Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Meet Mads Hansen, entrepreneur and maker of the best API in Fintech
Just back in London from Copenhagen, we discuss on how normal life is in Denmark compared to UK and how people need to meet people to build real relationships.
For the last 3 years Mads has been building and championing his platform. A single API where consumer facing businesses and website can allow their visitors and clients can apply to multiple lenders simultaneously.
A graduate of Copenhagen Business School, Mads honed his knowledge of lending at Zopa and Lendable growing a wide network of contacts and the knowledge and skills need to try and attempt a super complex API for financial lending.
As a platform and by re-defining the broker model Accepty makes finance fairer for consumers and doesn’t keep the customer details leaving the lenders with the relationship from the beginning.
With over 30 lenders on the platform, his company now counts comparison sites, loan brokers, finance apps, lenders and banks as clients. Accepty is now the leading loans api for search and comparison engines in the UK.
Mads has retained their independence so there are no vested interests – this means their service is not favouring higher commissions to the detriment of customers and unlike other providers, they do not compete against our partners and we only succeed when our partners succeed.
Hi Mads, Welcome to Confidential TV. How are you?
Speaker 3:Hi, al, I'm very good, very good. Thanks, it's a great pleasure to be in your podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's more of the pleasure of the old mind really. I think it's very grateful for anyone who wants to help me talk to my 10 subscribers, but you've got to start somewhere, which is interesting. Yeah, of course you have to build a base. Yeah, so you were in Copenhagen. You're now back in London.
Speaker 3:I'm back in London now West London. I came back from Copenhagen last week after having spent three weeks there and it's supposed to be a word call today, but it's most a holiday because my parents having to look after my two-year-old child, it's a bit of a challenge for them.
Speaker 2:So a word call today is just to hold it to your parents and hopefully they do some of the childcare.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but yeah, as we were chatting about just before, copenhagen seems to be quite normalised compared to London, so it's quite funny to be back now where you have to wear masks and all this shit.
Speaker 2:So nobody's wearing masks in Copenhagen. Just for people's reference, it's the 24th of August. Anyone coming back from France is in lockdown. Everyone's wearing masks in the UK, just so we know. We're on the timeline of this, so nobody's wearing masks at all in Copenhagen.
Speaker 3:No at all, and people are going out at night and the restaurants are open. Everything seems quite normal compared to here.
Speaker 2:And restaurants where the tables are two metres apart, or might normal.
Speaker 3:It's fully, at least the place I've been. There are no social distancing or anything. It's there.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine? Did you shake hands, did you touch anyone?
Speaker 3:Probably with my parents, not to shake hands with anyone.
Speaker 2:It's quite weird, isn't it? I was watching some video last night and there was a business, some weird, like Wool Wars and Wolf Wars, something like that, and of course they give you to the big hug and you're like, wow, do you remember? That was a weird thing we used to do back in the day. Yeah, correct.
Speaker 3:We never going to go back to them, do you think? Yeah, I mean I hope the hug will be out forever, but I mean a good handshake, a really mis-spread the hug can be with that.
Speaker 2:It's me saying. I think, especially when you're a founder, like meeting people is something you sort of do because you're spreading the message of your business, you're looking at your networking and I think the whole meeting you people, people can argue all day long that this kind of Zoom call type thing works. But it's not the same as our relationship was built. So we met in Pret or Starbucks or somewhere in London and we haven't done any business together. We sort of toyed around the edges a little bit and sort of three, four hours. At five years later we're still in touch. I don't think we would have met like this. I don't think it has the same value.
Speaker 3:No, I completely agree. I mean it is a different experience for sure, and I do think that the actually like the handshake tells a lot about people. My parents are from a region of Denmark that's quite a traditional, very Danish, like the archetype Danish, and I remember when we went there when I was a kid my hand was all red and sore when I left that place because they were all like from farmer families, from operations.
Speaker 3:These guys can do is just like 10 minutes, where you just stand there while you're doing stuff from you and obviously, like that tells a lot about them and it's just a great first impression. You can tell about the guy if he's got this buttery head.
Speaker 2:Smartest guy to and choosing customers and investors is can they shake your hand? But also the body language, right? If somebody's, if somebody sits opposite you and their hands are beavering away and their eyes are a bit shifty, you might not pick all those cues up in a video, where I think you pick. If you're a good at this stuff, you pick it up, even these little micro signals, you know, especially if you're really analytical. You ask them some, you do that thing of asking them some truth questions first, and then you ask them something to have to lie about and then you know the tale right.
Speaker 3:Well, now is there's also like the positives. Right, like right before lockdown. We, you know, yeah, you have a lot of climbs around the country and a lot of them are like you should come and meet us. You should come and meet us like, okay, where are you based? Sheffield, norwich? I was like, even though I do like to see the British countryside, I just know if I was to spend a business day going to Sheffield and Norwich, it would be a whole day Waste, so to speak.
