How a nuclear physicist turned fintech CEO, Nobel laureate in economics, and Singaporean venture capitalist joined forces to bridge AI with financial inclusion

Paulo: I wanted to start with how I remember Yanan in the podcast that we did virtually. You mentioned that you met Mike at the Green Economic Forum. We were talking about financial inclusion and so I wanted to listen to the other side of the story since you told the story of how you met Mike. Mike, you can tell your side of the story, like how you were drawn to Yanan and the speech and how you guys got connected.

Mike: I think my first contact with Surfin was from Daju, and he had figured out I was interested in development. I don’t think he thought I was an expert in either investing or in the technology itself, especially in this area. But the critical thing for me was Yanan and I had breakfast in Singapore. And I was just fascinated by everything he said, by his energy level, by his commitment, and I thought, this is really impressive and I would like to find a way to help.

So originally because of some concerns about the schedule, I agreed to be part of the advisory group, which I would’ve been delighted to be. But then…they were nice enough to allow me to join this really impressive board as well. That’s what was so impressive about what they were doing.

It was trying to bring financial services to people who are going to be just left out of the system for fairly long periods of time as countries develop. And I know from my own work that’s a multi-decade process. So that’s leaving out a generation or two.

And I thought there’s one other thing that was really impressive. I had watched the development of digital finance in China. I focused a little bit on India, which has a different history. We don’t have to detain ourselves with that.

A lot of people, like Jack Ma and the UN, were talking about spreading this around the world and in the emerging economies. But this is the first time I saw somebody doing it effectively in a company that was growing and making money. So I thought somebody’s figured it out, and it’s not easy.

It’s not easy because…every country is different. It’s complicated. You need different models and partnerships. I think if you took that ability that Yanan has to recruit those people — They’re highly motivated. They’re excited about what they’re doing. There’s an opportunity that they wouldn’t have had necessarily before. And I didn’t realize that was an important part of the story.

Paulo: I want to move to Yinglan as well, to get another view of what was impressive about Surfin and yourself.

Yinglan: I just had to share three things about Surfin that struck me. When I first met Yanan, it struck me as incredible because we have partnered with maybe 40 FinTech companies. Seldom do we find a company that’s bootstrapped and has growth scale. Not only was it bootstrapped at scale, it was in multiple markets with complexity and nuance. That’s far beyond a single market.

Every time I meet Yanan, I’ll give him some feedback. And I realized there’s another trait about him which is impressive, which is that he’s unstoppable. We give him feedback, he comes back and he makes a lot of progress. One thing we do is we back unstoppable people. A great founder who meets an obstacle, they go around the wall, they climb over the wall, they think a hole under the wall. After I spent time with Yanan in Switzerland and in Japan twice, I now realize that he’s really unstoppable.

Many founders try to build a company that makes money. But I think it goes much beyond that for Yanan and Surfin. He’s really trying to improve the lot in life of people in multiple developing markets that have real financial problems to be solved. And he has a passion that I have not seen most founders in the region exhibit.

Mike: To summarize, we have a person with genuinely admirable motivations, who’s also the Energizer bunny.

Paulo: Actually, [I wanted to ask] where do you get the energy? What energizes you? You’ve had a long career and yet I remember the podcast. You mentioned that, “I think Surfin is still like a baby company. It is still very early. There is still a lot to learn.”

So I think that really struck me coming from somebody who’s had a long career and built many businesses before. What continues to energize you?

Yanan: Sitting here I’m blessed by these two wonderful gentlemen who each have been so successful in each of their own journeys.

Now somehow we connect with each other and become one family. I always find that every time I take a new direction, I feel blessed by the people who are able to support me. There is always some important person at the turning point of your career or your important journey, someone who supports you. Because as Yinglan just mentioned, there are different struggles, different obstacles when we set up Surfin.

So [it is important to figure out] how to maintain the same passion or some energy throughout this challenge. It is also something I sometimes question myself and also search [for the answer].

[For Mike for example], he is really like a mentor because he has more energy than I do…he travels to so many countries and then, he’s like an ambassador. Wherever he goes, he promotes [Surfin], he shares [about our mission], and he is willing to support.

There is that quote that says, “If your life hasn’t ended, there’s always things you can do.” I always cherish every opportunity I can still on the table. I can still do something to be impactful somehow to people.

So that’s why I try to bring Surfin to so many countries because really I think our work has a significant impact to some extent, to a young family as far as Jakarta, as far as Africa. That means we are doing something meaningful.

I have been witnessing these different tech cycles, since the latter 2000s. There’s so many different cycles throughout the last 30 years, and I’m still able to participate in each cycle.

That’s a blessing. So I don’t want to waste any opportunity, to cherish the opportunity now with Insignia supporting us starting this. We raised Series A which means we’re more institutionalized rather than just bootstrapping it for the last seven years. So now it’s a new chapter and it’s a new page for Surfin.

I should cherish this opportunity, to go beyond and hopefully can challenge Surfin to reach even higher levels.

