Lending money to friends and family, with Craig Smith (JustLend)
How to Lend Money to Strangers
Brendan le Grange
4.9 • 43 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I named this podcast How to Lend Money to Strangers because for the last twenty years that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do. And although I’ve taken on projects across the credit lifecycle and on three continents, the underlying goal has almost always been to find enough data to turn strangers into customers we can know.
But Craig Smith has deftly flipped this on its head.
With JustLend, he is seeking not to understand strangers better but to lend better to those we already know. He’s reinventing the bank of mum and dad. And it’s easy to see the appeal in that, after all, property ownership remains a key tool for wealth generation but few young buyers have parents who can afford to help all on their own.
In this episode, we talk about lending to connections, the pros and cons, and the steps they’ve taken to optimise the experience.
You can learn more about JustLend at their website, or on Twitter or Instagram
If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me by email at brendan@howtolendmoneytostrangers.show
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bank of Mum, Dad, Auntie, Uncle, neighbour, um, school friend. That's really what it is. Um, yeah. |
| 0:07.6 | I'm a bit of a dreamer and I want to help other people with their dreams. That's kind of what began this thing. |
| 0:31.0 | Welcome back to How To Lend Money to Strangers. What is it is today? How to |
| 0:35.2 | lend money to friends and family? Because I'm joined by Craig Smith, who's UK-based |
| 0:40.0 | Fintech, just lent, is looking to redesign the way that we lend to the people that we know. |
| 0:50.8 | Yeah, I mean, I know we just made very briefly, uh, after that conference in London, but your business |
| 0:56.9 | model is one that stuck in my mind. So when I started the show, it was one I wanted to talk about. |
| 1:03.1 | And I think it's because it's such a simple reimagining of the whole lending process where, |
| 1:09.7 | you know, I spent my whole career in consumer credit looking at ways to get better at scoring, |
| 1:15.9 | to get better at identifying risk at high scale among strangers. But actually for most people, |
| 1:22.1 | the preferred first choice would be to go to their friends, their family, their community for money. |
| 1:27.2 | And in the old days, it was a bit like that where the bank was part of your community. And obviously, |
| 1:32.3 | to get up to scale, we moved away from that and it became all about numbers and mass lending. |
| 1:38.6 | And all the innovations been in that space and you've kind of looked at and said, well, actually, |
| 1:42.9 | we could improve the, well, they're the bank of mom and dad. So a little bit maybe if you can |
| 1:48.0 | introduce just lend and their idea behind it. Yeah, it was about helping a friend get on a |
| 1:52.9 | property ladder. Yeah, she's kind of done very well in her career now, but at that point, she needed |
| 1:57.3 | some help. And she was like, I really want to stay in it in my local community and I really want |
| 2:02.6 | to buy my husband here. And she just asked us on WhatsApp if we lend, but it was just a lot of |
| 2:08.0 | money to a group of people at that time. And it was like, how are we going to get paid back? |
| 2:12.5 | Because we were all recently graduated. So although that loan didn't happen, that's kind of what |
| 2:17.7 | inspired the idea for just lend. I wanted to provide opportunity to people could do what they |
... |
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