Client Partner at 4most , a specialist credit analytics firm that became...

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting back-to-back live recordings of this podcast in the MoneyPot studio, a glass-walled thing of beauty on the Money20/20 show floor. The second of those was a data-backed dive into the world of frictionless and fair embedded business finance with Rob Straathod, CEO of Liberis - what I think could be one of the best use cases for Open Banking out there. You can...

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting back-to-back live recordings of this podcast in the MoneyPot studio, a glass-walled thing of beauty on the Money20/20 show floor. The first of those was an inspiring discussion about real-time data in collections with James Hill, CEO of Flexys Debt Management & Collections Software - what I think could be one of the best use cases for Open Banking out th...