How to Lend Money to Strangers

I'm almost old enough to start voicing opinions about youngsters needing to cut their hair and get themselves some jobs. Which is convenient, because that's sort of what we're talking about today with Ethan Fraenkel from ProGrad - a UK-based fintech that's taking an objective-first approach to improving student financing. "You're not looking for car financing, you're looking to buy a car, you're n...

To grow from a small island you need a dual aspect: looking inward, CIM has a relationship with about 60% of commercially active Mauritians; looking outward, CIM is expanding into East Africa and possibly beyond? You can read more about CIM's finance arm at https://cimfinance.mu/mu/en/ Or, if you'd rather visit them and the beautiful island of Mauritius in person, here's where you can start your p...

In one way, it's slightly surprising that Mateo Infantozzi Riembau was a fintech founder. Not because there were no signs of entrepreneurial thinking, but because his early successes came from the travel industry. And yet he's done it twice, at a time were "there was little room for startups in Uruguay, and even less room for fintechs". But local innovators have changed that quickly. Now "fintech...

When I was living in Denmark and working at Experian, my boss’s boss was a rockstar, you would never hear Burak Kilicoglu ’s name mentioned without an associated compliment. And I wasn’t the only one to notice, so he was soon snapped up by Creditinfo to be their Director of Global Markets - a perfect-sounding guest for this show, right? Unfortunately, though I tried, I never managed to get Burak o...

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I feel an affinity for the peer-to-peer lending model. My initial interest was sparked during an MBA project 16 years ago and reinvigorated more recently by interviews on here with Monexo and Kiva . And I’m building on that today, with Anzhelika Osmanova, founder of Lendwill, a community-first P2P platform coming to us out of Norway. You can read more ab...

“This is not a small change, and it doesn't affect isolated groups. This is not just an IT problem. This is not just a modelling problem. This is not something the business can solve on its own. This really requires board attention to actually bring together those teams and ensure that there is really cohesion across the organisation.” - Frank Gerhard , Solution Associate Partner and CTO at Risk D...

Pawnshops are one of the oldest forms of lending, allowing people to turn assets they’d like to keep for the long-term into cash in the short-term - granny’s broch, those statues great uncle Thomas brought back from Greece, your Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. OK, one of those is not the same as the others, but our definition of ‘asset’ is changing, so where do holders of digital assets go if they want...

“If you look at the things we do as a company, whether it's in digital assets, renewable energy, or media and entertainment, we are always looking at how to structure financial products to push disruptive industries forward. We are banking on, and betting on the future.” Let's fund a movie. Truth be told, I don’t watch a lot of movies these days. There was a time I could use long flights to catch...

The Mexico lending market is not one I know well. It’s not one I know at all, truth be told. Luckily, Jorge Enriquez is blessed with an infectious laugh and an easy manner that immediately put me at ease. It’s something I soon learned was part of the DNA of his business: “we understand that asking for a loan is a stressful situation, so we need to create the right environment for our customers to...

The credit card landscape glitters with options for the consumer - different rewards earned at different rates, in different ways, sometimes with an annual fee and sometimes not, all wrapped in countless different brands and colours. Chances are, there’s a product out there that is perfect for every consumer. Chances are, it’s bloody hard to find. That’s where Chris Hutchins comes in. In, All The...

“Would I prefer cash through debt, or cash through equity? I would always choose cash through debt - what happens in partnerships is one person always works harder, and there is always some level of resentment towards the other ones, (and) you could always find a coach, you could always find a consultant or a mentor. And typically, you're going to have a lot fewer challenges.” There's good debt an...

I spend a lot of time talking about how to create debt for consumers. I do it because I believe that, when done right, debt can be beneficial to all parties involved, like a mortgage that generates wealth for the middle classes through property ownership. But that doesn’t lessen the fact that debt carries a cost, a cost that is now quickly rising. We know that mortgage rates are on the up, because...

