When Naureen Hyat and Humza Hussain joined forces with Nadeem Hussain, the founder behind the world’s second-largest branchless banking solution, they decided to pivot their B2B microfinance business towards the consumer, giving rise to Tez, the first FinTech in Pakistan to get a digital lending licence. They made mistakes quickly and learned from them, creating a scalable and digital lending model with risk at or below the levels of the OpEx heavy manual models of old.

"Our first cohort was probably the best part of the learning journey for us, because we actually got over 50% defaults on that first cohort... And then the credit scoring engine started taking shape. And we started bringing defaults down from 50 to 40, 40 to 30, 30 to 20, 20 to 15. Then the tougher bit came because it was not only about the credit scoring, it had to be about the experience of the consumer, how is the product structured, from the first interaction of the consumer with the company till after he or she has been paid, everything matters... the latest cohort actually closed at under three percent default. This was uncollateralized cash lending to the masses, so yeah, it was quite an interesting experience and we learned a lot from it."

Tez, now ZoodPay Pakistan, is at https://www.zoodpay.com/pakistan (or visit the group page if your interest are more global)

ZoodPay is on LinkedIn, too, where you can also follow Naureen, with 50,000+ others that are learning from her journey (https://www.linkedin.com/in/naureen-hyat/)

If you're interested in the broader fintech ecosystem in Pakistan, check out the Pakistan Fintech Network at https://pfn.org.pk/

The early growth of Tez was supported by, among others, Accion Venture Lab and Omidyar Network who have both got indirect links to this show, via episode 42 with Jayshree Venkatesan (a primer on microlending) and episode 68 with Elena Botella (a lesson in responsible lending)

You can learn more about me on my LinkedIn page, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you would like to participate in the show, reach out to me at https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/contact-us

Regards, Brendan

Oh, and if you’re in need of more banking podcasts, you can find related content at https://blog.feedspot.com/banking_podcasts/

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