Insights

Speakers: Richard (interviewer), Steven Stafford (CTO, Hope Macy) and Luke Scowen (COO, Hope Macy). Captions are also available in the video player.

0:00 Richard: What is it that makes Hope Macy special? What is your USP, I guess?

0:05 Steven Stafford: The sector in general is heavily regulated, so this is where we kind of come in. We provide the platform which does all of the interest calculations, the statements, the automation that they need, basically deals with all the risk side of things. We’re basically just doing all the heavy lifting for the lenders so they can focus on the customers and the transactions to help them with smarter decisions over time.

0:28 Richard: A big part of where technology’s moving at the moment is artificial intelligence, AI. It’s a buzzword in not just the industry, but in the media right now. And I’m guessing that that will have an immense role to play in lending decisions and compliance moving forward.

0:47 Steven Stafford: We’re going to have two levels of AI. One is going to be like the kind of copilot where it sits directly within the application with the underwriter and it kind of navigates them. It ingests all of the application data and kind of tells the underwriter what is happening with the applicant. And then we’ve got another one which is essentially a full autopilot where it will analyse the data, it will compare it against the company policies and so on, and it will make the decision based on that.

1:18 Richard: And that’s technology that you guys are implementing at the moment.

1:22 Steven Stafford: That’s right, yes.

1:23 Richard: Have you noticed a difference in the demand for kind of software as a service versus agentic type software?

1:33 Luke Scowen: Yeah, I think the whole industry or the whole, not just the lending industry, but the software industry is noticing this large shift towards these language models. It’s not just about trying to provide a service anymore. It’s trying to provide a service that someone can just hook in their AI agent and you can just type in a prompt and it just says, “Find me all the customers who owe me money today”, and it will just go, “Oh, here you go. I got this by doing this and doing this.” And it’s got a whole thinking process behind it as well.

2:00 Richard: In terms of the speed of developing these agent-based systems, is that something that AI is also helping you with?

2:07 Luke Scowen: I’m sure you’ll remember the scene from Star Wars Episode II where they see robots building robots, and that’s pretty much where we’re at at this point is AI building AI.

2:19 Richard: Looking at where you guys sit now in the industry, what gives you the advantage over other players in this?

2:28 Luke Scowen: Experience comes into this more than anything. Steven and myself have been in the lending software industry now for a good 12, 13 years. We started out with doing the normal systems: just plug and play, plumb it in, off you go. And then more recently, in the last three or four years, we’ve created a whole new system, a whole new ethos, a whole new architecture and mindset where it’s all being AI driven, AI led. Yeah, we’re like a Tesla with electric cars. We haven’t just taken out the internal combustion engine and dropped in an electric one. We’ve done it from the ground up and it’s through and through in its blood.

3:03 Richard: What’s the landscape going to look like for a lender in the next three to five years, do you think?

3:09 Steven Stafford: Well, the way I can see it, I think it’s the automation part of it. And, you know, we have multiple agents working away from the underwriting to the collections, to dealing with vulnerable customers, to monitoring the performances of the actual business and suggesting policy changes. Basically, it runs like stress testing your systems constantly, 24/7. It’s like having a risk officer available and working 24/7 on the system. You know, you can act on it pretty quickly whenever things are going wrong. And then as in terms of like the underwriters or the people who actually run the companies, they can just monitor it and see what is going on. So it is going to be an interesting shift to where the lending is actually going.

3:59 Richard: I think this will be a good time for us to wrap up. Thank you very much for your time today, gentlemen. And I look forward to seeing the growth of Hope Macy and what the future brings.