Errol Damelin (CEO & Founder, Wonga.com)

Having sold his  previous London-based international business software organisation, and spent some time in the States thinking about the next big idea, Errol Damelin wanted to take on a serious consumer market that hadn’t yet been disrupted by the web, in the way that say music (Napster), or retail (Amazon) had been during the Noughties. 

During his exhaustive search for a new niche in an existing market, Errol found a massive demand for small, short-term borrowing – in an industry where the provision of bank overdrafts, cash taken on credit cards or payday loans was all being serviced in a low-tech, stagnant and largely anti-consumer way.

Errol (and co-founder Jonty Hurwitz) spent 12 months thinking about how short-term lending could be done in a consumer-friendly and responsible way (making it fast and convenient but not putting people at risk from over-exposing or stretching their financial resources) and then spent three years developing the world’s only fully-automated risk, ID and decision systems. At Wonga.com an applicant provides 30 pieces of info online or via mobile, and Wonga.com then add more than 4,000 additional data points from public sources (including the credit bureaus) and crunch it all to make instant yet accurate decisions in milliseconds.

It is a process that is generations ahead of the banks.

Wonga.com do this 24/7 and, for those who are accepted, payment is made into their bank account (or they can directly pay a service provider’s bill) within minutes. As the judges at the recent Credit Excellence Awards said, Wonga.com were ‘Premier League amongst the finalists’ when they won the Risk category.

Errol Damelin is one of the few entrepreneurs to have not only set up one successful business, but to do it again and again in wildly different markets and sectors. It is a talent that cannot be underestimated.