Speaker 2:You've just, you've just alienated 57.6% of the country there. I think now it wouldn't be wasted, because now you could get a really cheap first class ticket and now you could get a table to just to hopefully get a whole train carriage to yourself. From what I'm hearing, that's true, that's true. There's nobody going anywhere. You see, like in London I wasn't credit Swiss, but one of the big ones they've got like 50 people out of a thousand back in. You know they're not going back. No, no, it's just going to happen.
Speaker 2:You know it's just really terrifying for all of you who own restaurants and pubs near Canary Wharf. But I guess for the distribution of people is good for people's families and stuff, although I would argue one could go slightly.
Speaker 3:The Canary Wharf should never have happened as constant. Well you know, they've some and probably I mean maybe it would actually be a nice place now with the it's going to kind of 28 days later, zombie land, apocalypse, kind of nice way.
Speaker 2:You can cycle around and there's no traffic or people. That's quite nice. We should talk about you really. So do you want to tell us about Accepti and what Accepti is?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Accepti is a. It's a provider of something quite by itself, but also quite boring in the sense that we are sort of the pipes of the lending industry. We provide the connections between price comparison sites and brokers and apps into, for the time being, personal loan providers, making them available to do, making it possible for them to provide real rates, instant quotations, via a single API, instead of having to go and do all those integrations yourself, whereas that sounds like a very simple concept, but it's just something that even big organizations like ClearScore and some of the price comparison sites are still struggling with, because there's a lot of integrations to be done and there's a lot of staying on top of the technology all the time. That can be handled much better by a company that only focus on that.
Speaker 2:It doesn't sound simple to me.
Speaker 2:Having doubled the match space for about six months, I don't think there's anything simple, but I think it's quite an achievement. So, just to probably don't understand this, there are lenders where you have a sort of pipeline of lenders and they all have different APIs and integration sets. So if you want, if you have an audience which you want to offer lending to, or a customer who walks a community, a customer walks into the street but you want to give them the best choice, normally you would have to go and ask your developers to integrate with the lender one, two, three, four, five, six to give you the best chance of serving that customer and also treating them fairly and all that great FCA stuff. So what you've done is you've built a single unified platform that talks to all those different integrations. So if I have a customer on my website who wants to borrow, and I can actually put them through one application process and you do, all the hard work in the background is working out who will offer them cash, who wants it, what rates, etc. Etc.
Speaker 3:That's true, and I guess I mean. The business came from a very, very concrete case where we were sitting, we were working with lenders or at lenders, and a lot of people would contact us and would say I need a lender panel, I need to provide this price comparison capability. Can I just integrate with you? And then you would have to tell them that in order to provide a good product, they would have to go to 15, 20, 30 providers, depending on how big they are, and obviously they would just like leave and never come back. They would go to a traditional broker.
Speaker 3:But as we you and me, a better love chat chats about, I guess acceptee stands out in the sense that we don't compete against or introduce. You are solely focused on the partnership, where we work on a revenue share model, whereas a broker is essentially compromising that sisters. We're opportunities andtalk competing against you and which store your custom details and all this stuff. So if you really care about your customer, you want your customers to be your customers not just today but also tomorrow and three months time. You have to hook up with a neutral partner like excepty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you want to in the end, because you know that, not, this is not typical cross brokers, but some brokers are better than others, and also you know they are handling your customer. So the customer, filled in the form of it, goes down the pint to the broker's office, where it could be somebody very talented and sophisticated and great at customer service looks after them. Or it could be somebody who's paid a commission that isn't paid very much and has got terrible training, and your customer sees that as you, and that's the key point here, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and you can send your customers in there and you can, it can look like a good deal and, okay, I'm making good money from this. And then you just know that two months down the line, the customer will receive an email from your competitors and saying hey, you know you've visited this website two months ago, don't you want to try this?
Speaker 2:website. Oh my God. So could there be a situation where if I use a broker, I place my business for the broker and actually in the is it the 14 day rule? It's a 14 day rule, isn't it? Somebody could actually site swipe the customer out, because I know some unknown big organizations do that when they see it on your back statement.
Speaker 3:A lot of stuff happening. Like if you go out with, especially when we were work, when we didn't have our own company, when we were working on the limb side. Like if you went out with these guys and had a few beers, they would tell you stories that you should not tell to anyone. And now the FCA, nor any other competitor or partner.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the FCA really tending on them. It's a funny industry. It's a small industry, right? Yeah, I've been working with this since I came to the UK five years ago and know pretty much everyone there and meet up with people like competitors, partners, all the time. So it's quite a nice little industry where people know each other, people know each other's weaknesses and even though competition is very fierce, I think it's also it's an example of competition being very good for business.
Speaker 2:I think there's a sort of element sticking together because in that space you've got the FCA implying if somebody steps out of line, the FCA commit and bang. That's another rule. And every time there's another set of rules and another set of compliance, it gets even harder to lend. I mean, I saw the one in the car industry recently which is the variable commission based on the variable interest is going. And you think, at what point did anyone think that was actually a good idea to begin with, the fact that the FCA have to go in and say, if you cannot have a thing, that's just for people watching listening.
