Podcast: One on one with ClearScore CEO Justin Basini

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Managing Partner Nigel Morris speaks with ClearScore CEO Justin Basini.

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Show Notes

Tune in to learn:

[4:55] How Justin thinks about the role of left-brain, right-brain thinking in decision making.

[6:17] Why creating a business is about building art on top of science.

[12:45] How CEOs think about existential threats to their businesses and how they deal with crises of leadership.

[16:20] What happens when you need to re-motivate your team when a sale or acquisition falls through.

[18:41] The limitations of geographic expansion and how leaders balance growing a product line versus entering a new country.

[25:25] The impact entrepreneurship can have on mental health and how it personally affected Justin.

[31:01] The best advice Justin every received... And the advice he regrets ignoring.

[31:58]  Why Justin is bullish on the future of ClearScore and the continued growth of fintech.

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Nigel Morris is the co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, a fintech venture capital platform focused on disruptive, high-growth financial services companies. QED has made numerous unicorn investments, including Credit Karma, Nubank, Avant, SoFi, Klarna, GreenSky, and AvidXchange.
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Nigel is the Chairman of ClearScore and Mission Lane and serves on the boards of Remitly, Quinto Andar, Bitso, Amount and Current. Additionally, he serves on the board of Ideas42 and Scotia’s Digital AdvisoryCouncil, and he works in an advisory capacity with General Atlantic and Oliver Wyman. Nigel previously worked on the boards of Capital One, The Economist, Brookings, National Geographic, Klarna, Braintree, TransUnion, and London Business School. He frequently keynotes at industry-leading conferences, including Money2020, LendIt, Finance Disrupted and the Bernstein Annual Financials Summit.
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Prior to QED, Nigel co-founded Capital One Financial Services in 1994. Under Nigel’s leadership as President and Chief Operating Officer, Capital One pioneered an information-based strategy that transformed the consumer lending industry.
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Although Nigel grew up mostly in England, he takes immense pride in the fact that he is at least half Welsh. He has an MBA with distinction from London Business School, where he is also a Fellow. Nigel was recognized as a Top 100 Venture Capitalist by CB Insights in 2019 and Midas List member in 2020 and 2021. He is an avid cyclist, but he is happiest when he is at home in Virginia with his wife, four children, and three grandchildren.

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Justin Basini is the Group Chief Executive Officer and the entrepreneur behind ClearScore. The ClearScore Group is now one of the leading consumer financial businesses globally helping over 18 million people on four continents. Justin established the business 2015 with a breakthrough proposition that put users in control of their credit report and score for free, forever. With the best app-based product in the world the experience has grown to allow users to take full control of their financial CV, allowing them to find the best value financial products for which they qualify. ClearScore is now the #1 in the UK and South Africa, with growing businesses in Australia and Canada. Around the world ClearScore is proud to partner with over 150 financial institutions who value ClearScore’s innovative technology and strategic approach to partnership.

Justin has been a popular blogger and writer on digital issues, marketing and entrepreneurship for over 10 years at www.basini.com and in July 2010 his first book Why Should Anyone Buy From You? was published by the Financial Times. This book has been called the “best book on really understanding and re-establishing the trusted business.” Justin is married to author, journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day. He has a first-class Honours degree in Biochemistry with Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology from the University of Bristol.

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ClearScore launched in July 2015 to help everyone, no matter their circumstances, achieve greater financial wellbeing. This started with greater transparency in credit reports and scores and has since expanded to include increased visibility of affordability, using current account spending patterns via Open Banking.  As a leading financial marketplace, ClearScore helps people access, and save money on, credit cards, loans and car finance. The Group combines beautifully designed apps, with powerful, consumer-controlled data, and a cutting-edge technology stack to deliver high-growth marketplaces that retail financial products.

ClearScore has grown rapidly to serve 18 million users across the UK, South Africa, and Australia. The Group now partners with over 150 financial institutions around the world to ensure that the right product, gets to the right user at the right time. ClearScore Group’s second app, DriveScore, is putting driving data securely and privately in the hands over 400,000 drivers, so that they can save money on their car insurance.

