Clive Kinross, CEO of Propel Holdings, on building a profitable fintech lender with just $4 million

Today I’m delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings. Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they’ve achieved it: profitably, almost from day one. 

Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founders, who are all still with the company, have built a business that now serves a market of 100 million consumers across the US, Canada, and the UK. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021 and has been the best-performing stock in its vintage.

In our conversation, Clive shares how his background as a chartered accountant shaped his disciplined, unit economics-focused approach to building a lending business, how Propel uses AI to analyze over 80,000 applications daily and make credit decisions in six seconds, and why he believes the opportunity to serve underbanked consumers in developed economies has never been stronger.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Why Clive decided to tackle credit for his second major business.
• How the company has evolved since its founding 14 years ago.
• The different brands they have in the US, Canada and UK markets.
• How their credit graduation programs work.
• The typical consumer coming to Propel for credit.
• How they differentiate themselves from others in the market.
• How their AI models work and the data they are feeding into these models.
• How Clive views the potential of AI throughout Propel’s business.
• Why he decided to take Propel public in 2021.
• How they were able to become a profitable fintech lender quickly and sustainably.
• What Clive is most excited about for the future of Propel.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 563: Clive Kinross

Clive Kinross:

We’ve got a big operation center comprising roughly 300 folks today who are working with customers on originations on customer service and on payment solutions when a consumer misses a payment, for example. And that’s where we’re using more and more AI to help chat bots, to help analyze the quality of calls, and ultimately to actually speak to consumers. We’ve really started to put a big focus on it over the course of 2025.

The efficiencies are quite astonishing. Each agent on the origination side is able to originate in excess of 50 % more loans than they would otherwise have done as little as a year ago. The number of automated loans that we’re doing has increased about 30 % year on year, all of which translates to incredible efficiencies.

Peter Renton:

This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings. Now, Propel is one of the most successful Fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers.

And what makes their story particularly compelling is how they’ve achieved it. Profitably, almost from day one, since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founders, who are all still with the company, have built a business that now serves a market of 100 million consumers across the US, Canada and the UK. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021 and has been the best performing stock in its vintage.

In our conversation, Clive shares how his background as a chartered accountant shaped his disciplined unit economics focused approach to building a lending business and how Propel uses AI to analyze over 80,000 applications daily and make credit decisions in six seconds and why he believes the opportunity to serve underbanked consumers in developed economies has never been stronger. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast Clive.

CK: Good morning, Peter. Delighted to be with you today.

PR: Yeah, great to have you. So I like to get these started with a bit of background and you also have an accent just like me. So maybe you could tell us where you’re from and some of the highlights of your career before Propel.

CK: Yeah, we’re both from the Southern Hemisphere, and I, Peter. You’re from Australia, I’m from South Africa. There’s a few differences, including South Africa’s the current rugby world champions.

PR: Yes, yes, don’t need to mention that.

CK: So that’s where I was born and raised and actually I’m a chartered accountant. I did my articles back at Arthur Anderson back in the day in Johannesburg. How quickly things can change. I went to Arthur Anderson at the time because they were the leading auditing firm in the world. And not long after that, spent a little bit of time in South Africa in private equity prior to immigrating to Canada in ‘97. So I’ve been here for about 28 years.

Spent a little bit of time in merchant banking before deciding that I was better candidate to be an entrepreneur than I was to be an investor. And I met up with a gentleman by the name of Michael Stein. Mike had just taken the first apartment REIT in Canada public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. He saw something in me. I had entrepreneurial inclinations. And he said, let me back you to start a business. That was the initial basis of our relationship to cut a long story short that culminated in the formation of a company that went on to be called Open Lane. Open Lane was a transformational business model that changed the way used cars are distributed at a wholesale level in North America. Instead of moving through brick and mortar auto auctions, which was the legacy way of moving used cars at a wholesale level with the advent of the internet, I saw an opportunity to really change the way used cars are wholesale. So OpenLane was a company that I started in my late 20s, went on to transform, indeed to transform the way used cars are wholesaled in North America. We’re taking that company public in ‘08 on the NASDAQ, unfortunately missed the window just because of the global financial crisis and sold it a few years later to Car Holdings for just over a quarter of a billion dollars which was a reasonable exit for a company that in ‘08 was valued at a multiple of that, but certainly something that I’m very proud of to have started and built out and obviously took a little bit of time off after that. I will tell you that OpenLane continues to operate today. It’s a multi-billion dollar company publicly traded under the New York Stock Exchange under the TECA card. I took a year off. I almost swore that I would never start another company again.