Speaker 2:Basically, I walk into car dealerships, it will fancy buying that Ford Fiesta and I fill in the form and everything. They send it off and certain lenders were saying, hey, you can lend this at 5% and we'll pay you 5% commission. And they were having a variable commission. So they could say no, no, yeah, yeah, that's great, but we're going to lend it 10% and we're going to get 10% commission and therefore me, the consumer pays an extra 5% on my finance. So it's just insane.
Speaker 3:Now I mean you should really try to cut out as many middlemen as possible, right, even though accept is sort of a middleman as well. We try to position ourselves as the most direct partner, like we basically just take the hassle out of connecting to all the lenders yourself.
Speaker 2:And so there's just one it's what I've seen, that you've sent me it's one API connect test and you can work with all the lenders. And you said earlier just the personal loan space. Is that correct? Yeah, is that just for just now, or is there what's in?
Speaker 3:the future. Looking at different venues, I mean obviously also the whole coronavirus, even though I hate talking about it. It also hit the personal loan space very hard, Probably the hardest of all the different loan shop businesses.
Speaker 2:Can you explain why? Just for people listening, was that because the lenders pulled back or because people weren't asking for lending themselves?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a combination right. Obviously, you probably had a lot of people here on this podcast talking about open banking. Open banking has been a talk for the last two years about how it could improve lending, how it could help lenders lend out more, and all of a sudden you have a crisis where from one day to another, you don't know if people are employed or unemployed and you want to use open banking then to verify that income. And the problem was that so far, most of the open banking stuff has been talked, so none of the lenders were actually like very few lenders were ready to try to do anything about it, and including ourselves. So overnight people had to figure out okay, how are we going to implement that? In the meantime, obviously, lenders were very afraid of lending out to people that could be unemployed in a month or two, so both demand and supply was basically sort of drained for one year.
Speaker 2:So have you seen any recovery in either side?
Speaker 3:We have. I mean, it's still not anywhere near to where it was before, obviously, but we have seen improvements. I think the whole lenders adjusting to the furlough scheme, lenders adjusting to being able to verify income by open banking has helped a lot and I mean the show must go on right and lending was not making money from not lending out money and you have to take a little bit of risk to make money.
Speaker 2:So that's the thing, isn't it? The interesting thing is I was at the head, like you. You could fill up 30 minutes talking about coronavirus. I think it's really depressing, really, really fast. And you've got to talk about it, right, because everyone's talking about it. And you just look at it and you think, oh, my God.
Speaker 2:So in your situation, when I was thinking about you coming on the podcast, I was thinking how does a lender know whether to lend to somebody anymore? So my credit score is 992. Brilliant, except for the fact I'm a middle manager in retail. Whoops, I'm a middle manager specializes in high street retail. That means my job is about as safe as ice cream sitting in the desert. There's no way of knowing. Now, it could be.
Speaker 2:I work for a retailer, which is actually going to be fine, but it could be. Also, I work for Debinance and therefore you can't. That credit score is meaningless, almost not. And then, if I'm on furlough, I'm on furlough because, genuinely, a company is actually just saying, ok, we don't need to go right now until movement on the street goes back up and whatever it's set to the ring. Or do they say actually they're on furlough because we're in the shit until we get to October? We have no idea and therefore, if you lend somebody 20 grand to buy something, they may have no money come October and most people on average in the country have got less than one month's outgoing save dot one a month. How are they going to fix this? You mean, you're talking to them. How do they rebuild credit scoring?
Speaker 3:To be honest, I think for the time being there's a lot of waiting on the fence to see, ok, what's happening with the furlough scheme. Once that's in place, then obviously there'll be lending opportunities. People will have jobs, some people will not and they'll just be, for most lenders, not attractive. I think there are interesting things going on in the market. Of course I have to be careful what I say, but it looks like the whole guarantor space is also being shaken quite a lot with Amigo and going on. So I think there's definitely an opportunity for the right company that can find out how to lend to this subprime space in the post-corona world.
Speaker 2:Getting complicated, Matt. The post-corona score. They just divide the score by two and multiply the interest by three or something. That's pretty simple, isn't it?
Speaker 3:And I mean there will always be a way and this whole industry and the UK mentality in terms of taking on debt is also, of course you're not going to just have a situation where no one's going to take out a loan anymore.
Speaker 2:So tell me more about that. So that's your experience, obviously, from seeing different countries. Is the UK just so different to the rest of Europe in terms of its appetite for debt?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so I mean it's a huge industry compared to everywhere else. The fact that it's not unlikely for you to take out a 50% plus APR loan, it's not like it's completely steering your way. It's actually quite a big chunk of the market, is it, joe, really? Really? I mean, in Denmark, if I go, there are not that many providers, it's mostly high street banks providing credit right. First raise, there would be sub 7%, 8%. You wouldn't have that much competition and then you just have. You have like lenders covering every single aspect from like three to five percent all the way. Our panel is is very strong, from from sub three percent up to ninety nine percent.
