Unlocking Financial Access

0:03Doug Ricket: Welcome to Breaking Banks. I'm your host, Brett King. I'm back in the hosting chair this week. Thanks to Jason and JP for carrying the show the last couple of weeks due to travel. But this week, we wanted to dive into a little bit of a perspective on global financial inclusion efforts that are happening in fintech. And specifically, we've invited along the CEO and founder of a really interesting socially mission-based fintech company called Payjoy. Founder has a background as a software engineer from Google back in the noughties and also involved in the Silicon Valley investment community with Silicon Valley technology partners.

0:47Doug Ricket: and even has had a stint as a guest lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Payjoy, and they have 20 million customers all around the world. We're going to talk about that in a bit more detail. Doug Rickett, welcome to Breaking Banks. Awesome. Thank you so much, Brett, for having me here. Delighted to be on and share some of the Payjoy story. Well, let's start with, you know, I mean, always when I get founders on, you know, having been a founder of, you know, of a fintech neo mobile bank myself and understanding the challenges it represents.

1:28Doug Ricket: I just had a coffee yesterday with a friend, Jay Patel, who's the founder of WIO Bank here in the UAE. He's growing very rapidly here, great startup, and talked with him about the founder journey. But I do think that founder journeys in Silicon Valley are a little bit different from founder journeys in other markets. Because Silicon Valley has some pros and some cons to it, right, in terms of fundraising. But let's start with where did the inspiration for this come from? What was the driver for you in founding Payjoy? And tell me a bit more about how this came to be. Yeah, thank you. It's kind of a circuitous story.

2:20It goes back. It's kind of a very personal life journey for me. So I'll give you the summary and we can go down whatever alley. So I grew up here in Silicon Valley in deep in tech, your tech nerd of the 80s into everything tech, tech, tech. Followed that through to study computer engineering, undergrad and master's at MIT. Of course, it has technology in the name. That must be the place for me. And then I met all these international students from around the world and felt like I had to educate myself a little bit about the world, like the rest of the world. So I joined the US Peace Corps, which is a government program that sends Americans to volunteer in emerging markets.

2:56So I was sent as a volunteer teacher to West Africa for a couple years to the country of the Gambia. And that for me really anchored a lifelong interest in emerging markets, international development, and really saying, how can we open that, you know, open that door to the modern world to that other half of the world that's getting left behind?

3:21Doug Ricket: I mean, we've made tremendous progress on financial inclusion in the last few years. I've done work with, and I'm sure you would know them from your time in Africa. Well, it's a more recent innovation there. But a company called Mojo Loop was a spinoff from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It helps sort of bridge different mobile money systems from a sort of ubiquitous payments perspective. But the founder of Mojo Loop, Costa Peric and I, he's been on the show numerous times. And we've often talked about sort of the financial inclusion battle, particularly for sub-Saharan Africa. But, you know, this is a global problem.

4:03Doug Ricket: But since 2011, 1.7 billion people have come into the financial services arena or been financially included because of mobile phone technology. And so it's sort of really interesting to sort of look at that. when you look at the problem of financial inclusion, and I want to get into this in some detail with you, but let's perhaps divert on this and then we can come back to the foundation story, is when we looked at this, particularly for sub-Saharan Africa, and this was a research study done by Accenture and Standard Bank back in 2016, which showed that the majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa wouldn't be able to afford the transportation to get them to a bank branch in the first place.

4:58Doug Ricket: It was something like 80%. And if they got there, then there was a 90 % chance they wouldn't have the identity documents required to open a bank account. And so there's some really foundational problems with, you know, the existing financial services system. And, you know, in countries like the United States, we think of the branches at the centre of financial inclusion, but the reality is in these developing emerging markets, then, you know, you're not going to deploy branches as a fintech. No investor is going to invest in branch locations, although, you know, we do have M-Pesa and the correspondent model there to some extent.

5:40Doug Ricket: But sort of coming back to this key issue, in terms of the markets you've chosen to enter, how has that been driven internally in terms of the decision in terms of which markets you've chosen to go into? Yeah, I mean, to be very frank, it's where it's been easiest. So there's still infinite work to do out there. And, you know, it's where there's been a big, what that means easy is where there's a big market opportunity for us of people who need access to credit. I can come back to what Pajoy does at its core. We provide credit through the smartphone. uh people who need that and where the business environment the regulatory environment is favorable uh that we're going to be able to run fast and spend most of our time on the customer and uh currency as well because since we're a lender uh and we figured out a way to bring our own currency uh there need to be uh you know safe and easy fx markets and we we hedge the exchange risk and we need to be able to move the money in and out so we can bring the money to benefit our customers and then get it out later when we develop profit, which is important to us and important in scaling.