It’s just really, really difficult being an entrepreneur and growing a business out and certainly is a path less traveled. But I soon realized that I was well suited to start another business and frankly, not well suited to do anything else. So, on the back of that and from my learnings of OpenLane, I decided I wanted to start a business in a big underserved market where the business model was somewhat proven and that obviously lent itself to the internet. So really went from the used car or the automotive market to a brand new business in providing access to credit to underserved and underbanked consumers, which is what we do at Propel.

PR: Was there a like an aha moment or what was sort of the trigger that sent you down this road?

CK: So first of all, this is an exceptionally big market. Started learning about more and more fintechs, which is not a space, obviously when I was focused on the used car market, not a space that I knew a lot about and started seeing more and more of these fintechs proliferating. A lot of them were growing fairly rapidly, but not necessarily generating a return.

And there was a segment of the market that was going off the underbanked consumers online in a very informal fashion at the time, less sophisticated marketplace, less sophisticated competitors. But I saw a rapidly evolving landscape where consumers were moving from brick and mortar to online to get smaller dollar unsecured loans. And again, a whole bunch of smaller players were proliferating at the time and running businesses as best as I could tell on a profitable basis. On the back of that, I spent about a year researching the market. It’s a huge industry that we serve, so it’s well served by associations and conferences and different vendors who are open to speaking to me. So I spent about a year flying around and speaking to them. And what I discovered was indeed a big underserved market, a market that candidly the regulators hadn’t caught up with what was going on on the internet at the time. And I saw a lot of room for cleansing that market from a regulatory standpoint. That all indeed happened. It probably took a few years later, longer to happen than I thought it would. But ultimately, the initial thesis was let’s raise capital. Let’s build a company that’s got real terminal value and ultimately provide best in class products to consumers using the internet as a distribution channel. That’s kind of what we saw and that’s exactly what’s played out over the last 14 years since we’ve built the business out.

PR: Yeah, so maybe you could just tease that out a little bit more. I’d love to kind of get your sense of how the company has evolved and how is it different today than what it was, what your vision was when you started. Yeah.

CK: Well, let me start off by telling you ways that the company hasn’t changed. When we started the company, I started up with three co-founders over 14 years ago. All three of my co-founders are still with me today. So it’s a founder led team. And certainly we’ve gone through many different challenges together and being able to capitalize on many different opportunities together. As we like to say, we’re just getting started and we feel better about the business today than we felt at any point in our history. Suffice to say we felt very good at various parts of the history.

So that’s one of the aspects that hasn’t changed from a four person organization. We’ve grown to a team of 650 plus today and growing. And I say that with a certain element of pride and a certain element of saying this is the infrastructure that we’ve needed to build the company to date, even though the increase in head count and the increase in overhead, if you will, is growing at a much slower pace than our top line, which I suppose speaks to the operating leverage of the business model. But you’re absolutely right, it’s so far as the environment’s changed a lot over the years. We were getting started in the business. If you were an underbanked consumer, you couldn’t qualify for a bank loan. You couldn’t qualify for a loan from a credit union. And there were very few options otherwise available to you. Generally speaking, the only options that were available to you was a payday loan.

And at that point in time, payday loans were being served through brick and mortar locations. There were about 24,000 of them at the time, which was more than Starbucks and McDonald’s stores combined. Since then, obviously with companies like Propel that have come into the market and used artificial intelligence and technology to be able to better underwrite consumers, we’ve moved to a model where we’re able to risk-based price consumers.

So we provide a different product to a consumer based on their risk profile, which is quite different to what existed at the time. Either you’re qualified for near prime or a prime loan, or you’re qualified for a payday loan. There was nothing in between. So in essence, what we’ve been able to do is disrupt the payday market by creating vastly superior products to these underbanked and underserved consumers, grow at an exponential pace, obviously, over that period of time.

And at the same time, the payday market has dramatically decreased in size. Today, there’s roughly 12,000 stores where there used to be 24,000 at the time. There’s also, Peter, way more regulatory clarity than there was at the initial finding stages of the industry. And all of that has meant that the industry has coalesced around a few bigger, more sophisticated players who are not only well-capitalized with very sophisticated management teams but also robust compliance and regulatory systems which are critical in operating in this environment.

PR: So they knew, presume you operate both in the United States and Canada. And maybe you could take us through like, what are the retail brands that you have? Cause it’s not, you’re not going out there with Propel, right?