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Full Transcript

Nigel Morris:

Hello and welcome to Fintech Thought Leaders, everybody. I'm Nigel Morris and I'm the managing partner of QED Investors, a global fintech specialist that has invested in now over 200 companies across the world from the US to Lat Am all the way across Europe, Africa, and now Asia. And today I'm really, really delighted to have a conversation with the CEO and co-founder, my good friend Justin Basini of ClearScore, a really terrific QED portfolio company that was born in England and now on four continents.

I'm sure we'll get into geographic expansion and many other things during our chat today. Now we passionately believe that fintech has the power to democratize access to financial inclusion, empowering consumers and small businesses. And ClearScore was founded with that premise and that everybody should have free access to their own credit score to help them achieve their financial wellbeing to a greater extent. So Justin, welcome to the podcast. You and I know each other well. QED was part of the building of ClearScore and I'm your chairman on your board, so you have to say very nice things today. Let's kick off if we might, with a little bit about you, Justin. Tell me what brought you to ClearScore and a little bit of background for our listeners.

Justin Basini:

Sure, yeah. Great to be here, Nigel. I'm glad that I've qualified as a thought leader. Don't quite know what that is. Maybe I'll undo that over the next half an hour or so. But let's start. I think ClearScore is sort of like a summation of my whole career. I've been working now for 25 years and if I look at ClearScore, it borrows from a lot of the amazing experiences that I've had, both good and bad. So I started my career as a scientist at university and I started my career with Proctor and Gamble and really was taught brand marketing and the power of having a superior product. And so that's what I learned there. Then I set up my first startup in my late twenties at the height of the dot com boom, and that boomed and busted and I had lost some money in that.

It was a very challenging time for me and I learned a lot about mental health and I know that's something that you are very passionate about. It's something I'm very passionate about and that comes from that part of my career. And because I needed to make some money, I thought to myself, "Well, where do I make fast money?" And so I went into a bank and I pretended to be an investment banker for four years with Deutsche Bank. And I sort of learned there that I really was mission-driven and I think a lot of investment banks tend to be less mission-driven and more just driven by money, which is fine, but it wasn't really for me. And then I was delighted... And I didn't realize how impactful it would be on my life, but to join Capital One and really a lot of the learnings that I have about what is great in companies, learning consumer credit, learning about how to empower consumers, that came from Capital One.

And then when I left Cap One, I set up a company called Allow, took that for a couple of rounds of capital raising, sold that one, and then started to talk to you in 2013, 2014. I knew I wanted to do something in underserved consumers' credit in financial services, wanted to do something around data, which I was very passionate about, and wanted to do something that was simpler than the proposition that I had at Allow, which was a personal data brokerage. It was very complicated. You and I started talking, you encouraged me to have a look at the Credit Karma model, which you knew very well and we felt that we could take that model around the world. And we started Q4 2014 and it has been an amazing experience since then.

Nigel Morris:

Justin, it is very unusual to find people who have a science background, who then get into brand marketing. Most people with science backgrounds get into building mathematical models to predict all sorts of cool stuff. That gives you left brain and right brain. I think that is a piece of you in that you trust your intuition and yet you have the analytical firepower. At the same time, I think you have a deep resonance with not only the customer but also the associates that work around you. Tell us a bit about that left brain, right brain.

Justin Basini:

Well, thanks for the compliment. I do think it is something in which I've really worked on over the years. I think I am quite analytical, but at each place that I've worked in, I've sort of learned the power of trying to combine different approaches, different viewpoints on the world, and different functions so that they operate in collaboration, but also tension to get the right outcome. That's really an aspect of diversity.

There are many aspects of diversity, but I think that's a really important aspect of diversity. And now if I look back at Proctor and Gamble, it was really the marketers that were really running the roost. At Capital One, it's the analytical departments that really are the locus of power, if you like, within the company.

And when I set up ClearScore, I really wanted to create an environment where there was no preeminent function, there was no preeminent logic. And so I think we've done a really good job at creating a sort of level playing field where all of us around the table, whether we're consumer insight people or technologists or marketers or data analysts or data scientists or marketers can come together to try and look at a problem in the round. And I think that has been a strength of the company.

