Solving big problems in innovative ways, with Waqas Javed (Bank of Punjab)

How to Lend Money to Strangers

Brendan le Grange

Banking, Careers, Fintech, Credit, Business, Lending, Management

4.9 • 43 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Pakistan is massively underbanked, but those gaps are being closed faster than you might think, using a range of innovative solutions that range from traditional credit bureaus to satellite imagery to psychometric scorecards. In this episode, I'm with Waqas Javed, EVP for Data Analytics AI at the Bank of Punjab, talking about the vision behind, and the impact of, their drive to bring fair credit products to the people.

You can find Waqas on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/wajaved/

The Bank of Punjab is online at https://www.bop.com.pk/BoP

Begini is at https://www.begini.co/ (and also via LinkedIn through James Hume, who helped set this one up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-hume-b8a4642/)

You can connect with me on LinkedIn, too, at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange/

And if you book your tickets for FinTechMeetup Europe, over at https://europe.fintechmeetup.com/home, we could meet in person

Other friends of the show include:

https://www.ogmara.com/ (customised risk management and analytic consulting)

https://www.ontap.co.za/pages/hoedspruit-store-details (for all your Hoedspruit-based bathroom needs)

https://flatwhiteorfoff.com/ (ask for anything other than a flat white, the answer is in the name)

https://www.joinhumoni.com/ (helping international students find accommodation, work, and financial services on day one)

https://www.haboomoney.com/ (making collections personalised, flexible and intelligent)

https://beetlesense.ai (AI-powered day one pest detection for forestry)

And since you like podcasts, I also co-create HAIghtened Senses with Christo van Zyl, which looks at the intersection between human senses and technology (and this week, flying cars)

Keep well, Brendan

This is an interview I set up while at Money20/20 Asia. If you want to make similar connections at one of their global shows, you can get tickets at https://www.money2020.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to How to Lend Money to Strangers with myself, Brendan LaGrange.
0:15.6	For the 199th episode of the show, I thought I'd do something a little bit different and put together a double
0:22.0	header of guests. If you've listened to many of the previous 198 episodes of the show,
0:29.1	you will have heard guests talking from markets around the world. And people sometimes ask me
0:34.6	how I do that. I'd even find somebody to interview in Moldova or Azerbaijan or Laos or Brazil or Kenya.
0:43.1	Well, the answer is I source my guests through a number of different channels.
0:47.9	Some guests reach out to me directly via the website.
0:51.5	How to Learn Money to Strangers.
0:52.7	Show has a contact form on it and you're welcome
0:55.5	to use that. Or they reach out to me on email or LinkedIn and again, you're welcome to do that too.
1:01.8	Sometimes the person doing the reaching out is a PR company who have a guest they want to place.
1:06.6	I'm open to that. As long as they've got an interesting story, they're welcome to come.
1:11.8	And at other times, I do use tools like LinkedIn to do cold messaging.
1:16.2	So if you're in an interesting market or an interesting company and you have lending in your job title,
1:21.2	there's a decent chance that if I haven't yet reached out to you on LinkedIn, I will in the near future to see if you would come on to the show.
1:28.2	But then, of course, I also used my own professional network, reaching out to old colleagues
1:33.3	or to the companies I used to work for in the past. And that's why if you look back at the names
1:38.9	of the companies featured, you will see a few that have come on more than once. I worked for Experian for two years in Denmark, and so there have been a handful of Experian episodes.
1:49.6	I worked for TransUnion in Hong Kong and the UK, and so there have been a handful of
1:54.0	transunion episodes.
1:55.7	But there's one organisation that appears multiple times with no direct connection to me.
2:01.2	And that's the Creded Info Group, home of my guests for today.
	...

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