CK: Yeah, Propel is just a holding company. That’s exactly right. And you know what was fascinating to me, one of the things I didn’t realize when I was running Open Lane was that so many of the consumers, mean the most sophisticated developed economies in the world are underbanked. And let me start off just by giving you a few data points and then I’ll answer your questions about the operating brands. In the US, something like 40 % of the population can’t afford $400 in the case of an emergency expense, 40 % of the population. In Canada, which is my backyard in excess of 50 % of the population lives paycheck to paycheck. Frankly, it used to be a little bit lower than that, but that percentage has just increased ever since we’ve been in the business. And what you didn’t touch on was the UK, we’re in the UK market as well, where the data for underbanked consumers is not that different.

So we’re addressing a market in those three countries of about 100 million people. And when you start thinking about it, this is in the most developed countries in the world. So if the opportunity exists to provide this kind of service in the most developed countries in the world, as you would imagine, it’s a global opportunity and it certainly is. And we certainly have global aspirations, but are in those jurisdictions today. In the US, we operate with two brands, Money Key, as well as Credit Fresh. And we operate with a combination of direct lending, as well as partnering with banks to be able to provide unsecured loans to consumers right across the US. Money Key is typified by slightly lower loan amounts, slightly higher APRs, and goes to consumers with more gross credit profiles than our Credit Fresh brand, which tends to target customers with slightly less gross credit profiles. And consequently, the APRs tend to be lower and the loan amounts tend to be higher.

What both of them share in common is we have graduation programs. What that means is as consumers prove their ability to pay over a sustained period of time, we graduate them to better products. By that I mean lower APRs and higher loan amounts. In Canada, our brand is Fora Credit. Fora Credit provides a line of credit to consumers at rates below 35%, which is the usury cap in Canada today.

And then finally in the UK, we did an acquisition a year ago, which has been going fantastically well. We’ve got an outstanding team in the UK based out of Nottingham who run our wholly owned subsidiary there called Quid Market. And they offer installment loans to the 20 million person market in the UK.

PR: Okay, so then maybe you could just take us through, you’re targeting a segment of the population, you’re not necessarily going after the prime consumer, but maybe you could give us a little bit of color on who are the kinds of people that come looking for credit with you guys.

CK: Yeah, it certainly is a very, very rapidly changing market. Look, the average consumer is what we call the everyday in the US context, the everyday American and in Canada, the everyday Canadian typically have an income around a median income of around $60,000. That number has actually been trending up a bit over the last few years, partially as a result of wage inflation, as well as obviously CPI inflation that is more and more consumers that seem to be living paycheck to paycheck. Affordability certainly seems to be one of the main issues from a political landscape and also on a real landscape as we are clearly in a K-shaped economy. And by that, it would appear that the rich are doing better and that those that are less fortunate are struggling seemingly from quarter to quarter.

A few data points to support that. If you look at applications, the two segments of the market that are growing in double digits in 2025 alone, from an application perspective with the super prime market, where more and more prime consumers are moving across to super prime, as well as the sub prime market. There’s this real bifurcation in the economy right now. And we’re seeing consumers who might otherwise have qualified for credit before the propeller brands moving into the propeller market. So our addressable market is expanding quite rapidly. Despite the fact that we’re in these very very developed developed economies, right?

PR: Right. Okay. So I mean, when you launched in 2011, was virtually hardly any options for consumers, near prime, sub-prime consumers to take out a loan online. I mean, it was, you know, payday or nothing in many cases. But today there is, you’re not alone in this market, obviously. There’s lots of people attacking it. So I’m curious about like the people who are underserved today. I they do have, they have better options than before, right? I mean, how are you differentiating your offerings from the others?

CK: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. know, when we say underserved or underbanked, we’re contrasting it to the mainstream banking segment and credit unions as well. And that segment of the market, frankly, has demonstrated that they’re really not interested in serving underbanked consumers. If you looked at what happened after the ‘08 global financial crisis, there were more and more branch closures in neighborhoods where more of our consumers reside. And if you look at what’s happening today, the New York Federal Reserve just put out the number of turn downs for mainstream banks for credit applications. And that number is at an all time high, certainly post 2000 it is. So that really demonstrates that mainstream banks and credit unions aren’t interested in these consumers. And that’s not to be critical of them. Their business model, broadly speaking, can be divided up into wealth management on the one hand, and broadly speaking, lending to these consumers on the other.