Nigel Morris:

Yeah, I totally resonate with it, Justin. In the Capital One days, I used to say that making decisions is often about putting art on top of science, get the facts right, be really empirical, understand the trade-offs, understand confidence intervals and all those sorts of things, and then make some judgment on top of it. If you just have the judgment without the analytics, you get into trouble. If you just have the analytics, you can get into trouble. So having the two combined is really important.

Frank Rotman, my co-founder at QED and longstanding Capital One person often says that venture investing is about extracting as much signal as you can out of very little data, and diversity of thought is really helpful. People are coming at the problem with different viewpoints and different angles. If your venture capital firm is full of graying white men who went to Ivy League schools, you are going to have a commonality of thought, which actually is not helpful at all. So I totally buy that. So here you are now. We're looking at nearly 10 years of the journey of ClearScore.

We were together earlier this week at our CEO conference. We had 70 plus of our CEOs all around the globe, and I think you said that you had 17 or 18 million customers now. So I mean ClearScore is not a small thing anymore. Tell us a little bit about the journey these last 10 years and how you segment and shape that.

Justin Basini:

Yeah, not quite 10 years, Nigel. Seven. So we are seven years through the journey, so I'm-

Nigel Morris:

We started talking in 2013 though.

Justin Basini:

That's true. That's true. Let's go back to the start. We capitalized the company in Q1 2015. I hired Klaus, our CTO and still with us. He joined on the 4th of January 2015. And I said to him that day, I said, "We're going to launch something in six months," because I'd just come off a project that was never launching. It was really frustrating. As I said, "We're going to get something into market." And true enough, we got something into market. So we launched ClearScore in the United Kingdom on the 15th of July 2015. Having spent, as you said, the last couple of days with many other CEOs at your conference, I think we were really blessed in the fact that we found product market fit almost from day one. That first month, even you'll remember Nigel, we acquired about 200,000 users and made a hundred thousand pounds of revenue.

That first six months, we acquired 600,000 users and a million pounds of revenue. We were blessed in the fact that we found product-market fit very quickly. And then as we went into '16, it was really about scaling and adding more product. The major difference that I think we've managed to achieve in ClearScore is that our product is really built to educate consumers about their credit score and report because we operate in markets where the understanding of this kluge world of credit scoring is not universal. In the US, it's a very universal thing. Most people understand or know about FICO or their credit scores; it has been around for a long time. But in almost every other market that we operate in, there is education to do. And so we built a lot of that coaching plans and timeline and further insights into the credit report in 2016.

And then 2017, the business is scaling. We're going direct. We're about four or 5 million users at that stage. We made the brave decision, I think, Nigel, to go international and we went down to South Africa. And the question I'm asked more than ever is why did you go to South Africa? And you'll remember the logic we had was we wanted a place where we didn't need to raise extra money, we wanted to be able to internationalize the technology, wanted to do it in a market where if we failed, it wouldn't have been fatal to the company. And we launched in South Africa and that business is doing tremendously well now; 4 million users, five years later. And then we accepted an offer actually to sell the company to Experian in December 2017. And then in 2018, we went into a series of processes with the competition of markets authority, which is the antitrust regulator in the UK. And ultimately, they decided that they felt that it wasn't going to be good for the market for us to combine with Experian and therefore we unwound that deal in Q1 2019.

And then it was really about rebuilding. And as you've said to me, marching the troops back up the hill and getting them excited again about Plan A. And boy did we do that. And 2019 was a great year. 2020 was going to be incredible. We had our record month of revenue in January 2020. You'll remember, Nigel. You and I were like, "Wow, this is amazing. This is going to be a signature year."

And then by May revenue was down by 85% because of COVID. And so we had more people in the shop, but we had nothing to sell them because all the lenders stopped lending at that stage because they were worried about COVID. And that period through COVID was very, very uncertain. We didn't know we had to make some tough decisions with the business, but I think we made some great decisions. I always say to the team, I think we had a brilliant crisis. And that's something you always say, "Have a great crisis." We had a really great crisis.