7:04Doug Ricket: Now, I'm very interested in the fact that as soon as you go to your site, payjoy.com, and you check it out, you straight away go to the phone as an asset for or business creation, et cetera. So one of your primary products is lending to buy phones, I understand. Yeah, so that's how we started. So would you like me to, maybe I can take a minute, deep dive on. Yeah, please. I'm thinking how much background to go into. Let me give you the brief story. And if you want to go more, there's so much depth of how it took us to get there. Um, so we started with the phone, uh, phone finance. So it's basically a mortgage for your phone.

7:53The customer is buying this asset secured by a loan to purchase the asset. And, uh, I had kind of developed this concept in partnership with a company, uh, uh, founded by a friend of mine from Stanford. Uh, the company was called D-Lite that was doing solar in Africa. and we came up with this pay-as-you-go concept to let the customer pay for the solar system a week at a time and D-Lite deployed that in that decade to over 100 million people benefited now over 150 million lives around the world who have electricity who didn't have electricity before and that was really what what drew me into getting involved and then for PayJoy uh this was coming out of Stanford Business School with a founder a friend of mine um co-founder for PayJoy we said hey we can do this for anything, not just solar.

8:40We can do it for anything electronic. We can program to shut off. You make a small payment, it turns back on, and now it's pay as you go. And we came to the smartphone as that number one hottest device that, you know, a billion people around the world had their eye on. This is the year I'm going to get a smartphone. And the amazing thing to me is it looked like they could afford the smartphone and all these other wonderful electronics that give us a great quality of life if someone offered them a payment plan. But why was there no payment plan? Like, you know, here in the U.S., ever since the first iPhone came out, there's been, you know, 24-month purchase plan on Verizon.

9:15Why don't we have that in most of the rest of the world, the global south? So that was what we started with. And our first technology there was mobile security that locks the phone in case of nonpayment, which is why people pay. uh you know if if uh if it was you know one click of the finger to watch all the movies of the world uh easily there and tv shows there probably wouldn't be as much money going into all the streaming services uh but they got some formula right between you know 20 years ago when you had napster and everything and and everything was just download the streaming services got some formula right which was pay us if we develop good content and then we'll make good content and and And that angle is working.

9:58So similarly for us, the mobile security just lets us do a deal with customer that says, if you pay us for a week of phone usage, you get to use the handset. I'm not talking about the data plan or minutes or anything, but the handset itself. So that was our product number one. And because of the mobile security that says, please pay your next weekly installment, it kind of keeps honest customers honest. Most people are able to successfully pay in time. That's our second technology is really, I'll call it predictive AI underwriting. to know who's good for$200 of credit, who's good for$300, how can we make it work for them, should we offer a 12-month term, a three-month term, getting that offer and pricing right so customers successfully pay back, they build their credit history, we earn some profit.

10:43We did all that with the mobile phone finance product. And then we said, you know, kind of back to our original mission, you know, these customers don't have credit to buy a smartphone, but they also don't have credit for anything else in their life. Like all the things that you possibly need credit for is, you know, maybe a smartphone is 5 % of all the things they could need credit for. Uh, you know, if your roof is leaking and water is dripping on your face while you're trying to sleep, you should fix your roof. You need like, that's a great use of credit, you know, pay to fix it today and, you know, pay it off over six months or something.

11:15That's a great use of credit when something really bad happens. It's kind of like insurance. And then we also see people going after opportunity. Like we have so many of our customers are small business, small family business owners. And, you know,$500 to credit is another sewing machine, another food cart. You know, they're growing a family business, they're adding inventory. So we, uh, so we're offering one-time loans and then, uh, we expand to a credit line and we put a credit card on top of it. So people can use that credit for anything and still building on the original innovation of securing the phone.

11:48So if the original product was the mortgage for your phone. This one is the HELOC. But we tie it to a credit card so you can use it for anything. And that's really our mission is get customers access to credit for everything. So we're not a full service bank. And today, I don't want to be. We looked at that last year and found the thing we are doing that's really making a difference for our customers is getting them credit. If they need$500 and no one else is offering it to them, Payjoy has found a way to underwrite them, get them credit, that they can successfully pay back, build their credit history.