Our consumers don’t necessarily have funds on the wealth management side, making them less attractive to mainstream banks and credit unions. And on the other hand, when you look at their lending, for the most part, our customers rent. They don’t take out mortgages. Lots of them obviously lease or borrow to purchase vehicles. So that is an element of the business, but even more and more of that is not happening as the proliferation of other forms of transport takes hold and again, banks aren’t as interested in our consumer set.

So if you then turn around and say who is filling the void, most digital lending today is happening through alternative lenders and fintechs. I think up to two thirds of the market today is not mainstream banks when you look at the digital lending market. So absolutely, lenders like ourselves, fintechs like ourselves have come into the market and have filled that void. And we’ve done it through…with products that are vastly superior than what was otherwise available before. We’re able to do that through AI and machine learning. We’re a company who looks at in excess of 80,000 applications every day, certainly at this time of year as we’re in the middle of season. And as I mentioned, we’ve got a team of only 650 people. So we’re able to do that and we’re able to take dramatic costs out of the supply chain.

And with our AI machine learning, adequately price risk and pass on any of the savings that we recognize to our consumers. So it’s kind of a win-win. Our investors are investing in a best-in-class company. Consumers keep coming back to us and driving our growth because the products that we provide to them in general on a risk-adjusted basis are better than they could get elsewhere in the marketplace. As you mentioned, Peter, the characteristics of the markets that we serve…and I would say, or fintechs in general, is it’s not a winner takes all model. It’s not, like a Google or a Facebook model where there’s one dominant company. We all market a little bit differently. We all underwrite a little bit differently. So the market, as predicted, has coalesced around a few bigger players. And I suspect that that is the trend that will continue on a go-forward basis.

PR: So I want to dig in a little bit to your AI comment. You do have on your website, you talk a lot about AI, about your AI powered platform. Could you walk us through how your AI models work? What data signals are you capturing that maybe other companies miss? Just give us a bit more color there.

CK: Yeah, I’m certainly happy to provide elements of that. Obviously, there’s some stuff that if I would have devolve it, my chief risk officer would come and hit me over the head, even though I’m the CEO and say, what are you telling everybody? But let’s start off with the basics. And the basics is that you need people who have the expertise of doing this. The gentleman who heads up our risk area is one of my co-founders, Dr. Jonathan Gola.

John did his master’s in artificial intelligence at MIT and then did his PhD at the University of Berkeley. He’s an absolutely brilliant guy and has assembled a team of quite outstanding PhDs who formed the backbone of our team who assesses our risk and who builds our models. So that’s number one. Number two is we’ve been doing this for a long, time. Over 14 years, I mentioned that today we look at in excess of 80,000 applications a day and render a decision in six seconds, so you can imagine all the data that we have over 14 years. And in addition to all the data that we have over 14 years, we funded in excess of 1.2 million consumers in multiple jurisdictions that cross multiple different products. So that provides us incredible insight and knowledge with which to fine tune our models. And the other element that’s not necessarily tied to AI, but critical to our underwriting is we work with all of the different bureaus. We’re integrated with all of them. We’re integrated with tons of other data sources. Some are discrete to Propel. Others are not discrete to propel. But there’s tons of data sources that we work with, with which we are able to extract data. We have our own proprietary data sources as well. So that’s another critical piece of the puzzle that ultimately all forms the basis for our AR models where we’re able to analyze up to 5,000 data points for a consumer.

Look, AI or no AI aside, what’s critical in lending to a consumer is they need to have not only a source of income, but their income needs to be right sized to the size of loan that they’re getting. So we’re always looking at what is their income? That doesn’t change whether you’re using AI or not using AI. That’s critically important. The other thing that’s critically important is how stable is that income? How long have they had the income for? Has it been going up over that period of time? Is it stable and is it consistent? And the other thing that we’re looking at is how good are they at managing their finances? Meaning, you know, lot of our consumers come to us because they do have bruised credit profiles, but are they on their way up after being in a challenging situation or are they coming to us at a time where their finances appear to be at one of the worst points in their recent history? Recent history is what’s critical in analyzing these customers.

Peter, unlike probably you and I, whose credit profiles don’t necessarily change that much over a five or 10 year time frame, our consumers’ credit profiles could change many times, even over the course of a 12 month period. Three or four times for argument’s sake, and we’re looking to provide access to credit to these consumers at a time that they’re working their way out of what might otherwise be a challenging situation.

PR: So beyond underwriting, I’m curious about how you’re approaching AI internally. I mean, what is the potential here for your…across all of the products that you have? What’s, what’s the potential for AI?