We started to generate more alternative data, so employment data, open banking data, and other data sources, and that has powered our growth at the back of '20 into '21. And '21 was a fantastic year. We brought in new capital, a new partner around the table from Invus, and we've now grown considerably. And '22 has been a stellar year for the company.

Nigel Morris:

Thank you for that synopsis. I'm getting flashbacks from the conversations you had with me over the years as you navigated the ups and downs. You have actually had to navigate two pretty seismic impacts on the business. One was when we were talking to Experian about selling the business, and that was about getting the rank and file onside with, "Hey, we're going to have this new parent and this is how it's going to be valuable for you," on the one hand.

And then because of the regulatory issues that then came undone and you had to go back to them and say, "I'm sorry, we're not going to do that now. We're going to do this." I think that was a real crisis of leadership and a tremendous opportunity at the same time. Take us back to that moment, Justin. What was going through your head and what does that mean for listeners who are going to face those kinds of existential threats and changes and opportunities?

Justin Basini:

It definitely was very demanding and very emotional. I think all of the things that I've learned over the last... Well my whole career, but the last seven years especially, is tapping into the emotion of what is happening is really, really important. Being too rational, too left-brained, and too logical about things, really doesn't allow teams to reform what they're thinking, and how they're feeling, and go through that change curve. So when we announced, I think it was February or March 2018, to the team that we were going in that we had accepted this deal and it looked likely that we were going to have a new parent in Experian.

To be frank and very honest with you, there was a lot of disappointment, some anger, and lots of tears because we are a mission-led company and I believe that often we talk a lot about what we do is competitive, it is about fight, and we are there to win for customers and win for consumers.

And we had, in a way, demonized Experian as the enemy. And I think often it's good to have enemies because it focuses people externally. The enemy is outside; it's not inside. Why are we arguing with each other, right? This is about the consumer and it's about competition, right? We are on the same side. So we had done some of that and therefore to announce to the team that we were actually going to go into Experian was extremely challenging for all of us. But I still believe, and I believe that now even though the company has done fantastically well, that the creation of a UK champion where a UK disruptor could go into a FTSE 100 UK company and go around the world, 34 markets, a billion consumers, would've been an amazing opportunity. Now, I don't know how it would've played out, but I think it was an amazing opportunity for UK PLC and for the fintech sector in the UK.

The fact that we couldn't do it then obviously presents a problem in the sense of you've spent a year where my focus really was on getting the deal done and we really weren't focused at that time on really sort of innovating, changing, et cetera, et cetera. We then come into '19 and we've got to start to retool. And when I made the announcement that we were abandoning the deal, to be honest, I think at least 50% of the team went, "Thank God we're not doing that." That's the reality of it. And the other 50% were like, "Okay, what's the plan now?"

And I just went right back to the mission that you and I drafted and agreed in March 2015, people around the world will turn to us when they have a financial decision to make. We make the world of finance clearer, calmer, and easier to understand so people can take decisions and get greater well-being. And I just started with that and I said, "That is plan A." It has always been plan A, how we fund this business, and how we manage this business is separate to that. This is about the mission. And that over time really brought people back into the fold and recommitted people to that purpose.

Nigel Morris:

So you re-recruited them to the bigger mandate. Were there people who had already spent the money in their head of the liquidity event that they thought was coming and was that difficult to navigate? And did you have to sit down and think about the compensation structures to your management team?

Justin Basini:

I think we're all pretty level-headed and most of us have a reasonable amount... Well over a decade of experience and many of us over two decades of experience. So I think we benefit from the fact that we're slightly older in that sense. I remember David Weaver, who you'll remember, was one of our advisors through the deal who was an old banker friend of mine, and he said, "Just remember the deal is not done until the money actually exchanges hands and do not get ahead of yourself."

And that, I think, was extremely wise. Actually, I think all of us made the decision to deliberately mentally sort of separate from that potential future. And so I'm sure there was some of it idle daydreaming, but certainly, nobody bought new houses or new cars or whatever in that period.

Nigel Morris:

I'll tip my hat to you for navigating that kind of up and down as a leader. Certainly, you make it sound very easy and simple, but I've seen the wheels come off with other companies and I've been part of helping manage them perhaps when we've had to navigate that kind of difficulty. Hats off.

