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PODCAST

How to Lend Money to Strangers

Brendan le Grange

A podcast about lending innovation and lending leadership 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,’ with guests from New York to New Zealand discussing everything from crypto-backed mortgages to crowd-funded loans for refugees to gamified loan journeys to AI-powered credit scores.I am the host, Brendan le Grange, and I have spent the last twenty years working in - or alongside - lenders in Africa, Asia,

business management

All Episodes

26:09

How to Lend Money to Charities, with Holger Westphely...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/05/26

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. Anything that has the word 'admin' in it is an anathema to many philanthropists. And that's where we come

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40:21

Building an all-in-one credit platform, with Ash...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/05/19

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, to build Pillar as an all-in-one credit platform for anyone who finds themselves excluded from the

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36:58

Consumer protection in Inclusive Finance, with...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/05/12

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 today we look at how what we learn about responsible lending and safe banking experiences in the developing

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38:22

Active credit building, with Sho Sugihara (Pave)

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/05/05

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 wants to give my arm the instructions it needs while it is still useful to do so. Pave takes a similar

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29:40

Financing smart agriculture, with Allan Tollo (MyFugo)

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/04/28

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 international careers, and SME loans as a root to economic progress, but MyFugo’s wraparound service for smallholder

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28:12

The cards are alright... for now, with Liz Ruddick...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/04/21

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 balances. But… “lenders will need to be vigilant to any further increases in missed payments in the coming

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36:53

Expanding access to micro-credit and micro-incomes,...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/04/14

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 turning existing pillars of their communities into his sales network, Adam is also creating new income

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34:43

Purposeful BNPL in an emerging market, with Mark...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/04/07

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 iteration of small improvements that might bring APRs down little by little.And perhaps, if I was asked

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33:25

Open banking is mainstream, with James Varga (DirectID)

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/03/31

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 actually changing now. We’ve spoken about Open Banking before, quite recently actually, but in today’s

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37:58

Can the blockchain solve ‘identity’, with Jonathan...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/03/24

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, there is, but none of the ones we’ve discussed to date felt complete, which is why I was keen to speak

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19:26

Open Banking in Greece and beyond, with Dimitris...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/03/17

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 Greek fintech landscape.You can learn more about Infin8 and their European Open Banking at www.infin8.euYou

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27:43

Touch and tech in African consumer loans, with...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/03/10

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 for consumers, but as data is generated limits grow and transactions can move fully digital - a best of

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28:47

Learning from our lending mistakes, with James...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/03/03

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 James Lambridis of DebtMD. James and his team help consumers that are in tricky debt situations, regain

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29:07

Lending against assets, all assets, with James...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/02/24

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 lending. What would you do if you needed funds to start a business?Mortgage your house?That’s often your

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24:35

Consumers and their credit data, with Kelli Fielding...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/02/17

I spent several years creating industry-level research for one of the big credit bureaus, first in Asia and then in Europe. During that time, one of my defining projects was a deep dive into the value generated by consumers monitoring their own credit reports. Prior to my study, I'd only seen this addressed as a single question: do consumers who monitor their own credit data regularly, see improving credit scores?But that’s not a specific enough question to understand the nuance… sure, if you were

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33:19

Could we lend against crypto assets, with Phil Blows...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/02/10

We owe this episode to a comment Praveen Sinha made in episode 15. Praveen was talking about the trends to watch in fintech/ lending in India and mentioned cryptocurrency as an asset he'd love to lend against, not least of all for the global scope it could add to his business.And that stuck in my mind. So when I learned of AQRU and the fact that they were paying actual money interest on crypto deposits, I wondered if we could put two and two together - after all, wouldn't the first step in treating

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22:03

Fixing vendor finance, with Alex Armitage (Nectarine...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/02/03

For the last 20 years, I've been delivering lending projects across the credit life-cycle and around the world, but always focused on the consumer. The only time I've come into contact with small business lending is on the very fringes when we've used a business owners personal credit report to estimate the risk of their new business. Or, in other words, I've only ever seen half of the picture.I started to address this in Episode 25, with Alek Koenig, but there’s so much more to learn. So today

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36:57

A global career in collections, with Chris Somervell

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/01/27

New Zealand might be forgotten from world maps so often that it’s become a meme, but that didn’t stop today’s guest from taking his career truly global. Chris Somervell’s has worked in eight countries while away from home, predominantly managing collections operations.And that’s what we discuss: lessons learned as technology developed and cultures changed alongside him, and a fundamental reimagining of what it could mean to work in collections.You can find Chris on his LinkedIn page (or out

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19:03

What is an identity, with Jaime Ramirez (Preventor)

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/01/20

In episode 17 of this show, John Cannon said of identity that “when you really sit down and think about it, in the digital world, it is broken."On the back of that statement, we could hardly leave it to just the one discussion, so in this episode, I’m talking to Jaime Ramirez, founder and CEO of Preventor, a Miami-based fintech that’s building the next generation in ID verification and financial crime risk management. We talk about the challenges of verifying identity in an increasingly online and

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21:22

Seamless working capital finance, with Alek Koenig...

How to Lend Money to Strangers ·

2022/01/13

A lender will always want to know as much as possible about a business’ health before extending credit. That’s not changed, but until recently the only data that could help in that regard was slow and expensive to produce. And in turn, SME loan application processes were slow and expensive to complete. To make matters worse, these slow and expensively-produced numbers are seldom fit for purpose, even the old faithful financial reports are only a summary of what was actually happening, not a deep

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185 results

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