How to Lend Money to Strangers

Stephen Hawking starts A Brief History of Time with an anecdote he attributes to Bertrand Russel who, having just finished a lecture on the heliocentric nature of the planets’ orbits, was challenged by a lady in the audience. “What you have told us is rubbish.” She said, “The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle." "If your theory is correct, madam," Russell replied,...

Early in Dead Poets Society, we’re introduced to Dr J. Evans Prichard’s approach to measuring the greatness of a poem, a dual-axis model which plots ‘perfection’ against ‘importance’ and which is immediately ripped up - because it is excrement. Luckily, I’m not trying to confine something as ethereal as poetry, so bear with me, and imagine a market for loans being described using two axes, with th...

“Please, sir, may I have some more regulation?” The Lending Standards Board is the primary self-regulatory body for the banking and lending industry in the UK, driving fair credit outcomes by giving lenders a way to hold themselves to a higher standard. I chat to Anna Roughley, Head of Insights at the LSB, to find out how this drives fairer outcomes for lenders and borrowers alike, and why self-re...

It’s not often that a bank’s ATMs running out of cash is a sign of its success, but that’s exactly what happened when Cantilan Bank - with its systems on the cloud - was able to get back on its feet after Typhoon Rai, and to dispense much-needed cash to the people, when no one else was able to. In today’s episode, I speak to Antonio Separovic , co-founder of Oradian , the fintech whose cloud-nativ...

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 on...

We all pay a mortgage every month, just sometimes it's our landlord’s mortgage we're paying… I was in London for The Podcast Show in the last week of May and took that opportunity to record another in-person episode of HTLMTS - this time kindly hosted at OnLadder Towers by Cameron Orcutt , half of the exciting entrepreneur pair that’s using deposit loans to help first-time home buyers get on the p...

You may have noticed, but the world is a little unsettled these days. Incomes are variable. We’ve had government support programs come and go. And underlying industries come and go. Prices are rising. Fast. In an episode of this show that I recorded six months ago, I made reference to the price of fuel being £1.50 a litre. That had actually been a slight rounding-up for convenience but already, wi...

The first really big event that I spoke at during my time in Asia was in Shanghai. I was at Lendit China speaking about the emergence of fintech lending in Hong Kong, following a template my US colleagues had first designed to explain the rise (and rise, and rise) of lending fintech there . So I’ve always been interested in the forces that came together to give fintech lenders their first foothold...

I used to feel a little bit exotic knowing a person born in Moldova, but since he left as a baby, that’s actually all I knew about Moldova. It turns out, I should have been paying attention because it may be a small country, but Moldova is standing on the threshold of significant change: on the one hand, a formal push is now underway to bring them into the EU but on the other, there’s also the sti...

I feel a strange affinity with peer to peer lending. I've never done it myself as a lender, borrower or connector but one of the first projects I ever did in my MBA, some 16 years ago now, was on Zopa and the emergence of the P2P model. But more recently, the headlines have been bearish, with Zopa and Funding Circle - two pillars of the form - both shutting down their retail P2P arms. As a lending...

Thailand is one of my favourite markets. My main memories are of the fantastic food, the vibrant streets, and the perfect beaches but I also helped to roll out the first-ever national credit bureau score there and that’s what we’ll be talking about today. Thailand is a young country with a fast-evolving fintech scene, so I have pulled together Khun Phadet Charoensivakorn (COO of the National Credi...

Now, here is a topic I didn’t see coming. But why lend money to a charity, isn’t that a bit mean, to ask for your money back if they’re doing work you believe in? I spoke to Holger Westphely , Acting Head of CAF Venturesome , to find out how and why loans are sometimes better than donations. It's very difficult to raise grant funding for anything that isn't directly related to a charity programme....

As a three-time immigrant myself, I’m always going to pay attention when I hear that’s there’s a new fintech in town building credit that moves with you , doubly so when one of the co-founders of that fintech is Ash Bhatt who I first met when he was Head of Lending at Revolut, for the US and UK markets. Ash has used that international experience, and his own experience as an immigrant in London, t...