Let's talk about geographic expansion a little bit. So a company comes out of the ground, Justin, it's a very predictable pattern. It gets product market fit, it gets a great net promoter score, the unit economics makes sense and you are scaling. And then you start to say, "Okay, great, I think I've got a wedge. I have a mono product, monoline business." And then you start to say, "Okay, well do I add products alongside in the geography that I started," or do I look around and say, "Wow, this business model could apply in other geos."

Some people say you should only try and do one of those things at a time versus going down both routes. But as this business came out of the ground and you mentioned the leap to take on South Africa. By the way, 4 million penetration in a population of... What? 20 million? What is South Africa's population, Justin?

Justin Basini:

24 million, but there are only about 12 million that are really in mainstream credit. So 4 million on 12 is pretty good penetration.

Nigel Morris:

So a third penetration. Talk a little bit about the trade-off between going geographically versus domestically with another product. And you are in South Africa, you are in Australia, and what are the limits of the geographic expansion as you look forward?

Justin Basini:

We definitely thought quite hard about international expansion, but whether you realized it or not, when we signed off that vision, it started with people around the world. I put that in there deliberately because I had been having conversations with Klaus all the way through around, let's just make sure that our tech stack can go global.

Nigel Morris:

It was a little sneaky putting that in there, wasn't it, Justin? Let's be honest.

Justin Basini:

No, I mean it was completely transparent, Nigel, whether you understood the ramifications of what you were signing up to, I don't know. But it was transparent. But we had put a certain amount of effort, not hugely, but just our approach had always been, let's make sure that we can support multiple currencies, for example. Let's make sure that we can support multiple languages, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so that little bit of overhead made it much easier when we made the decision. And I always thought... And I think this is a thing about UK businesses, but also I think maybe it's broader than that, it's sort of non-US founded businesses, is if you really want to build a very large company, you almost have to by definition go for global TAM. If you're in the US the market is so huge that you can just create a massive, massive organization just from that one market.

Whereas if you're sitting in little Old England or UK with 65 million users and a TAM of two, 3 billion, you almost, if you want to really fulfill your ambition, have to go international. And that was always our thought. And there are about, we think, 12 markets around the world that can support a ClearScore-style model. And South Africa was a pretty easy lift for us. It was low risk and it allowed us to learn the international playbook. We then went into India, you'll remember that we withdrew from that market in March 2020. A bit because of COVID, but also I think digital end-to-end origination is not commonplace in India and we don't really have the skills or desire to run massive call centers, which is generally the way you need to sell credit in India.

And then Australia has been very successful for us and we launched in Canada a few weeks ago and we are very excited about Canada. We think that there are several more markets that can take the model over time. We now have a playbook. We can execute very quickly. We can launch within 12 weeks. We know how to do our marketing and we know how to get those businesses into profitability within about three, four years because that's the journey we've been on in the UK, South Africa, and Australia.

Nigel Morris:

That's one growth vector. Thank you, Justin. The other one is now I have... Tell me how many customers you have in the UK and I have now a dominant brand in the UK. In some ways, you are the Credit Karma of the UK now I have proprietary data. I have a tremendous relationship with my customer that's represented in my net promoter score and the consumer has lots of needs. Talk about the adding of future products and services or what you've done and then what the future is.

Justin Basini:

So just to be clear, I mean we compete very strongly with Credit Karma in the UK. So aren't the Credit Karma of the UK. There is a Credit Karma in the UK and we compete very strongly with them. Obviously, we are the market leader by some way; 13 million users. We have tried for many years actually to cross-sell. I know you and I have had many conversations about can they ever really cross-sell?

I remember you put some charts up several years ago at a conference that was just like, "Yeah, cross-selling really exist."

Nigel Morris:

Yeah.

Justin Basini:

Anyway, so we tried cross-selling car insurance and home insurance and things like that and it never really took off. The reason I think it is, is because our experience and our user base is just... We are so good at telling people their credit score and report and then enabling them to action that into taking better offers of credit and saving money on their loans and their credit cards.