Speaker 2:Apr 90 hold on a minute Rewind Ninety, not a cent, apr. Yes.
Speaker 3:Is that even obviously an APR is constructed in the way that you might have like a lower loan amount and then actually the fee it makes up a Big, so a big part of that APR. But yeah, it's, it's not uncommon. It's not uncommon, it's not even considered like Shit credit.
Speaker 2:So what was one go back in the day, 1000 and something percent, one of it.
Speaker 3:You still have like from 100% of your up to 2000% of your, you still have a big.
Speaker 2:just fine if you're borrowing a tenner Until tomorrow, but not so good if you're borrowing a grand until three years time, is it?
Speaker 3:no, no. So that's the key, I think, I think. I think credit will always have a Will, always find a way through in this post-coronaworld.
Speaker 2:So you have a question for me. Do you think Rishi has got no choice but to extend the furlough scheme?
Speaker 3:I don't know where he will, how he'll be able to find.
Speaker 2:Is it's one nuclear submarine is to kind of warship. It's a few days of running the NHS. I mean it sounds like a lot of money but you know, if you look at the way the Germans did it with the staggered, they managed to put people partially back to work and it's going to cost a nine billion or something.
Speaker 3:And I looking into how many people have actually been working during the furlough. Yeah, yeah, oh trigger's a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I saw this. There's a lot posted linked in this morning guy posted. He said if you were in the car industry and you're worried about the Government's investigation into getting people to work during the furlough scheme, get in touch. Why the car industry? What have they been doing? Yeah, you must be. There must be a lot of people like especially small companies. You went yeah, I'll get the furlough scheme and never can just work from home and no deal, they'll all kind of work for me because you know what else they're gonna do.
Speaker 3:Uh, yeah, I mean it's it's desperate times for for a lot of people and Obviously it's it's not good, but it's just a lot of stuff happening here. Yeah, your revenues are gone from one day to another or you're actually not able to to go into work. Of course, as a business owner, you have to.
Speaker 2:I think there's it's also the mental health bit, right. You know, I don't know. I really see it's been a bit overblown. But Christ almighty, sitting in your back bedroom day after day after day after day, I mean you know that is, that is not good. I mean, you know, I dread this winter. Personally I dread a second wave, not because I'm almost 50. I don't really want to get it, but you know, it's more the kind of like really in the dark, because in march and april it was warm and sunny and you could go outside and get a suntan. It was great.
Speaker 3:October no fingers crossed for that average to Dubai, or something record for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you, all these, all these countries got lots of space. I know the end that will sell you your own acre. You can, you know you can. You can stay and take me at least go for a walk, because we come back from france, so we're in isolation, right. So I am stuck in the house, no visitors, no, I can't even walk the dogs, apparently, and I get it right where I live. I could walk the dogs for four miles and not see anyone. I could literally cycle out of here and once I'm at the village which I don't have to stop and talk to anyone within 10 meters of anyone, I'm not going to see anyone. I get the point fall off by, go to hospital, spread coronavirus from france, or you know, this is, this is the problem. If you don't, if you don't measure this in a more regional way, like if you're in the center of the city and you come back from paris, you need to stay in, right? I?
Speaker 3:don't know when you came back, did. Did you come by the airport or did you take the train on a drove? Yeah, okay, because we came to Heathrow and it's like you got all these different nationalities just meeting up on this, this huge queue when there's really where you can, you can social distance.
Speaker 2:I thought that was all fixed. I thought I seen pictures of people in socially distant queues and half empty airports and lots of really not today.
Speaker 3:We came back. We came back on the choose there a bit odd hours and it was there never seen so many people in Heathrow lining up really. You go to the, to the, to the counter, and there's like you have to survive, like you have to surprise ladies. You don't have to.
Speaker 2:Oh man, that's right and changes every day. Right, so you can be in Portugal today. And when I set self-license, come back, and I remember thinking all the way rushing back I was like, huh, I'm fine, I'm gonna stay and finish my holiday and then realized if we didn't get back soon, the kids wouldn't be able to go to school. It's like, oh, no, right, okay, so change the year of star for two days early. But I mean, you know, if they were a bit younger I wouldn't have bothers. I thought I just stayed in France for the month and just got better. Sometimes, done was swimming. So, henry, that's Well. Yeah, I took all the stuff with me. I was gonna use my green screen, the recordings and all that stuff and was there. Then actually I got there. I thought, you know, I can't be bothered, so you need to have a. I think you need to hold the, you know, if you can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we should really talk about your business. As much as I love this, um, one thing I want to do is where'd you get? You were in lending and so you, you were the lend, you're in the lender side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were. I mean, I met my co-founder, robert, a few months after I came to the UK, when we were working at soba. Okay biggest and oldest or not the biggest anymore, but the oldest peer-to-peer lender In the UK huge success to his open to yeah. I know it has a few bumps Throughout the time, but I think like they're. The way they're turning into becoming a bank now is very exciting.
