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<h3><em><strong>Gabriele Sabato, Co-Founder &amp; Chief Executive Officer at Wiserfunding</strong></em></h3>
<strong>How does your business help financial inclusion in fifty words?</strong>

Wiserfunding’s mission is to spread a common language of credit by providing the same set of credit risk analyses to both lenders and borrowers. We help improving financial inclusion of SMEs by educating them and assisting to create a credit risk culture to restore trust in the financial system.

<strong>What’s the biggest opportunity for FinTechs trying to improve financial inclusion?</strong>

The biggest opportunity is to be able to make the difference by providing services that either do not exist or are not offered in an efficient and digital way. Promoting financial inclusion should be the main objective of every fintech as only by increasing the size of the market, we can achieve better results for everybody and ultimately increase the efficiency of the market.

<strong>And the biggest challenge?</strong>

The biggest challenge is to find the way to be heard. Sometimes it is hard for a small startup to find the right audience, network and clients. To make big changes, time is needed, but startups don’t have a lot of time and risk losing sight of their ambitions just to bring home some quick wins.

Shining A Spotlight on Financial Inclusion: Wiserfunding

<p>Wiserfunding is a London-based credit analytics platform that helps small and medium enterprise (SME) lenders strengthen the size and health of their portfolios.</p>
<p>Our solutions provide the fastest, most accurate analytical tools that enable lenders to screen, underwrite, monitor, and manage their portfolios with transparency and ease. Customers at a variety of lenders, from neobanks to asset managers to embedded lenders, use Wiserfunding to scale their credit decisions while reducing costs from provisions, losses, and operations.</p>
<p>Using industry-specific credit models tailored to SMEs, our insights are grounded in five decades of academic research at the forefront of SME credit risk, unifying data from an array of public, private, and unstructured datasets that yield the most comprehensive view of a company’s creditworthiness.</p>
<p>Wiserfunding was founded in 2016 by Dr. Gabriele Sabato and Dr. Edward Altman, founder of the Altman Z-Score, to help address the $5tn funding gap to SMEs. Backed by BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active growth investor, Wiserfunding supports over 60 clients who have lent £3bn+ across 3 continents.</p>


Wiserfunding

<p>Wiserfunding is a London-based credit analytics platform that helps small and medium enterprise (SME) lenders strengthen the size and health of their portfolios.</p>
<p>Our solutions provide the fastest, most accurate analytical tools that enable lenders to screen, underwrite, monitor, and manage their portfolios with transparency and ease. Customers at a variety of lenders, from neobanks to asset managers to embedded lenders, use Wiserfunding to scale their credit decisions while reducing costs from provisions, losses, and operations.</p>
<p>Using industry-specific credit models tailored to SMEs, our insights are grounded in five decades of academic research at the forefront of SME credit risk, unifying data from an array of public, private, and unstructured datasets that yield the most comprehensive view of a company’s creditworthiness.</p>
<p>Wiserfunding was founded in 2016 by Dr. Gabriele Sabato and Dr. Edward Altman, founder of the Altman Z-Score, to help address the $5tn funding gap to SMEs. Backed by BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active growth investor, Wiserfunding supports over 60 clients who have lent £3bn+ across 3 continents.</p>

Head of Wiserfunding India

<p>Avantika has several years of diverse experience in Banking, Strategy, Finance, Sales and Operations from her time in Investment Banking at Citibank in New York and London before moving to the corporate side to head a large automobile business in Asia.</p>


Avantika Goel

Board Member & Co-Founder

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<p class="tc-pu-meam-p">Ed is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He is the Director of Research in Credit and Debt Markets at the NYU Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions. Prior to this, Professor Altman chaired the Stern School’s MBA Program for 12 years. Dr. Altman was named to the Max L. Heine endowed professorship at Stern in 1988. Dr. Altman is recognised internationally as an expert in corporate bankruptcy, high yield bonds, distressed debt and credit risk analysis. His pioneer work on the Z-Score model published in 1968 formed the basis of the current scoring models now available at Wiserfunding.</p>
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Dr. Edward Altman

Co-Founder and CEO

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<p class="tc-pu-meam-p">Gabriele is an experienced risk management professional who has researched and worked in this field for more than 15 years. Before founding Wiserfunding, he held senior roles in risk management for banks and consulting companies, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank, ABN AMRO, Experian. He has published several articles on risk management and SME lending in top ranking academic journals, including the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Services Research and the ABACUS.</p>
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Dr. Gabriele Sabato

<p>Gabriele is an experienced risk management professional who has worked for several financial institutions and consultant companies across the world in the last 18 years.</p>
<p>Before founding Wiserfunding together with professor Altman, he was Head of Risk Appetite Portfolio Decisioning for the Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest. Prior to this role, Gabriele was Head of Credit Risk Portfolio Management for Ulster Bank and Global head of Credit Risk Analytics for ABN AMRO. In his roles, Gabriele was responsible for ICAAP, stress testing, risk models, portfolio management and risk appetite. He has provided support and oversight in risk management to banks and subsidiaries in Asia, North and South America and Europe. He started his career working for Experian in Italy and Eastern Europe helping banks in enhancing their consumer and SME risk management capabilities and capital optimization.</p>
<p>Gabriele holds an M.Sc. and a PhD. in Finance from “La Sapienza” University in Rome. He was a visiting Scholar at the Stern School of Business of the New York University under the supervision of Professor Altman with whom has published several academic papers on risk management and SME lending in top ranking academic journals, including the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Services Research and the ABACUS.</p>
