Your branch on your phone, with Albert Howard

How to Lend Money to Strangers

Brendan le Grange

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

5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For a long time now, the prevailing narrative has been branch versus phone, and phone has been winning. But there is another option, branch and phone, or rather branch in phone, and it gives us the best of both worlds plus a few fresh advantages to boot.

Connect with Albert on LinkedIn using https://www.linkedin.com/in/albert-howard-mb/

And while you're there, stay up to date with the Mini Branch story at https://www.linkedin.com/company/minibranch/

Or jump straight to their homepage at https://www.minibranch.com/

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As is the show, please follow its page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/how-to-lend-money-to-strangers/ (once you have followed, look for the circle with the three dots in the ehader section, click that and then 'invite connections' and invite any of your colleagues who you think might like the content

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Friends of the show include: https://www.ontap.co.za/pages/hoedspruit-store-details (for all your Hoedspruit-based bathroom needs), https://www.joinhumoni.com, https://www.haboomoney.com/, and https://beetlesense.ai

And since you like podcasts, I'm also co-create hAIghtened senses with Christo van Zyl, in which looks at the intersection between human senses and technology

Keep well, Brendan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	digital presence has been enough to get FIs through the past decade. And now we're seeing the
0:06.6	transition that's taking place where now it's going to be digital communication that gets
0:10.4	through the next decade. And so that's exactly where many branches prime to be able to provide
0:15.5	two financial institutions, which is live chat, audio chat, video chat, texting, SMS messaging, and a virtual assistant
0:23.4	chat bot, which is by far one of the top three favorite features.
0:27.0	I mean, it understands over 200 languages itself.
0:29.5	And so a lot of these credit unions are now able to get into some of these underserved
0:33.3	communities that they otherwise weren't before.
0:39.0	Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers with myself, Brendan LaGrange.
0:44.0	I have been working in consumer lending for something close to 25 years now.
0:48.8	And early in my career, there was no escaping the fact we needed the bank branch involved.
0:55.0	We could get an application and approve it in a matter of minutes using our scorecards, but the consumer would
1:00.8	have to wait until the plastic was printed and sent to a branch before they could collect it and use
1:06.8	it. That was a painful step for the customer because invariably they would have to take
1:11.5	time out of their day to get to their nearest branch and stand in a queue, sign some paperwork.
1:17.7	And it was a pain for us because, well, it was a pain for the customer. So fairly often,
1:23.0	customers would not bother to collect that card. That card we had paid to market and produce was left
1:28.8	to rot in the vault of a bank until dormant. We saw that pattern repeated the products across banks
1:35.6	across the world, really. And so it's no surprise that as an industry, we reacted with a simple
1:41.6	message of less get rid of branches. But as in all knee-jerk reactions,
1:47.0	we were probably not nuanced enough in our thinking looking back. And we should not have been
1:51.8	saying branches are expensive and slow. How do we get rid of them? But branches are expensive,
	...

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