Speaker 2:Yes, smart mover thing yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, hopefully they had a bright future.
Speaker 2:Do they? Do they need somebody to provide them an API to all the lenders, not for you to know?
Speaker 3:Well, we are already working with them. We already work with them. That's the funny thing when you work with your old colleagues and all of a sudden you sit there as an outsider. I mean, you, you've read, if you I don't know whether you own or like entrepreneurial experiences it's coming from a big company, out doing your own stuff, but that's that's really where you feel the difference. Right, you, one day you have a brand Begging you and you, you're the, you're the guy that everyone wants to talk to Make stay. You're knocking the door in your Forrest office and you just to nobody and everyone's like, well, yeah, maybe we want to work with you, but did you find you could do stuff faster?
Speaker 2:because the thing is, yes, I actually Sort of it. What you're being is, I've done some work for bigger companies. You pick up the phone like, oh yeah, I'll speak to you. I've spent most of my life knocking the door but you've never heard of me. But, like like almost everything, they feel like who's this guy? No, thanks, um, but did you find that they so you would have built your business and gone right? We want to move quicker, faster, easier. Do you find dealing with the bigger companies is like now? You're sort of waiting through a trickle trying to get stuff done?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. Um, that, that's probably the Difficult and difficult part of being like a small b2b driven business, because A lot of the dependencies come from bigger companies. Yeah, so so, even though you can move super fast and do stuff Uh, you're the people that you depend on don't really move as fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, always the way, and that just is because they say yes, right, and that's the hey. You open the champagne and then, six months later, you're still wondering why this is going through another round of some kind of review by somebody in some other department. Yeah, yeah, somebody I did some work for recently and six months at last, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:The path to success is probably to find somewhere in between where you can help those big organizations like building smaller, it's like a minimum viable product step so they can see the value and you can actually make their life much easier. It's out much easier than it is. But Instead of coming as a small company and just say, okay, we're gonna build this amazing thing for this, for in our case it's like for this client and we don't know about whether it's going to be a success, but you're gonna have to put a lot of development resource into it, that's not gonna fly at all. You have to Provide them with some sort of Product first, where they have to do extremely little work.
Speaker 2:So basically get, get buy-in from high enough up to give the people lower a day and they permission to do it, and then give them somebody so they don't have to do anything, so you can then go, look at work. So everyone goes, how do we get more of it? And then you get this sort of you need to sort of build a, a wheel of momentum to get it to work right.
Speaker 3:It is the secret, I think the secret and it's funny because you have all these people. I have to be careful what I say, because I was literally a lot of she was. Well, I mean, you just have a lot of people around, especially in big banks, that have Nice titles and big Areas of responsibility and all this stuff, and you just see how little they actually move, how little they can do, and it's not because they're not Bright themselves, but it's just because you're caught in this big monster of bureaucracy and yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I can find it when we're actually on there. Somebody sent me this and it's I'm sorry it was my fault. Here we go, it's really funny. So basically it's called Simple Sabotage. Right, and it's actually.
Speaker 2:It wasn't the CIA at the time, it was whoever was running the American Special Secret Strategic Services. They were called Field Manual. This is, bear with me, it's worth it. This is the Strategic Services Field Manual for how to disrupt an enemy. So, for example, there'd be resistance in effect, and it goes through things like poor sugar and fuel tanks and all this kind of stuff. And then the bit at the end is called General Interference with Organizations and Productions and Production and it's the Strategic Service Guide to how to bugger up business. And you'd be amazed. The stuff for kind of insinuating the kind of like we'll make decisions has to go upstairs. You know nothing what is going on here. And then it's like so number one and this in the Secret Sabotage document, buy the Americans to Two.
Speaker 2:Resistance all over Europe during the war was insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions. Big company rule one Make speeches, talk at great length and make long anecdotes in the cancer person experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration. Bring up relevant issues as frequently as possible and refer to the last meeting and attempt to reopen the questions that were answered at the last meeting. Advocate caution, be reasonable and urge your fellow meeting people to be reasonable and avoid haste and be wide about the proprietary of any decision that you have to make.
Speaker 3:Provide solutions to that.
Speaker 2:And I can't remember where, demand written instructions, do everything possible to delay a decision. It was literally the guy into dealing with big corn brats.
Speaker 3:You know, I started out, actually my career right after university in the national rail company in Denmark. If there's an industry that's conservative and full of bureaucracy and that's the rail company, right, like literally, you have rails, you kind of just change them from one day to another, they'll lay there, and that whole mentality just goes on into head quarters and into yeah, I guess it sort of helped me a little bit, because my co-founder, robert, comes from a different background where he's like he used to run club nights and he is like Okay, he gets frustrated if there's bureaucracies, I think we balance each other out quite well in the sense that I can always tell him, like this is not going to happen, or yeah, it's going to happen, in six months we're going to have another call, or yeah, and I can figure out.