12:16We grow profitably. That's our formula.

12:19Doug Ricket: All right, I've got two questions. The first is probably a fairly simple one is, what percentage of your customers that join Payjoy, is it where it's their first financial purchase or introduction to the financial system? Yeah, well, kind of a rough number as a rule of thumb, about half of our customers have no credit history. And so, you know, they're stuck in this chicken and egg stuck at zero because they have no credit history. A lender will not give them credit. So they can't qualify. Yeah. So kind of like you were saying, people with no bank account stuck at zero. And then we're able to use the smartphone to jumpstart the whole thing and say, okay, you don't have credit history, but, you know, we've done our alternative data assessment and we think you could be, you know, one of those honest customers where if we give you the phone and there's some security collateral, we think the chance of you paying us back in full, even if you're late, you know, one or two payments, that's fine.

13:22We manage that. But we think the likelihood is you will pay us back and we can jumpstart people into the credit system for the first time. All right.

13:31Doug Ricket: So let me now give you the second question. What you've described in terms of the way you manage the relationship with the customer, including the features on the phone. How do you do that? Is it an Android, you know, add in? Do you ship the phones? Is it SIM locked? You know, can you help me understand a little bit about the tech that you developed for that? Yeah, so we started with this technology in 2015. This is how we started the company and actually part of how I recruited my initial co-founders of being able to secure the phone. Because if it just said, please pay your bill, it's the end of the week.

14:11I mean, the amazing thing to me is maybe half of the population would. Like they will just pay you because they promised to pay you.

14:17Doug Ricket: It's interesting, actually. I don't know what that says about human societies and norms. But that can still, you know, half is still hard to make a profitable business on. And so we find that mobile security that says, it's time to pay your bill. and your grace period is up until you pay again, you can't use it again, cuts the loss rate by maybe half, we've seen, depending on the situation. And that was inspired, actually, I just want to give credit where it's due, all the way back to when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. Back then it was mobile minutes scratch cards. Right. You'd buy 100 minutes for$3, you'd go scratch it off, You'd enter a security code into your phone and it says, you know, I have 100 minutes.

15:05You talk at the end of your call, it says, now you have 92, now you have 98 or 88, 84. And at the end, it says, you have zero minutes. You can't make any more calls. And so it was this kind of prepaid concept. And that worked perfectly for our customers to manage their money. They knew how much they had less. They knew, you know, when they wanted to buy more. So we really brought that to the smartphone to be able to say, you know, the handset itself, you can pay for a week of usage. And then if your cash flows are smooth, you can pay again, you can pay again. If you're interrupted, no problem.

15:37But really the mobile security is key to that. So we started with our own kind of handmade security technology. And then a few years into the business in 2018, we scraped together all our security code and said, okay, we're making this into a proper platform. Then we started licensing that platform to the major manufacturers, smartphone manufacturers, for them to bake into the phone at the factory. And then the phones get shipped out around the world. And when they meet the Pajoy app at the point of sale, the Pajoy app pops up a question to the customer. Do you give us administrative access for your phone?

16:14We'll use it in case of non-payment. Do you agree? Yes, yes, yes. The Pajoy app can then hook into the, almost like a biological system, a receptor, in the operating system and firmware of the phone to have a strong level of security that is highly resistant to jailbreak. I won't say impossible because every day, maybe dozens of people jailbreak their phones. What? Oh no, I revealed the security is broken. No, that's fine because we have 3.5 million active users today, every month, monthly active users. And so we just have to fight the fraud and the jailbreaking and keep that down to a small fraction of 1 % and then the whole, the economics work out.

16:52So we do that with smartphone manufacturers. I was amazed that any of them went for it. Honestly, back in 2018, I thought, you know, less than 50 % chance this goes anywhere. But I think what's going on is the mobile industry is so competitive. You know, if we can help the sales for Motorola Brazil and we can help you sell another 500 ,000 phones, that's really meaningful. So I think that's where we've gotten strong engagement across from the manufacturers.