But every time you try and have another conversation about here, you can now buy car insurance, you can now buy home insurance, it becomes quite dissonant and introduces some friction into a very optimized journey. So the way that we've chosen to go at it is we launched a new brand called Drive Score about six months ago, and that is a telematics-based car insurance app and people can download it for free to their phones and it will tell them how good a driver they are.

If you score over 750, it's out of 1,000; 750 is a good score, which about 60% of people get. So most people are good drivers. They can share it if they wish with an insurer and typically that will reduce their premium by 10% to 20%. And so what it does is it leverages the brand trust and the user base that we've built with ClearScore but doesn't interrupt the flows that we have within ClearScore around credit. Now we have close to 400,000 people on that at the moment. It's still early with that business, but I'm hopeful that that will prove out that we can penetrate new verticals through this multi-app strategy.

Nigel Morris:

Look, I think Drive Score is really exciting if I understand what you just said correctly in that car insurance in the UK is a lot of people shop a lot more than in the US. It's centrally regulated rather than at the state level in the US.

Justin Basini:

The market here, as you say, is highly competitive. We have a lot of comparison sites. And so the regular consumer behavior is they come in, they fill a form out, they have a look at other pricing. What I like about the Drive Score model is that it gives people another option and options are always good and it's a very large market. And if we could serve a few million customers, that would be a big contribution to our group and another vector of growth. And so that's why we're making judicious investments in that brand.

Nigel Morris:

Justin, I'm looking at the clock here and the time is flying by. Can I move us on to something that you mentioned earlier, which was mental health? We actually had a whole session on this at our CEO conference earlier this week, and you have been an advocate of focusing on mental health in general and mental health in the workplace.

Tell us a little bit about where that energy comes from and what advice would you be giving to listeners.

Justin Basini:

Well, it comes very directly from the experiences that I had when I was in my late twenties and I set a business up, it was around the 2000s, the height of the dot com boom. I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. It was all going to be amazing. And we built a little team of about 12 people and I took several friends of mine out of Proctor and Gamble and we were focused on digital marketing and digital brands and things like that. We were all very young. And basically, as the market crashed, most of our clients stopped paying us. We couldn't pay salaries, so I ended up putting salaries onto my credit cards, ran up debts of about 50 grand, trying to pay salaries, trying to see us through, and when it all unraveled... And I didn't tell my partner at the time.

And so it was all secret and my behavior was becoming very strange. It all culminated in... Being very honest. It all culminated in a suicidal episode. And so it's all very hazy in my mind, which is when I've spoken to people who've been in similar circumstances, it often is. But I remember sitting there with 500 paracetamol and a bottle of vodka going, "I don't really want to be here anymore." And it was friends of mine and my ex-wife and her mother actually that sort of saved me at that point. I went into therapy to really sort of understand why I was experiencing what I was experiencing and not handling it. And so I very directly at that time in my life saw the work can very, very much affect your mental health and can have very, very disastrous consequences. And so I said throughout my following life and following ventures, mental health, and physical health actually because I think the two things are very, very combined.

I'm going to put that central as to part of the ethos of the way that we're going to manage people. And so we talk a lot about potential here and pushing forward for your potential. We have very demanding performance management, but we also back that up with in-house psychologists who any member of the team can speak to at any time. Not to do long-form therapy, but just to be able to reduce the barriers to starting to think about these things.

We're super focused on bringing people together, really making sure that we manage all different types of personality and cognitive disorders and putting everything into perspective. And that's been a really critical part of our success, I think.

Nigel Morris:

So powerful Justin. And thank you for sharing. That takes a lot of gut to share that. And it speaks to I think how critical it is that leaders in particularly high-stress startups and startups by their very nature are unstructured and high-stress can speak openly about the issues of mental health. By getting the issue on the table and disarming it, you undermine the stigma that is attached to it. And your point about the zero to one is the hard bit.

I mean, if I got a sore shoulder, I'm going to see my physiotherapist. You think nothing of it. If I tell you I'm going to see my therapist because I can't sleep at night or because I'm hearing voices in my head or because I drank a bottle of vodka last night. And you think that somehow that polarizes people. So the more that we get it out in the open, the more we talk about it as part of life and its connection to physical health, the better we are. So I really, really appreciate that, and more people should do it.