Speaker 3:Okay, who do we need to speak to? What are they? Even without knowing the insights of a big UK bank, I still know from having worked in one bureaucracy how it worked and how you can potentially get decisions made yeah, decisions to be made.
Speaker 2:I think we were taking it. We're taking the mickey a little bit. We should be, I think. When you look at I think, both government and big business. I think they've actually responded very, very quickly Because this has felt like the longest summer ever not like in the longest summer film where you wear a surfboard in ground Europe, but it has felt like a very long time but actually to completely revolutionise how people work at home, how government works and I get a lot of frustration with the government. I don't think any government of any colour across the world would have done anything differently. I mean, what can they do? They get shout at that for being right wrong. Everything they do. There's an opposing opinion, and that's the case normally, but now it's under a high little load of tension with people dying over here, and I think that's the thing that big business has done. All right, yeah.
Speaker 3:You can have all these plans right where you plan all this. Okay, what's happening in a pandemic? And obviously you should have those plans ready, but there's just nothing that can be actually being in it and having to work day to day to fix stuff yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think also they get really unfair. I think big businesses big businesses as well, big businesses and government have plans for when shit happens and stuff goes wrong. Now, if you look at government, there was a document somewhere that said the pandemic document, make sure we've got PPE. But there's also one for the mass terrorist accident thing. There's a plan for almost everything you could possibly imagine in some department of Whitehall, somewhere with some civil servant, and if they bought everything to protect for eventuality, the tax we'd have to pay would be like 90%. I mean warehouses full of guns and PPE and God knows what for every possible. And you can't do it right. So I don't know. I think big business and government have done all right. Really, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're not living like you do back in Denmark, with no masks in restaurants. You can actually go out for dinner with that. I have to have to sit behind a plastic shield.
Speaker 3:It's also because Danish people are much more obeying to the government. Like early on, when they said lockdown and you have to do the ex fine said people were just like yes, let's do it. And they were living together and the government was becoming more and more popular because they were demanding a lockdown where it's here to complete office. They were trying to go and doing lockdown and then all of a sudden, it's like what the fuck? Why haven't you thought about this? Why haven't you thought about the grades for school children?
Speaker 2:Can you imagine being that guy? We're going to do this system. Yeah, that's great. Okay, we've never had this before. So this is the first time it's ever happened to affect two million children. Whatever it does, yeah, yeah, we'll do that. We'll do that. Okay, press button. Go. That's terrible, change your mind. And then you'll go okay, right, okay, so we change your mind. You've changed your mind. You should be fired. You're like hold on a minute.
Speaker 2:There's a guy put a thing on LinkedIn yesterday and Defense of the Utah, I think it was in the Economist In that you, if you take accepting and things change and you pivot your business over here right, different site, different director, maybe 180 degrees right, you've got the business. You've got some code that you built. You can, you can rescue it and go into something else. You get called a hero, right, you know the Mads the hero CEO who, like you know, pivoted the business and did something else for it, and the government changes its mind. It's completely filling and you should be fired. And also, by the way, the bloke in the charge has been in the job running, you know, the education department for like 25 minutes. He's had no experience of it ever before because last week he was in the NHS.
Speaker 3:Maybe before that he was in the Ministry of Defense and yes, it's like every time I hear these stories that just brings me back to the thing I've heard, like the, how they just run around, like oh my God, it's about communication, it's about fire.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. I don't know why anyone does that job. Anyway, what's on the so, what's on the horizon? So do we go, we go, we get through the winter and we, we don't all get locked down and go mad for accepting them. What, what, what you know, because obviously you've done parcel lending. Are you going to like different types of lending? How do you widen the customer base? Yeah, so, we.
Speaker 3:We've got a few very exciting partnerships lined up. Hopefully we're going to go live this year, unless this pandemic lasts forever, and that's going to happen when that's going to happen. It's going to allow us to grow a bit more. We're bringing out a few more people. That, of course, would would widen up our capability to deliver on other new employee people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Yay, good news story Company employees, more people brilliant.
Speaker 3:Let's bring you the headline. So, yeah, that'll be very exciting. Obviously, we're also going to do some stuff in this open banking world that we were talking about, because it is a new world world and it's new way of looking at credit scoring that can potentially help our lenders and help us.
Speaker 2:Could you do the scoring for them? Could you actually do this? If you were to, if I applied on via your platform, you could look at my bank account and go actually, here is a score for the lender.
Speaker 3:It's not what we do now Like. What we do now is, and what we're different from like experience-owned companies, is that we actually allow the lender to do the decision themselves. We integrate directly with the lender. That's when you get the strongest decision. Yeah, obviously, with this open banking world, where we get access to much more data that the lender depends on as well, you don't know where it's going to end, but there's definitely a room for applying much more smarter analytics and machine learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you get all these applications coming through and you can actually look at which lenders to pass them to, because you can do actually some pre-screening based on the breastings. So for all of us who don't really understand open banking, does it mean you can see how much I spend at Love Honey in Starbucks? That's correct and I can see that it's terrifying. Not that I spend any money at Love Honey or Starbucks.