Yinglan: I’ll just add two more points, which I think Yanan is too humble to point out, which is one thing he may not realize is that he is contrarian, but accurate. Because if you think about most FinTech founders, they will not actually go to the continent of Africa intuitively.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense because first, there’s less competition, if you have superior knowhow there, you have a distinct edge.

So the last point is actually given his hedge fund background, it’s a big plus because he can dynamically allocate resources in accordance with the market fluctuations.

And I think in the turbulent world, some version of the world is going to change and make it more risky. So I think his hedge fund background actually makes it quite interesting for a multi-market operation.

Managing Risks of an Increasing Techno Nationalism to Build a Truly Global Fintech

Paulo: Actually I wanted to ask about the whole aspect of Surfin being a global multi-market company and ask how as a leader, you’re able to manage. I remember when you did the podcast, you were in Singapore and then did the podcast, you had a flight to Pakistan or something like that. So you’re always on the move. Always going to different markets.

Maybe you can share from a leadership perspective how you’re able to manage different teams. How has that leadership style developed for you since you started Surfin?

Yanan: It’s always about how to diversify risk, how to manage risk as a financial services player.

So that’s why we go to so many markets. We try to diversify the risk like a portfolio manager rather than concentration risk. If you focus on one country or one region, there’s always concentration risk. So diversification is a benefit. But of course it costs more resources. It costs more energy as myself and as our Surfin team.

But then I always ask, why not? If we have technology that can be scalable, if our technology can collect different country’s data to train the model to make our system more efficient and more scalable, why not? Because this is a benefit. This is why we can go to so many countries.

Secondly, I also feel it’s an opportunity for our young team members. They’re all younger than me. They also have just started their careers, so I want them to experience it. They can go somewhere new and they do something new, to help them to raise up their career value or life goal values through this opportunity.

That’s how I think this enterprise can last longer. You have a great team and can work together. We work together for a long journey. So then how to motivate them to step out of our comfort zone. So I think that’s how we can enable each other, empower each other as a journey together.

Paulo: Speaking of technological cycles and diversification I’d love for Mike to share a little bit of your own views of what makes Surfin different, because a lot of fintechs, they’re all trying to develop risk management in their own different ways. What makes Surfin a little bit more competitive when it comes to that? Obviously apart from being in multiple countries.

Mike: So I think that it’s two things. One, I watched this happen in China and the drivers of it were Ant Financial, born out of Alibaba and WeChat Pay, which brilliantly entered the fray with red envelopes.

But they all had massive amounts of data, especially in financial services. They had all the e-commerce data and this transaction data, and the Chinese policy makers as well as the entrepreneurs had pushed the digital side of the financial sector way faster than anybody else. But just before the pandemic, the gap between China and everybody else, including the developed countries, was enormous.

The pandemic closed it because a lot of economies hustled along to do the contactless payments as part of the defense mechanism. So I thought to myself, you really can’t do this without all this transaction data. And along comes Surfin and says, actually you can.

By the way, that’s an important ability: innovation. To enter lots of markets because in most markets you don’t have this concentrated batch of transaction data. So I completely changed my mind when I saw Surfin. I thought, if you don’t find a way to digitalize the kind of transactions along the lines of the China model, and then make that data accessible you hit a major roadblock and they basically said you can use the behavioral, social, et cetera, data to move past that.

So I thought that was a real breakthrough. And so the ability to operate in complex environments, find the right partners, not threaten the existing institutions, build a team, and then with this innovative technology that kind of breaks through a fairly important barrier was I think what impressed me.

Paulo: I’d like to bring a concept into this conversation of techno nationalism. And ask you, Mike, like what are your views on the impact of that? I think a lot of countries are using technology to forward their own influence, to influence their own agendas, and that has an impact on how tech companies are operating within different jurisdictions.

So how do you view that as impacting Surfin? Or do you see that as an advantage for Surfin?

Mike: Techno nationalism depends on where you are. Everybody knows there’s a big technology competition between the United States and China.

The Europeans are out of the game so far. They may get back into it, but I think everybody else is trying to find a way to use this to benefit their people. But they do have concerns. So the thing that strikes me most is that virtually everywhere you find restrictions on data. Not just privacy, but where the data resides and whether it can move.

That’s a kind of techno nationalism that’s, I think, fully justified. The reason I don’t think it is an adverse development for Surfin is A, they take data seriously, and B, the data that they use to train. I believe for a specific country, it’s specific to that country. So the fact that they can’t bring in a ton of data for each market except the underlying technology concept doesn’t seem to me to adversely affect them.

So far it doesn’t look like a major headwind to me.

Paulo: And Yinglan, any thoughts to add from a technological standpoint?

Yinglan: I think it’s a big moat in today’s environment, right? If you think about this whole development of DeepSeek, right?

You essentially have rendered large language models as a commodity, right? The player that has the most data [wins] and Surfin has 60 million users’ data right now across multiple countries. I think that presents a significant advantage for Surfin to underwrite a lot of loans effectively and in the future, do many more interesting things, such as payments, insurance among other things.

