Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. You're about to hear Evan Davis meet three business leaders who've taken on the banks. It's the bottom line.

Hello and welcome to the program. Now, if you like that old phrase, don't get mad, get even, you'll like my guests today.

They're all running businesses that are taking on the banks.

They're offering old-style financial services in completely new ways.

In that sense, they're pioneers of alternative finance.

So can they beat the banks at their own game?

Well, welcome to the three of you, each of you in a different niche, I should say,

and we best start by explaining what it is you each do.

First, returning to the programme is Giles Andrews, Chief Executive of Zopa,

a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing marketplace, Giles.

So just talk us through the customer experience.

Well, there's experiences that very ordinary people lend money to other people. And by doing it directly, if you like, on our platform and avoiding banks, then they get a better deal, simple as that. Right. So I go to your website. Indeed. And what happens? You would register as either a lender or a borrower. If we look at the borrower side of the journey first, a borrower will give us permission to access data on them and give us some data of their own. So they'll fill in a form

that's a bit like a bank application form. And a combination of the data we buy from Credit Bureau

and the data they put on their application allows us to score them with a unique proprietary

score, which allows us to assess their level of riskiness.

Right. So I want to borrow, say, £2,000 for some home improvement of one kind or another. That would be a fairly typical loan. Okay. I go to your website. I've got my credit score done. What happens on the other side then? So you would ask for a quote, and you'd put in how much money you wanted to borrow for how long. And we would then match you with a whole load of other people who, in advance of that,

had agreed the terms under which they would be prepared to lend.

So they've picked the kind of risk levels they want to take and the length of time they want to tie up their money.

And they'll lend very small amounts of money.

So our average lender is lending about £5,000,

but lending it in £10 units to 500 different people.

And we do that to spread their risk.

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