“Buy now and pay in up to 24 monthly instalments using your existing credit card.​ Zero interest. Zero fees. Zero new credit.” With copy that good, you might not actually need to listen to this week’s episode ? But please do, it’s a really good one as we hear first hand from one of South Africa’s most exciting new fintech founders. Float is all about taking a payment tool that you already know and love, stripping away the cost, to providing cash flow management that enables spend without an unnecessary expansion of unsecured credit. Float is at home at https://www.float.co.za/ And on soc ..read more

Always curious, always outspoken, Carolyn Rohm has a deep passion for helping analysts and analytical teams to engage with the wider business and stakeholders to deliver solutions that provide real value and bottom-line benefits. In today’s episode, we talk about her career in credit risk, about the different nuances of credit risk analytics in high-risk and low-risk environments, about credit scores and credit strategies, about analytics for modern collections, and about how to build teams with hard and soft skills. Carolyn is at home online at https://www.carolynrohm.com/ (or just straight ..read more

The global covid pandemic shut down a lot of things, but new vehicle supply chains were among the hardest hit. A knock-on effect of that was that Taran, an advanced analytics and AI consultancy saw their hot lead for a new contract evaporate. But sometimes setbacks are really opportunities in disguise, and as Taran's leadership team adjusted to put all their eggs in their remaining project, they realised that they were more than a consultancy, they had a product on their hands - and, more or less, that's how Taran Decision Manager was born. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Martin Chudoba ..read more

Caleb Maru called M-Pesa the "company that changed Kenya forever", and the crazy thing is, its impact was even bigger than that - because the dominoes that M-Pesafirst tipped over in Kenya, seventeen years ago, are still having an impact all over East Africa. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Nassor Abubakar, an M-Pesa veteran and digital lending expert who is spreading mobile-first digital loans across Tanzania with NMB Bank. You should follow Nassor on LinkedIn for https://www.linkedin.com/in/nassabuba/ NMB is at https://www.nmbbank.co.tz/ and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/co ..read more

In the world of data science, there are people like me, who have signed up for an online Python course but just not got around to starting it yet, and then there are people like Ayhan Diᶊ, who, given a spare month, create a Python package to succeed the highly successful CreditR by simplifying tasks such as variable analysis, model development, and calibration and validation with unparalleled efficiency ? Ayhan Diş is a Quant Professional renowned for shaping sophisticated data-driven solutions across diverse sectors, and we discuss what AI and ML can bring to the world of credit risk modell ..read more

"Data is a bit like the blood of an organisation. It goes everywhere. However, because it goes everywhere, you cannot just silo it somewhere. Of course, you need to have some standards around data, but every part of the of a business has to be responsible for the data".  Daniele Forni cuts through systems and technologies to solve the complex data issues that otherwise prevent financial institutions and startups from unlocking their data potential. And luckily, he loves sharing those insights with us: on LinkedIn, at conferences, in articles, in free-to-download reports such as his Guid ..read more

Designers speak about 'the job to be done' - you don’t need a taxi or an Uber or tuk-tuk, you need to get home to bed; you don’t need a mortgage, you need to finance your house purchase; you don’t need to spend every second weekend researching market rates, you just need to be on the best deal you qualify for. In this episode, I speak to Vincent Turner about Australian mortgages, about startups and why ‘early-stage businesses’ is perhaps a better term, about design thinking and deep working, and about a rather special belt. Uno is at home online at https://unohomeloans.com.au/  Or on Li ..read more

Rwanda is rising as a regional financial centre, catching the East African fintech wave to drive economic and social transformation and to broaden financial inclusion. In today's episode, I'm speaking to TransUnion's CEO for Rwanda and Head of Africa Growth Regions, Sam Tayengwa to hear about the energy and progress that's bubbling to the surface there. We talk about mobile loans, of course, but also the emergence of old classics like mortgages and vehicle loans. TransUnion is, as Sam said, at https://www.transunion.com/ but also at https://www.transunion.co.za/ and https://www.transunionafr ..read more

The story of East African fintech is built around the mobile phone. Not the smartphone, mind you, but the humble feature phone. In markets where all but the most significant of locations lacked an established infrastructure of landlines and local bank branches, these phones leapfrogged both: powered by pre-paid sim cards that often served as a secondary currency and cleverly leveraged USSD technologies. But it has been seventeen years since M-PESA arrived on the scenes and yet traditional credit tools have often failed to cross the floor - in Uganda, the credit bureaus are filled with the data ..read more

"At its core, Credit Canary is a data platform that consolidates and reconciles multiple different data sources in a standardised way to produce a really rich set of flags and real contextual insights. And the essence of that is flexibility within lending. With the data that we have, there is a great opportunity not just to help make better decisions, but to help make better lending products." - James Fell, Founder and CEO All too often, a borrower and their unique circumstances are thought about at the point of application and then entirely forgotten until a payment or two is missed. That m ..read more