CK: Yeah, we’re certainly just getting started in what is probably most transformational technology I’ve ever seen over the course of my career. You when we talk about AI in the underlying context, we’re talking about predictive AI. And obviously, that’s deep mathematics and statistics. And you need to know ours are just articulated a few minutes ago. Generative AI is obviously what’s in the headlines each and every day and seems to be what’s really causing major transformation and a company that likes to be an early adopter of these types of things, you would imagine that we’ve got a head, an executive dedicated to leading our AI initiatives. And for the time being, the main focus of AI has been on building efficiencies across the organization.

We’ve got a big operation center comprising roughly 300 folks today who are working with customers on originations on customer service and on payment solutions when a consumer misses a payment, for example. And that’s where we’re using more and more AI to help with chatbots, to help analyze the quality of calls, and ultimately to actually speak to consumers. We’ve really started to put a big focus on it over the course of 2025. The efficiencies are quite astonishing.

Each agent on the origination side is able to originate in excess of 50 percent more loans than they would otherwise have done as little as a year ago. The number of automated loans that we’re doing has increased about 30 percent year on year, all of which translates to incredible efficiencies. But not only is it efficiencies that are more effective as well, the AI is able to analyze every call, provide feedback on every call in a very structured way to the hundreds of agents that we have on the call. So we’re recognizing tremendous efficiencies while doing our job more effectively and converting more and more consumers into loans, some of whom otherwise we may have missed the opportunity on.

We’ve also got a development team, a software development team in excess of 100 developers. That team’s also growing at a slower pace just because of how we’re using AI to make the development cycle that much more robust, quicker, and more effective, all of which speaks to the efficiency side of the business and obviously the cost-cutting side of the business. I also want to mention, Peter, that we’re that for the 2025 financial year, we’re investing a lot in AI, meaning that even though we’re recognizing these efficiencies, our investments have actually been a drag on profitability in the short term, and we expect to see more cost savings in ‘26 and ‘27 and beyond.

I’m also very focused on revenue generating opportunities from AI, and for the time being, we’ve used a very sophisticated management systems to manage all the data across the organization and understand what’s going on in our different geographies and our different products. What we’ve developed now is really an AI overlay that sits on top of our entire database that I could go in and ask normal conversational questions to understand what’s going on in the marketplace. At the end of the day, the effectiveness of that tool comes down to how effective the questions are that we’re asking.

We’re an entrepreneurial led organization. We’ve got lots of smart people across the company who are getting answers to their questions almost in real time and through those answers developing opportunities, be it on the marketing side, be it on understanding where risk is maybe more heightened than it otherwise might be and adjusting the business on a real time basis as a result.

PR: Okay. So you’ve been a public company for many years now. I think it was a 2021 if my memory serves me. What was behind your decision to become a public company?

CK: Yeah, so to begin with, it’s important to understand that prior to being a public company, the only equity that we raised was when we founded Propel. That was about a $4 million capital raise all the way back in 2011 and then grew from 2011 onwards through a combination of profits as well as raising debt capital. Tremendous discipline in building the business that way and took it that way all the way to 2021.

At that point in time, believe that we had the infrastructure and the team to start looking beyond the US to grow our business on a go-forward basis. At that point in time, we got a call. We started to get quite a few inbound calls from private equity who had heard about the company and were interested in investing in the company. There was a particular investor that we were speaking to, the Raptor Group back in 2021, who wanted to give us a private equity type injection.

We really liked it, by the way, very sophisticated FinTech investors. And at the time, thought before we go down this path, we need to look into the public markets and liked what we were hearing about the public markets. The window to raise capital was open and the valuation that the public markets were providing was higher than the private markets. Even still, it was a very thoughtful, reflective time in our journey that that makes sense for us to do that.

And we figured because we could forecast the business on a go-forward basis, we checked that box and the use of incremental capital would help us scale geographically either through build versus buy type decisions. Since going public in 2021, we’ve launched four in the UK. That was an organic greenfield launch on our part. We’ve used public market capital. We went and did a board deal in October of last year, raising excess of $100 million Canadian dollars to buy a Quid Market in the UK. We’ve launched lending as a service or forward flow program since being a public company. We’ve launched incremental bank partnerships and distribution arrangements. I would say Peter has given us tremendous credibility to go out and grow and expand the business. It’s also returned tremendous amounts to our shareholders.

We’ve been the sixth best performing company on the TSX over the last three years with the best performing IPO of our vintage, which is not surprising given the 6X growth in our revenue over the period 2021 till today, and even more 7X growth in our adjusted profits, which really speaks to the operating leverage of the business model. So, so far, it’s obviously been the right decision in allowing us to grow and expand and as I said earlier, we’re just getting started many opportunities ahead.