Speaker 3:Obviously, we don't store any customer details and we're very much like anonymized data, so we just aggregate a lot of data. But yeah, if you share your open banking details with a lender, they would analyze your spending habits, jesus, some more sophisticated than others, and they keep those.
Speaker 2:Did they keep them? Sorry, did they keep the details? They have to, I suppose, make the rational of the decision.
Speaker 3:Yeah, not more than they would do with your credit file and more. But it is a funny way. You have to trust. But actually we've seen some quite good adoption of this, like in the consumer space that people are now willing to open up.
Speaker 2:It's because they don't know. They just sort of mean some system is going to look at the bank account and make a decision. They don't know that it actually means that Once they find out, they're going to have two bank accounts the one that I use for applying to lenders and the one that I use for stuff I don't want you to see over here, because the other thing is, of course, if lender A has all of my bank details spending for last year, we're making one huge assumption here that this company over here is not going to get hacked. Yeah. Which is just not the case.
Speaker 3:We still haven't seen the first hacking case of this, at least in the UK right, which is quite lucky.
Speaker 2:Has there been hacks elsewhere?
Speaker 3:No, wasn't there. Was that experience, or Equifax yeah?
Speaker 2:it wasn't open banking, there wasn't a dump of people. Can you imagine name, email address, bank account details and where you spend your money? I mean, there's some marketing goal there.
Speaker 3:We have a TIST portal. We have obviously a few different demos that we show to clients and we also tell them don't put your real bank details but just open banking, because we can actually see your open banking details on the demo. Obviously you don't want to sit there.
Speaker 2:But obviously you don't keep that data. Just so we're clear here we do not keep the data and merely pass it through to the lender.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in the production world we don't store any customer details and it's all alarmized.
Speaker 2:I think it's great. I think it does make lending better actually.
Speaker 3:Right, and soon you will have this. I don't know, soon, maybe in a few years, you'll have this open finance, which is another layer to that whole open banking space, where you will now be able to see people's assets as well. You'll be able to see their pension, like their savings accounts, as well.
Speaker 2:So cyber security is the business to be in, because that's actually the flip side of all this stuff. Right? If you have one place with everyone's details, like that, you know cyber security is where it's going to be.
Speaker 3:I think that was. The church has always been a nice place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got a friend. I got a friend in cyber security and he's been really busy since March I think. He's bought I think in March or April he bought 22,000 laptops for his corporate clients because they didn't have. I couldn't believe this. People go to work and don't take a laptop. They go to work and there's a computer at a desk. I was so like. I was like well, why don't they have their computer with them? Well, they don't. They leave the computer at work. You're like oh how clean. But probably 2,000 people didn't have a laptop.
Speaker 3:That's the thing. That's the thing. We can't roll back right, even if we start going back into the office. These companies, they're probably not going to allow their employees to just leave their computer and then take the weekend off. They're probably going to demand that they bring their computers so they can always be online.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, that's true. Actually, why didn't? Yeah, because there's a lot of the talk about this work-life balance and people wanting to do more of it, and I think it's important you're at home, because after this I'm going to go downstairs and make a cup of tea, and it's 11.48 and the kids will want lunch and stuff, which is all very lovely, apart from when they wander right in the middle of one of these or you're talking something in the phone. If you work for a big company, maybe you're going to feel, because I was going to ask you.
Speaker 2:The next question before we wrap up would be what's your number one tip for founders? And of course, mine would have been something along the lines of you don't have work life, you have life, and it's all smashed together and it's easier to deal with if you just accept the fact that you're always kind of on. Being a founder is your choice, so just wrap it into your life. And of course, it's not the same if you work for a big corporate. We say, hey, now you've got a laptop and you work from home. You can work on Saturday if you need to.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, obviously, having been a founder now for three years. You always work right. You always Even if you're on the playground with your daughter if you get a text that's important enough to have to deal with it.
Speaker 2:But do you think you do, or do you think we've created that monster for ourselves?
Speaker 3:Well, just and no. Like. If it's your own business, you feel obviously a bigger ownership too. As a very small business, you have to deal with everything right, like if the FCA calls me and says, hey, matt, what are you doing in this area? And I have to respond to it, otherwise we're going to get in trouble. The same thing about representing the company. If someone calls and wants to build a new pricing person side, you always have to be involved. But I guess you're right in terms of part of it is also created by ourselves.
