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 infestations to artificial noses detecting spoiled milk or the presence of mildew to innovators building businesses on top of this fast-changing tech, our podcast uncovers the innovative ways AI-empowered machine ..read more

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 with the possibility of a future book, and we hear how Provenir is helping banks, fintechs, and other financial services providers make smarter decisions faster with their AI-Powered Risk Decisioning ..read more

"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 location to find Paul than in Kigali. Simbuka is online at https://www.simbuka.com/ or find and follow them on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/simbuka/) Paul is on LinkedIn at https://www ..read more

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 loan and want to optimise their options; some want to make sure everything is untouched and as it should be. So, in their latest global study of the phenomenon, TransUnion set out to see if each of th ..read more

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 a specialist analytics firm and went on to win awards for its new "green" credit score - an ESG score that can be adapted and utilised across all regions and tailored to a lender's available data, in ..read more

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 a specialist analytics firm and went on to win awards for its new "green" credit score - an ESG score that can be adapted and utilised across all regions and tailored to a lender's available data, in ..read more

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 find Liberis at https://www.liberis.com/ You can find Rob on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-straathof-3b56152/ (Liberis are there, too, of course) Don't leave LinkedIn before reachi ..read more

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 there. Flexys is at home online at https://www.flexys.com/ You can reach out to James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-hill-07850167/ (where Flexys are, too) James' own podcast - Fle ..read more

Five years ago, cash was involved in every fourth POS transaction in China. Today, it is involved in 1 in 14, and in two years, it is expected to be involved in just 1 in 33. The size and speed of that evaporation are undeniably impressive, but the most important lessons will be found by studying neither the size nor the speed at which those cash transactions evaporated but from studying where those transactions went. In the West, cash transactions became debit card transactions and the big banks saw them all. In China, cash transactions went into the new mobile wallet ecosystems, and as the ..read more

Grab is by far the largest ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia, the largest food delivery platform, one of the largest digital payment methods, and now, thanks in part to the work of my guest, Ritwik Ghosh, the largest embedded FinTech lending business. That's an impressive set of achievements, but Ritwick and his co-founder, Sauvik Datta, still saw a gap: while Grab is an important platform for many merchants, it is never their only platform, and so any platform-specific effort to deliver revenue-based financing is doing so with at least one eye off the ball. So they created Seedfl ..read more