"Fairness in pricing often starts with the idea of competition - if there's healthy competition, that will bring the price down. But, in the United States, if you look from the 1990s to the 2020s, credit card profits have steadily risen, and real interest rates have steadily risen and at the same time, default rates have fallen and it's just less expensive, in some ways to run a credit card compan...

Credit scores are near to my heart. I kinda work around them now, but still, I spent a wonderful decade rolling the things out and so I’m getting back to my roots. In today’s episode, Toni Hubbs talks to me about how the team at VantageScore is driving inclusion and transparency in credit scores at scale (a really, really big scale), and about how and why those scores are being used in securitizat...

This is a special interview for me. HTLMTS doesn't pull in huge volumes of listeners, but that's OK, that's not really what I'm after. I want the right listeners, not the most listeners, and so I get excited when a guest tells me they got a business lead after their interview, or when one guest asks to be set up with another for some new project, or when, like today, I get to look inside a company...

In February, I spoke to Phil Blows about backing traditional loans with digital assets. The crypto markets had a rough time in the months that followed, so I wasn’t expecting much progress on that front, but I was wrong. Bull markets are a great time to build, after all. So I have Phil back today, talking about ByBrix and their new crypto-backed mortgage offering. And sure, to crypto outsiders lik...

"It was, at that time, a very crazy idea", Neel Juriasingani tells me. "A lot of people still look at us as those crazy guys. But coming from that tech mindset, we were forced to think about how tech could be built to solve these challenges". Over the last decade or so, lenders have invested a lot of time and money to turn the smartphone into an optimised account acquisition tool - you want t...

We eat volatility for breakfast, we make love to volatility! Which is handy, because we’ve all heard it, most of us have even said it ourselves, the world is very volatile at the moment. So when Evan Chrapko of Trust Science told me how their models embrace volatility, I knew we were onto something interesting. Even more so, because I spent a decade working in the credit bureaus myself, and that’s...

Not all bankers wear suits - some, like Todd Kleperis, are built for frontier markets. It has been a decade since Washington and Colorado legalised the use of cannabis, and 17 States have followed suit, but with federal legalisation not yet on the books, most banks in the United States remain wary of the £33 billion industry. This, in turn, leaves the fast-growing recession-resilient sector starve...

Open Banking is a proven technology with proven use cases, and in the UK, perhaps its spiritual home, user numbers continue to rocket - there are now more than 6 million active Open Banking customers there. However, some other markets are looking on and wondering what the fuss is about. This was surprising to me. And it was surprising to today’s guest, Nick Tuttelberg of DirectID . After all, ther...

BNPL is usually spoken about in terms of it being a more convenient payment tool for people in option-rich credit markets, but a revenue model that doesn’t require interest resonates with Middle Eastern customers for even more reasons. So in this episode I speak to Ziyaad Ahmed, co-founder and COO at Spotii, a Dubai-based BNPL now in the ZipPay stable. You can learn more about Spotii at https://ww...

More than 200 million formal and informal micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets lack adequate financing to thrive and grow; and the majority cite the lack of collateral and credit history and business informality as barriers to that financing. Today's guest, Sabelo Sibanda , has built CreditAis to solve this by providing explainable deep learning models that use alternativ...

Nicole Lapin , Host of Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin , is “the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand”. And sure, you may not need a dictionary to understand lending anymore, but that’s because you work in the industry. I’m going to guess that most of your borrowers don’t. And I’m also going to guess that most of your borrowers don’t want to spend their days reading dictio...

South Africa has an awkward history with payday lending and payday adjacent lending, so I was a touch concerned when I first heard that a fresh pair of South African entrepreneurs were looking to shake up the industry. Luckily, all my concerns were misplaced, because SmartWage is not looking to rethink payday lending, they're looking to make it redundant . You can read more about SmartWage, now re...

Singapore might not feel like a natural home for a mobile banking app built on a vision to increase access to credit, but the city is not all glass skyscrapers and besuited bankers; and women are the ones most likely to fall through the cracks. That’s why Lucy is here. If you’re an entrepreneur, or a momtrepreneur, or a micropreneur, then it’s like your bank, but better. In today’s episode, I spea...