Speaker 2:No, and now we have the business matters. You just cut out there. We lost internet for a second. Oh, am I back? Yeah, we're back now. Yeah, I think we created for ourselves, like you see, definitely what would be your For anyone listening. He's going hey, yeah, I'm going to leave. Actually, there's very type of people going I'm going to have to set up my own business. What's your sort of top tips top one, two, three, whatever tips for people starting up.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's tricky. I think what we would have done differently is probably to maybe, like, actually do a sale and proper sales first before actually building anything. Okay. So just as you can raise money on just an idea by putting a nice slide show together, you can also sell into a client the idea of something, especially because if you're a small company and you're working with big companies, just getting that big company's approval and say, yeah, okay, go ahead and come back to us with a real product, that thing would make a big difference.
Speaker 3:We went out and tried to build the product and then go to the big corporations and then go back to our lenders that we depend on. We should have done that a bit differently, I think. But that's I mean, you never know right when you start out. You could also be there. I think you should just do it and obviously try to learn as much as possible beforehand, both about the industry you're in and about what other founders and other industries have done good and bad before. But at the end of the day, you have to make up your own, you know, like, make your own experience, have your own experiences.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing you could add to the sort of expand that would be actually network in the space right. So because you're going to spend a lot of time in it. So, like you know, with you, with accepting, with the car, I think you spend a year networking really when you've got no money, you haven't raised anything yet and you have to get to know everyone. That's expensive. But once you do know everyone, if they like you, I guess, and they like your idea, then you find it spirals very fast. So it's worth doing six months of what in the old days would be walking and meeting in coffees and Starbucks and stuff. It's not just endless Zoom calls which must be really dispiriting. I'm glad I'm not doing it now and I think that that network effect helps you hugely. People like you and your business and then they have to tell others, and I agree with you.
Speaker 3:It's very important, coming also as a foreigner to a new country, to be able to first work at a company first. It's always that mile. Yeah, it would not be possible to build like SEPT to coming straight from Denmark because it's so much network dependent and you know the small ins and outs and you know which people to speak with. So, yeah, you had network for sure, it's everything.
Speaker 2:It's a network and sell it before you build it. Yeah, sell it before you. It's just called the hustle right, fake it before you make it. So the advice is network and a bit of fake it before you make it. Well, I wish I'd fake it before I made it with Carson, if I could have gone to Cardi and said, hey, do you want to buy this? And they said, well, the thing is, they would have said yes. The problem I would have had is they couldn't track the conversions. The time for Carson was actually coming. Now the dealers are actually moving so fast now to sell online and I thought in 2014,. You know, they got to do this soon. I didn't think they'd actually never do it, unless a pandemic forced them.
Speaker 3:Did you bring the pandemic? Yeah?
Speaker 2:Well, that was the smartest thing I could ever have done. Hey shit, we're going to sell online, we need some traffic to our website, kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:But I think but some risk management solution where you came out. Are you prepared for a pandemic? Yeah, it's a lot of nice cars you have here, sir. It's pretty freaking.
Speaker 2:Christ knows how they're going to survive. I'm looking outside going to. I kind of should buy. I've got a station run about it. I don't actually have a car and it's like do I need a car to know? Really? I mean nowhere. It's not like I live in London. You know. One car for a family, that's probably enough now, isn't it 9 million people working at home going?
Speaker 3:I don't need to spend 400 quid a month on the golf course, but then again, like cars, is a bit like what we talked about earlier, with this whole your relationship to dead and created.
Speaker 3:It's just being grown into the British culture that you also have a car, you also have two cars. You like to drive your cars even though you're I mean, I literally spend I'm moving from flat to flat here in Chelsea, west London, and literally like it's a 10 minutes walk from one flat to another, and on Friday I spend one hour on a car, one hour on car going where I could have been walking for 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:Just to drive from one to the other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was like some sort of traffic jam. You must have told the staff to compare. You have to be easy.
Speaker 2:It's like a roadblock. And it's not a roadblock. You know what it is. It's the new cycle lanes, because London is going to be all cycley-cycley until it rains and people can go back to the pub and they're pissed. I think this. I love this idea that we're going to become just like Denmark and Sweden and Holland and all of a sudden become a nation of bicyclists. It's like yep, good luck. Good luck with changing a culture of car ownership and being going to the pub afterwards.
Speaker 3:What the fuck would you do there? When you produce bendies and estermats in Swalburton, why would you go to ride a bike? Yeah?
Speaker 2:Although you know, if you'd had shares in Halifords and various other bike companies, you'd be doing really well right now. You know there's I think it's treads. I went to and they didn't have any bikes until the 21st of January Not the ones I was looking at. They do have some bikes, obviously. Caviar treads has got bikes for sale, yeah. So I think maybe the culture's changing, but I think it's a hobby sport culture. We'll see if it translates into kind of you know, continental European cycling culture. I don't see it myself.
Speaker 3:If it does, I might as well just move back home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but then it's sunnier for longer here, isn't it? Let's be honest, it's very, very dark in Denmark in winter. On that note, it's been an absolute joy and a pleasure. I loved hearing all about Xcepti and Paul's movie. Speak Again next year to find out where you are and how things have turned out with the pandemic. So thank you very much, paul's place yeah, have a good day.