17:17Doug Ricket: So on the site, you actually allow them to choose the phone that they want. You have an online store, right? Oh, yeah. And so I mentioned, you know, we started with one manufacturer. We have now all the major Android manufacturers. You know, we've talked to Apple over the years, too. It may join at some point. And so in the markets where we operate across the global south in LADAM, Africa, Southeast Asia, uh you know we've been able to achieve very high market coverage of our security platform can be on 70 80 90 is a great variety of the selection of phones available that people want and so typically they walk into a brick and mortar mobile phone retailer and you know the customer would have if they have 50 in their pocket they probably think they're buying a basic phone and now that retail clerk says, oh, or you can buy a Samsung, Motorola, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei.

18:15Like, let's get you a proper smartphone. Oh, how could that be me? I only have$50. That's your down payment. Pajoy will finance$200,$300, depending on your credit underwriting. And they walk out of there with a great smartphone. And our security keeps on its customers honest.

18:31Doug Ricket: So how do you recruit those mobile, not mobile operators, but mobile phone distributors in country? Yeah, so this is where we found this kind of hidden path in the forest that works so well. You know, fortunately for us and the customer, because the mobile industry is so competitive, those mobile phone retailers are so competitive to sell more phones. and one way that they can increase their sales, increase their customer conversion, upsell, you know, to higher value phones is credit. So it's kind of like if you went to a car dealership and you say, hey, you know, here's my car I want. Probably the next thing after which model that the sales guy is asking is, okay, how do you want to finance?

19:24So now that's what the retailer does. And it's an easy sell because we help them sell more phones. If they're trying to sell a customer a$300 or$400 phone, that may be out of reach for a good chunk of the population that they deal with or the people are actually responsible. And they'll spend a$50 phone while they think about some future day when they get a good smartphone. But now with the financing, it can be today. Welcome to the modern communication and financial system. What we did now with the people getting the phone, we've started adding on the Credit Line credit card product on day one.

20:00So they walk in there with$50 thinking they're getting a basic phone. They qualify to finance a smartphone over maybe a year. And we're handing them a credit card, a Payjoy credit card that they can use to buy anything. So maybe they buy a pair of headphones, you know, right there in the store. And they learn how to hold that card to the reader and beep for the first time in their life. That's awesome. Now you can shop online. Now you don't have to carry cash in your pocket. All the good stuff that flows from that.

20:24Doug Ricket: Tell me, in your experience with the research you've done, how does access to a phone open up? I mean, it should be fairly obvious, but what is the multiple in terms of the effect of when you have access to a phone and the opportunities it unlocks, not only for access to ongoing financial services, But just for starting a business and, you know, just being able to be financially included, how does the phone, you know, factor in and impact on that? Yeah. So, you know, early on in Pager's history, kind of the first five years, it was really all about the phone finance. And we had some academic researchers look at our operations.

21:12This was based out of UC Berkeley. and they found that even during the repayment period, so let's say you're financing this phone and you're paying it off over the course of a year, even while you're making that weekly payment to buy your phone, still your net impact is positive because the phone is such a powerful asset. And so we have, you know, our early customer stories are all, you know, you got me my first phone, my first smartphone, this is amazing. I can keep in touch with family members who traveled to another country. I can, you know, for my small business, I can talk to my customers instead of having to, you know, sewing business.

21:43They come and show me a picture. They can send me an image. They can tag it on Instagram and show me what they're thinking to make. So really around that communication and that the net benefit was equivalent to a multi-point increase in income to their overall well-being. And then with the addition of the credit line, now they can use their credit for anything. That's where our modern customer story is now. We really see a lot of this. I grew my sewing business. I added another sewing machine. I grew my family food cart business. We added a fourth food cart. We added more inventory. We were able to expand in all those directions.

22:20I got through hard times. One week, we had a couple that's early card customers, and they do informal house maintenance and cleaning and repair. But it's informal. They don't have a regular salary. They don't show up every week. It's word of mouth. So one week, they had no work. Maybe their regular customers were away or traveling, and there was nothing. So how do they feed their kids? And credit can say, hey, if you hit a tough spot, we can get you through that tough spot. You don't have to suffer. Really, our customers, particularly at the lower socioeconomic level, really have it rough. There's not a lot of padding and cushion between them.

23:00Doug Ricket: No, no, it's not even paycheck to paycheck. It's day to day. I'm interested. I had Scott Sanborn on the show a few times. from Lending Club. And one of the things he pointed out was that when they looked at the data, that whether someone pays their phone bill on time was a really strong indicator of creditworthiness or management of credit. Because it's so important, people who manage that well are going to manage this. But you build a virtual credit report from someone that doesn't have credit history. So tell me a little bit more about that technology and what data do you use to assess their viability for this?

