Because you know we all owe money your mortgage your car your whatever your credit card

Let's say student loan. So we all owe money. You're not going to jail and there are ways to manage it and pay it off

We've spoken about this before in previous episodes on collections

The fact is we can learn an incredible amount from the mistakes we make but too often in lending businesses

We don't build the feedback loops that are needed to bring lessons back from collections to originations

Welcome to how to lend money to strangers. I'm your host Brendan look range and I've been working in consumer lending for the last 20 years

delivering projects in Africa Asia and Europe and

Now is the chief solution architect at confirm you a

Fintech that's gamifying access to credit among the end bank

Check out our story in episode 24 of the show

But if we can learn from collections then it stands to reason we can learn even more from the companies that specialize in

Helping consumers when loans go wrong like the New York based at M.D. whose founder and CEO James Lembrele is here with me today

James Lembrele is welcome to the show you have a undergraduate degree in finance from Penn State and an MBA from NYU Stern

So all the typical qualifications of a banker and yet the last decade or so of your career has been spent

Some might say on the other side of the fence helping consumers to push back against the bankers

That's probably a little bit of an aggressive description, but certainly helping trouble debtors to extract themselves from bad credit

situations and take control of their own debt

So let's start with that interesting contrast could you expand a little bit on your background and what got you to move

Into this world of debt solutions

for sure so before

Launching debt M.D. Branden I worked as you said in the debt relief industry for five years

My job was to advise people as to what their best option was to pay off their debt

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