PR: So then when you look at many of your US counterparts that have been around for a long time, but have struggled to get to profitability, and many of them are now, but is it really just your bootstrapping mentality? You’ve been profitable for a while. What’s different with you guys?

CK: That’s a very interesting question and the fact that you say it was about bootstrapping mentalities, a very, very insightful question as well, actually. And let me touch on a few aspects of it. The one is I’m a chartered accountant, you know, and the way I learn to value companies is the value of a company is the present value of its future cash flows, which is a function of profitability. I know full well, having started Openlane and we raised a lot of money in Silicon Valley for that business. The Silicon Valley mindset grow without necessarily regard to profitability. And in some industries, that makes a lot of sense, not in the lending industry, because selling money candidly is not the most difficult thing in the world to do. Getting it repaid is materially more difficult than generating revenues. So we’ve always had an eye on profitability, partially because I think it’s the only reliable method that you could use to value a company. And it’s also the only reliable method that you could use to actually grow a company as a going concern. If you’re relying on constantly going back into the markets to raise capital, you could hit a period, a speed wobble where you need capital and the markets are just closed and investors aren’t investing. So from that perspective, it’s always been a good thing.

Also personally, wanted to retain a sizable amount of control in the company. Both financial control as well as control in the direction of the company in order to do that. We had to run the business profitably so as not to give up capital to others who might have a big influence on the business. And the third is we understand the business very well. You know, we start off with a mentality that every loan that we underwrite or that we originate needs to produce a marginal income. And if you start off with that mentality as well as have a large, call it margin of safety with every loan. It’s absolutely the right attitude rather than betting on how a market may shift that one day these loans may become profitable.

Lots of entrepreneurs start with a thesis. More often than not, the thesis proves not to be correct. So many of these companies that start out fintechs and others that start out losing money in the hopes that one day things will change, you never hear about. They just close their doors and shut it and go away. And the odd one has the right cache or the right founder or the right vendors and they’re able to pivot and make changes until they find their path ultimately to becoming a public company. But the unit economics in our industry are not overly complex. You need to understand the unit economics and then you need to have the team and the processes and the underwriting to make sure you can operate within the bounds of those unit economics to run a profitable business.

PR: Okay, so the last question then, as you look to the future, I what are you excited about? What’s next for Propel?

CK: I think, foundationally, the idea that there are underbanked consumers in these developed countries has never been more pronounced than it is today. We just had an election in the US a couple of weeks ago, and we saw how affordability was very much on the ballot. So I think the thesis around this huge underserved market and the need for credit for these consumers is probably as strong as it’s ever been. So let me start off by saying that and also to say that I actually think it’s not only the political issue, political matter of our day, but it’s the practical matter of our day, this bifurcation of the market to the polls, to the super prime and to the sub prime. I think that that’s here to say so the need for best in class companies like Propel to me has never been stronger.

And I say that having been in this business for 14 years. In addition to that, it’s a global opportunity. I’ve mentioned already that we’ve got the co-founders all in place today. We’ve got a 20-person executive team of 650. We’ve never lost a single executive. We’ve got our best-in-class proprietary technology. That’s another key element. And we’ve got a very, very strong balance sheet as well as the ability to tap the capital markers. Should we need more capital, which by the way, I don’t expect we would need, we wouldn’t have increased our dividend 10 quarters in a row, we felt like we needed additional capital as an example. All of that translates to opportunity to expand the business, not only in the markets that we’re operating in, where we have single digit market sharing each market, notwithstanding the explosive growth that we’ve demonstrated year in and year out, but more than that, we have the ability as what is the ambition, as what is the know-how to expand this business geographically.

So we have aspirations of becoming the global leaders at this and very much believe that we’re in the early innings still of that big, overall mission.

PR: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there Clive. Really, really appreciate you coming on the show. We’ve been following your story for a while, so it was great to have to get a bit more in depth with you and appreciate you and thanks again.

CK: Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Enjoy the conversation.

PR: I remember the go-go days of the online lending space in the early to mid 2010s when VCs were throwing equity at any fintech lender with a half-decent business plan. It is interesting to me that Propel did not partake in any of this easy money, raising only $4 million in equity at their founding and no more before going public 10 years later.

Propel’s emphasis on profitability just goes to show that you don’t need large amounts of equity capital to create a successful fintech lender. This is a lesson that was missing for much of the history of fintech lending in this country.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thank you so much for listening.