So I would think that you’re one of the few companies that has the potential to be truly multi-country, multi-product with a depth of consumer information at scale that you can harness to do very hyper-local, hyper personalized targeting. If you go back, that’s how the new world is being built. Factories were being built physically. I think now we’re seeing data factories being built on consumer data. And I think we have a good foundation to build a really interesting company.

Bringing Together Financial Inclusion and Agentic AI

Paulo: I also wanted to ask about how financial inclusion and agentic AI come together and your views on that.

Like how does agent AI kind of help forward this financial inclusion mission? And maybe, obviously these are like big buzzwords that people use, but maybe again, share a little bit more concrete example of how it unfolds in a specific market.

Yanan: Now it’s becoming possible that we can have more interactive FinTech products based on the user’s demands and then respond by the FinTech company to offer a co-pilot.

So I imagine it will probably evolve in two stages. The first stage will be more system based. It will be an AI assistant to help the customer to understand what their financial demand is.

Sometimes the customer may not know what their financial need is, they just want to ask a simple question like, I want to plan this vacation probably in the summer and how I can go about getting financial resources.

So maybe just a simple question about their daily life. Maybe in September I have to send my kid to college, how I should do some financial planning. So this kind of simple question from living circumstances is what customers can ask. And then a FinTech company can offer the proper product.

So that’s why I think in the first stage there will be more AI assistance to help the user to understand what they demand, what their embedded finance is. So I think the financial services will be more embedded in their daily circumstances. So that’s why recently, in Surfin we try to progress toward that direction.

We offer, for example, medical loan products in collaboration with hospitals and medical insurance companies to bridge that gap when the young patients want to access hospital facilities and pay for medical bills.

Then we try to understand their medical demands through the medical data, and then we can learn their credit appetite, how much they can afford to pay for those bills, and how much income they are able to generate.

So I think that’s the next step. The AI agent will become more like a digital robot agent to interact with customers and then to offer a one stop solution hopefully through their daily circumstances. So I think this is probably in two phases. First phase is more interactive and embedding it in daily activities, and then secondly, to be more cross-sale and to be a one stop solution.

Paulo: And for Mike, from the outside looking in, Surfin is making a lot of progress in terms of implementing AI into delivering financial services. What do you advise Yanan in terms of considerations when rolling out these types of solutions or developing these technologies from many years of looking at how different economies have evolved and what are some of the considerations?

Mike: With both Yanan and Yinglan I’m mostly learning and not advising.

I think the one thing that Yanan and I have talked about, and I think it’s important, is that [agentic AI adoption] is behavioral, right? So the question is, what do you do with these increasingly powerful agents? Do you tell people you have to be careful here, these are prediction machines.

This is not a substitute for your judgment and intuition and whatnot. So I think the successful implementation is getting the balance right between misuse and very beneficial use. There’s a component of it that has to do with the customer’s behavior. How can you deal with the fraud problem by educating everybody?

And I talked to several people who said education’s kind of important, but that doesn’t really solve the fraud problem because nobody’s going to read all that stuff.

There’s a California company that’s trying to make the housing market that Stanford runs, work better. A kind of complete system for sellers, buyers, et cetera. All the functions, documents, it doesn’t matter what it is, and then they hope to scale it up. So the founder of this, said they’re going to deal with the fraud problem by getting certifications that will show up on any document that we send, including emails that have a stamp on it.

It’s like a tick mark…I said, I think it’s a good idea, but it’s not going to completely solve the problem. If a fraudster puts an email in there and it doesn’t have the tick mark, but there’s a bad link, a subset of people are going to click the link.

So this is an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about. So my suggestion to you, in addition to having this certification procedure is that you send an email to people right when they first engage with this platform and tell them any email we send you either won’t have a link in it, or if it does, it’ll have this tick mark.

And we highly recommend that you don’t hit that link. You see what I’m saying? So if fraud comes in and it’s a bad link, if you’ve educated people that you should never respond directly to this, but rather go to the website, engage with the platform, we’ll make it easy for you to find.

There’s an important element in finding this balance as they go down the learning curve and innovate. That’s the balancing side of this advanced technology.

Paulo: What are the next five to 10 years like for Surfin? What’s the future for us and what does that look like?

Yanan: So I hope Surfin becomes one of the AI agent banks in this region so that we can enjoy the next cycle of FinTech. Because I really feel the winds come in and next waves come in with this new LLM and AI agent application.

…I think that’s hopefully becoming a reality—more interactive, more intelligent, more individualized, and of course in the end, more inclusive.

And I also have to sort through as the founder of the company—like Yinglan just mentioned, we need on one hand to diversify the benefit, but on the other hand have to focus. So I think that’s the next five years. We want to be more focused in one region and in two or three markets so that we can be deeply rooted for Surfin to be more impactful to offer FinTech solutions.

But I’m excited, because with so many talks about geopolitical tension, so many talks about decoupling, I can see as long as the technology is there, it can bring people together. I think of Mike’s Nobel Prize-winning theory on informational asymmetry. I’m still learning about the information economy.

There is always information there that could offer some stimulus to the current growth and the productivity in emerging markets. So I hope Surfin becomes one of the beneficiaries to this new emerging market, which has the new technology cycle, has a growing consumer market and has the next growth momentum.