I grew up in Japan, where my first job was delivering magazines to homeless vendors in Osaka city for The Big Issue. That was the moment I started thinking about social finance. At 18, I went to Brazil to work for an entrepreneur who had set up an NGO providing financial and educational support to disadvantaged communities in São Paulo. I saw the impact that one person could have on the lives of many and was deeply inspired by that. From that point, I wanted to build my own business with a focus on solving inequality. I worked at McKinsey for three years after university to save up cash to start my own venture. Eventually, I co-founded Pave out of Entrepreneur First in 2017 with Chris Butcher. The desire to solve systemic inefficiencies and eliminate unjust financial exclusion continues to be my biggest motivation to this day.

We started Portify in 2017 to help gig economy workers better manage their finances with Open Banking and improve their financial well-being. During the pandemic in 2020, we did over one hundred in-depth customer interviews to understand what it meant for them. We learned that for the first time, a lot of our customers had managed to free up cash flow because of lockdown and furlough payments. There was a surge in demand for credit building services as people started considering long-term financial aspirations like a mortgage. We rapidly shifted our attention towards providing credit-building products, and that took off. It required tough decisions like axing some of the lucrative contracts we had at the time to re-focus our resources, but it worked out. Earlier this year, we went through a rebrand from Portify to Pave to finalize our commitment to this new direction and prove there’s a better way to build credit than getting into more debt. By offering tools, education and support, we offer the proper path to good credit.

I’m a big fan of Nubank. They started out in Brazil and provided access to core banking services and credit to millions of people. Having lived there and worked with people who were excluded from the financial system, I know they solve a real problem with respect to inequality, so I’m excited about the impact they are having. I also think Goldfinch is up to interesting things. I’m aware there is a crypto gloom phase going on, but I think their business model remains smart, and their vision for decentralized off-chain lending has the potential to massively reduce the cost of borrowing for millions of underserved people in developing countries.

It’s more important than ever that we focus on financial inclusion as fintechs. The cost of borrowing is starting to rise in tandem with the cost of living. More and more consumers are going to need fair financial products to get through the next few years, and then rebuild their finances in the years after. We must come together as a sector and bring products to market that will support them, even if that comes at a risk to businesses. I’d love to see more founders entering this sector, and I’m always open to conversations to explore ideas – feel free to DM me on Linkedin!

There were numerous challenges around scaling the business, but the most challenging that comes to mind were around changes of direction, and bringing the team along with those decisions when you have minimal proof points that things are going to work out. That requires empathy, conviction, open communication, and a lot of legwork from the team. Finally, as a founder often it’s difficult to fully delegate work to the team. Everything feels important, and it’s hard to let go of things, especially if it’s your first business. But to create a productive and motivated team it’s key to do so, and this is a challenge I’m always trying to get better at.

As mentioned, more and more people in the UK are resorting to credit products to cope with the current income shock and cost of living crisis. We will continue to improve our app to support our B2C customers in upkeeping their credit health. At the same time, we are also launching B2B credit analytics services with our platform, Fuse. Over the past year, multiple fintechs approached us looking to get support on credit analytics and lending. Our benchmarking and research indicated our analytics capabilities were top- notch compared to what was out there. Fuse will bring businesses an all-in-one platform for assessing customer cash flow, affordability and credit worthiness to help them get better lending products to market more efficiently. We think this is a key step to take at a critical time to widen the impact we can have and achieve our mission of bringing millions more people into a fair financial system.