"It was, at that time, a very crazy idea", Neel Juriasingani tells me. "A lot of people still look at us as those crazy guys. But coming from that tech mindset, we were forced to think about how tech could be built to solve these challenges".Over the last decade or so, lenders have invested a lot of time and money to turn the smartphone into an optimised account acquisition tool - you want to be where your customer is, after all. But the fact that their smartphones are where your customers are at, means we could be using them for far more than data transfer. And maybe we just needed someone from the Telco industry to open our eyes to that.Neel and his team at Datacultr have optimised the smartphone as a contact tool, even when they're outside of network range, to create as many opportunities to engage with a customer as possible, and in a language that they understand. They're even able to turn phone service into virtual collateral if that's what's needed to secure a loan for the most underserved and underbanked populations.More on Datacultr can be found at https://datacultr.com/ (or find their Fintech50 recognition at https://www.inclusivefintech50.com/2021-cohort)If you'd like to learn more about their model, or if you'd like to maximise the risk-reduction potential of your customers' smartphones, Neel can be reached for discussions via neel@datacultr.com.You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), 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-24If you have any feedback or questions, if you would like to participate in the show, or if you'd like to find full written transcripts with timestamps head on over to HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.ShowRegards,Brendan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.