Justin Basini:

I completely agree with that. And just to underline that for you, I have three children. My eldest is 18 and my middle son is 16. Both of them for their 16th birthday got therapy that I gave them for their 16th birthday. Not because I feel that they're particularly in need of therapy. I think everybody is in need of therapy.

But what I wanted to do was I wanted to give them the sense that I'm going through something, my solution is I'm going to go and talk to somebody about it very much like if Luca, my eldest, sprains his knee, he goes to a physio. If he's feeling depressed or anxious, he should go and talk to somebody about it.

Nigel Morris:

Totally true.

Justin Basini:

Reducing those barriers I think are absolutely critical.

Nigel Morris:

I love it. I totally agree. I'm watching the clock and I'm going to go to some rapid-fire questions here, Justin, and you have to answer them very pithily. You have 30 seconds to answer each one, okay? What's the best advice you ever got?

Justin Basini:

Focus on your strengths.

Nigel Morris:

Okay. What's the best advice you ever got that you ignored?

Justin Basini:

Stay fit.

Nigel Morris:

Stay fit. Okay. Do you listen to opera or rap?

Justin Basini:

Neither.

Nigel Morris:

What do you listen to?

Justin Basini:

I listen to music with tunes in it and things like that. Opera is just too much, too much for me and rap is not melodic enough.

Nigel Morris:

There we go. Are you Italian? Luca and Basini? Are you Welsh where your dad grew up or are you English?

Justin Basini:

I'm a mix of everything. I'm British. I am European and I'm proud to be a mix of lots of things.

Nigel Morris:

When Italy plays Wales or Wales plays England at rugby, who do you support then?

Justin Basini:

I support Wales versus Italy and I support England versus Wales.

Nigel Morris:

There we go. And what would you tell your 25-year-old self? So go back 20 odd years and given what you've learned these last 20 years and what you've been through, what would be the advice you'd give your 25-year-old self?

Justin Basini:

95% of success is execution. Do not search for the diamond of an idea like Facebook or Google or whatever. There is far too much in my mind of emphasis put on those sorts of businesses. 95% of entrepreneurship is getting your shoulder to the wheel and executing really well.

Nigel Morris:

And what's the key to executing really well?

Justin Basini:

I think it's about hard work. I think it's about thinking smartly. I think it's about test and learn and it's about just demanding high standards. One of the things I think we've done very well in ClearScore is just demand high standards.

Nigel Morris:

Last question, then we'll let you run off and execute flawlessly with all those high standards and getting everybody excited. Tell me a little bit about the future. How bullish, or bearish are you on the future of consumers of financial well-being, of financial education, and indeed what role ClearScore can play in that?

Justin Basini:

Super bullish on ClearScore and companies like it, fintech, because we are in the very early stages of a revolution. And that revolution is about consumer empowerment, it's about fairness, it's about owning your own data. It's about turning away from the traditional high street banks and looking for alternatives. We're only in the foothills of that, right?

If I look at personal loans in the UK, only 40% of them are originated away from the high street banks. So I've still got double to go of people who are going to not walk into a bank branch or ring their branch, but actually, look around. So that behavior I think is great because it means that you get better functioning markets, you get more empowerment, you get people understanding things better. And through that, I think it's going to be enabled by technology, enabled by fintech. There's still a role for the banks, no doubt about it. This is an ecosystem, but I think essentially over the next 20 years, you're going to continue to see radical unfolding change in financial services for the good of most people.

Nigel Morris:

So chapter two, not chapter eight.

Justin Basini:

Yep. Chapter two, not chapter eight. Yep.

Nigel Morris:

Justin, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I really enjoy it. I learn a lot as we go through this. You and I have been through many ups and downs as we've worked together on building ClearScore. Hats off to you. Thanks for the conversation. I hope it's useful to our listeners and I will bid you good day. Thanks, Justin.

Justin Basini:

Thanks. An absolute pleasure and privilege. Thanks, Nigel.

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