It used to be that developing markets suffered because they didn’t have physical bank branches. And as a result, a lot of innovation sought to find workarounds that the developed markets just didn't need. But now that none of us have physical branches, the solutions built in the developing markets have the freedom to spread globally. I’ve spoken about this before in the context of fintech, but tod...

I’ve recently moved and now I have an electric stovetop, the old-fashioned type that stays hot for ages. When I inevitably place a stray hand on a still-hot plate, it’ll take my nerve impulses about 15 milliseconds to reach my brain, add a bit of processing time and allow for the return journey, and in under a fifth of a second, my hand will move away. The process is so fast because the brain want...

I know the voiceover says this is my 38th show, but a quick reshuffle means it is actually the 40th, still, my message remains the same - MyFugo is possibly the best representation I've seen to date of the benefit that credit can bring to previously underserved markets. I’ve gotten excited about mortgages as a tool for wealth creation, Ivy League student loans as a route to well-paying internation...

Liz Ruddick is the author of the UK Cards Report, FICO’s go-to resources for anyone working in the UK card industry. This means Liz is perfectly placed to put the latest card trends in perspective, and it’s another case of ‘it could be worse’. The cost of living is rising around the world, so things may yet turn bad, but for now, consumers are spending relatively well and reigning in their balance...

This is not investment advice, but I’m going to put it out there: Adam Rice is one of the most exciting entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to on this show, with AssetDirect a bold embodiment of his ambitions - providing access to credit to underserved populations in Canada and now around the world. That alone is great, I love an ‘access to credit’ story on this show, but there is another layer to it, by tu...

My career in consumer credit started in South Africa, a little over twenty years ago, when making access to credit fairer for the lower tiers of the economic pyramid meant investing resources to build better credit scores so that we could bring our rates below the statutory maximum. We were young and idealistic, but still, by starting with a lender’s mindset we figured that the answer lay in an it...

No one will give you a job until you have work experience. No one will extend you credit until you have a credit history. Two absurdities that have existed long enough to become absolute cliches, and yet they somehow persist. And more than that, they’re two hurdles that are easier to overcome if you come from money - maybe you’ve got an aunt who could have a word with the bank’s CEO… Well, that’s...

It’s weird: when I moved house, the world suddenly stopped while everyone waited for me to get a new utility bill, at which point we resumed normal service with me once again a verified real-life person. We've said it on this show before, but there has to be a better way to prove identities than a utility bill, a signature, and an unchangeable government-issued number of some sorts… And of course,...

We’ve spoken about Open Banking on this show before, often from the perspective of how to use the data, and often with a UK-centric point-of-view given the early lead we’ve seen the region take in terms of large-scale adoption. In today’s episode, we’re moving further afield and taking a look under the hood, as it were, with Dimitris Petrilis from Infin8, and also adding a little context of the Gr...

Not every hot new name in consumer lending is some smartphone-native app underpinned by a quiver of machine learning algorithms. But also, not every hot new name in consumer lending is actually making a profit. This is why Michiel le Roux, Group CEO of Unifi Credit is taking on sub-Saharan Africa with a ‘touch and tech’ approach. A good ol’ fashioned branch network provides a route into the system...

Not every loan made to a stranger is a good one, sometimes the lender suffers as a result, almost always the borrower does. On this show, we often talk about how to mitigate the pain felt by lenders, upfront or after the fact, but we’ve also scratched the surface when it comes to taking the customer’s point-of-view - in today’s episode, I want to go a level deeper. Which is why I’m speaking to Jam...

Where do you go next when you already have your own show on Channel 4? Well, to HTLMTS apparently 😁 In today’s episode, I speak to the founder of Prestige Pawnbrokers and star of Posh Pawn , James Constantinou. It was a slightly left-field booking for me when the idea was first floated, but then I realised that the much-maligned pawnbroking model can also be a disruptive approach to asset-backed...