Underpinned by his broad experience and his now global reach, Brendan launched How to Lend Money to Strangers in 2021, a podcast that aims to bring you the world’s most widely-sourced lending insights.
Today, 200 episodes later, he has spoken to lending leaders and lending innovators in 60 international markets, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. And he has taken the show on the road, as it were, recording at major industry events in Amsterdam, Bangkok, Edinburgh, London, Mumbai, Riyadh, and Shanghai.
Now, everything he has learnt along the way has been encapsulated in a book by the same name, because just because university taught you how to build a predictive model, doesn’t mean it taught you what to do with it.
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Brendan has also dabbled in fiction writing, publishing two pulpy action-adventure novels, which are definitely cheap and hopefully fun to read. If “Clive Cussler turning Raiders of the Lost Ark into a shoot-'em-up” sounds like a good thing to you, then give them a try (but don’t expect Shakespeare).
Brendan has spent the last twenty-five years building data-driven lending strategies and data-derived analytics products across Africa, Asia, and Europe.
First hired by CapitalOne to build models to detect credit card fraud, he has since managed collections strategies, portfolio management strategies, and acquisition strategies for Barclays, Standard Bank, and HSBC, and has built consulting teams and value-added data products for TransUnion and their clients, including rolling out the first-ever national-level bureau scores in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
More recently, Brendan has moved from the world of corporates to the world of start-ups. He is an original team member at ConfimU, a Singapore-based provider of gamified psychometric credit scores, and a co-founding advisor at Humoni, a Cymru-based provider of day one financial services for international students in the United Kingdom.
But the header says FinTech and ForestTech, and that’s because, inspired by his work building Humoni, Brendan teamed up with his old school friend and multi-craft pilot, Christo van Zyl, to build BeetleSense.
Working across Europe and Asia, their multi-model AI solution helps owners better understand their forests and better protect them from damaging pests like the spruce bark beetle, the oak borer or pine beetle, or the rhinoceros beetle.
This move from FinTech to TechTech inspired a second podcast, hAIghtened senses, in which Brendan and Christo explore the places where technology and humanity interact to create something more. From flying cars to AI-powered noses that detect fake wine to mindset optimisation, anything that takes us to a new level is fair game.