23:49Doug Ricket: I mean, I know it's a secured facility in some respect, but at the same time, I'm sure you're not taking on unnecessary risks. So what does that data model look like? Yeah. So definitely, that's really the second technology leg we have is predictive AI underwriting data science and machine learning that builds this model, using the model, optimizing the offer, figuring out how to get the right customer the right amount of credit, and then anti-fraud, fighting back against the fraudsters who are everywhere, so we can serve the regular customer as well. So I'd talk about probably three categories of data.

24:26The first would be traditional credit underwriting data. And half of our customers may have a credit score. It may be, you know, equivalent to in the U.S., you know, a 550, a 600 is not a strong credit score that would let them do a lot. But there can be a lot of data in there. We partnered with Stanford, a data analysis class, and I hadn't realized until we went deep in it with them because it's not my day-to-day area. It's like 1 ,200 data points can be in the credit report. We get on people who do have that. And so then we'll do our unique underwriting to understand, oh, how does this apply if you're in rural Mexico and you have 1 ,200 data points, even though your credit score is 580 or something?

25:10So there's the traditional data we do use. And you mentioned telco payment history. I'd put that really in the second category, which is alternative data that's not typically used for credit assessment. So in some cases, we partner with the mobile phone network operator. And where they share repayment history, We can analyze that and help figure out credit worthiness from that. We'll get other types of data. We used to work with Facebook, and people could link their Facebook profile, and we could analyze the network graph and use it for anti-fraud signals. We'll get a secondary piece of data like email, and we can plug into services that help us underwrite the email and understand how long it's been around, where it's been used.

25:56Was this email created yesterday? That might be a sign this is a fraudster or has it been used? You know, here are these 10 things over the last 10 years. Like that's valuable data. And then that's kind of bleeding into the third category is kind of original research where, you know, we'll collect some alternative data and we can do some original research where no one has a score, but we've found correlations. So like the easiest one of those would be analyzing the network graph through Facebook or through contacts that people can choose to share information about themselves with their consent.

26:31If they would like, they can share information with us. We can use that to underwrite and potentially get them credit. That's their choice. They don't have to.

26:40And we can analyze the network graph. I would have thought in the past it was like, oh, you know, if you have a friend who took out credit with us and never paid back, or maybe if you have two friends who took out credit with us and never paid back, Maybe you're part of a criminal fraud ring or something, or maybe you're just extremely, you hang out with people who are not credit worthy and don't know how to get, that would be a negative signal. We actually found analyzing it that the other side was the stronger one. There wasn't as much fraud signal as we hoped, but there was on the positive side.

27:11If you have three friends who have taken out a loan with PayJoy and paid back in full, very strong positive signal. So that's in the category of kind of alternative data analysis. we're looking for, even if there's no credit history, if we can get access to that type of thing and we've learned over time, what matters if we're in a 50 ,000 person town in rural Columbia for how much credit we can get you.

27:38Doug Ricket: Look, I applaud what you're doing. I know we're running out of time, but I like your sort of positioning as you want to help a billion people. I think it It was Brock Pierce that said the definition of a billionaire should be someone who positively changes the lives of a billion people, you know, which is a nice concept. But, you know, you've got 20 million customers right now. You're in nine geographies, which includes Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Colombia and the Philippines. I noticed on the site that you've also got a global option. So you're obviously looking at other geographies right now.

28:21Doug Ricket: But tell me about the appetite in Silicon Valley for social mission-based initiatives like this versus Silicon Valley right now, particularly with what's happening with Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX and so forth. For many people, it seems like this very capital-focused, return-focused type of private funding market. But how do you go about finding investors there that are more socially aligned? Yeah. So, Payjoy, we walk this middle path. and it's basically where we've found that I think we can achieve the greatest positive impact in the world and it correlates with building the greatest, you know, most successful company because that's the path we've chosen.

29:14But I think they go together. So I think if we were pure nonprofit focused, if we were a nonprofit, we'd be writing grant proposals and we'd be limited to, you know, can we get a million dollars of funding this year? Can we get 2 million building that? and you know if we were pure profit focused you know I think we could we could do all right but I think we're able to attract a stronger level of talent and we're able to have regulators understand us in a way that they wouldn't if we didn't have that social mission component which is really saying we're here to make life better for our customers and so what that looks like for us let me let me risk talking about the way people can misunderstand us or not like us There can have two ways.

29:58I feel like we're walking on a ridge through the mountains and we can fall off a cliff to our left or to our right. So on one hand, people can look at us and say, oh, you're a bunch of nonprofit do-gooders, right? You're not out to build a successful business. You know, have fun, go write your grant proposal to the Gates Foundation. Good luck, all the best. And so, you know, what we show is, hey, we built a profitable business. We're approaching a billion revenue. We're approaching 200 million profit operating before tax. Like these are amazing things.

30:25Doug Ricket: So you're not a non-profit, clearly. I want to put away that, you know, we're not a non-profit. We're actually quite profitable. On the other side, people look at us and say, oh, you know, you're touching poor people. What are you doing to those poor people? Are you taking their money? You know, are you mistreating them? Are you a predatory lender? And so that's where the social mission side says, hey, look, I lived in a mud hut in Africa. I really care about making these people's lives better. Let me show you our major covenants to make sure we're making their life better and not worse. You know that phone thing?

30:53they can return the phone anytime and walk away debt-free. So there's no debt trap. The door is always open. We have these guardrails in place. And so -

31:02Doug Ricket: Well, I like the messaging you had, which is fairness is a core differentiator, right? Fixed payments, no interest bumps, no late fees. No offering interest every time. It never grows, even if you're late. And that also helps. We go to India, Indonesia, Philippines, Peru, and the regulator who's there says, oh, foreigners are coming to do business in my country. What are you coming to do? You're coming to pillage and take our money? No, because we've built this thing up over the years and we have data points and academic research, we can explain to them, you want to help your citizens, we're here to help them.

31:36It's led us... And they're positive to the market.

31:41Doug Ricket: Where do you think you're going to go next? Because there's a lot of countries that could do with this. Right now, there's a lot of opportunity in Asia. So our most recent country launches were the Philippines and Indonesia. And we were approved for a license in India. So that's the short term. I think there's a lot of potential there. You know, those are big populations in Asia. And we've actually worked there in the past in partnership with other lenders. We thought we were going to be a tech provider to lending until 2020. And then the last six years, we've been the lender. So we have some histories.

32:14Doug Ricket: If you want to get into Thailand or Vietnam, let's have a conversation offline. I think I can help there. Awesome. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great, Doug. All right. So, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. We've had a great conversation, but how can people find out more about Payjoy and what you're doing? And what help can you ask the fintech community for? What help could the community we have at Breaking Banks provide to you guys? yeah i mean uh you know our everything's pretty much there on our website and linkedin there's not really more beyond what i told you you know we're bringing access to payjoy.com right payjoy.com that's right uh we're bringing access to smartphones and credit around the world so i think as you said that's actually one of the most useful you know people who are uh international and are working in the financial system in thailand and vietnam if i heard you correctly Yes.

33:14Great. Those are definitely on the roadmap. People can work with us, help us understand that motion, things that are unique and different in each geography. That's a big piece for us to overcome. We have to adapt the technology, but the core piece I've seen working, which is smartphone has security collateral, helps get people into the credit system. The magic is that seems to work across Africa, Asia, and LATAM. So we have a lot of work ahead of us to make that happen. Fantastic.

33:41Doug Ricket: Well, Doug Rickett, CEO and founder of Payjoy, thank you for joining us on Breaking Banks today. And I really applaud what you're doing. It's smart, not only in that, you know, obviously it's a great business for you guys. The revenue numbers and the funding numbers, the lending numbers speak for themselves, but also you're doing something positive. And I wonder now, particularly with AI and so forth, it should be time for us to shift our focus writ large to how can this technology solve problems for people who are disadvantaged. If we're not using these technologies in these ways, then why are we doing it?

34:25Doug Ricket: We should be lifting everybody up. So I really applaud what you're doing. Thanks for joining us on the show today. Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it. That's it for another week of the world's number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer Elizabeth Severins, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham. If you like this episode, don't forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media. Or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever it is that you listen to our show. Those actions help other people find our podcast.

35:01Doug Ricket: And in return, that helps us build an audience that can be supported by sponsorship so we can continue to provide you with our award-winning content every week. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you on Breaking Banks next week.