At sixteen I successfully manipulated my refugee mother into a loan she did not need.

The bank then took it from there.

My brother was fifteen, possessed of more talent than equipment, and absolutely certain he was going to be a famous singer. I was the older brother and the designated family negotiator, partly because my mother’s Swedish did not yet stretch to small print. We had arrived in Sweden a few years earlier with very little. A professional sound system was not on any list we could afford. So I went to work on the one person who could be persuaded.

You can take a loan, mom. Ten thousand kronor. GE Money Bank. Look, here is the form.

Day after day. I wore her down. Eventually she said okay. We bought the sound system. We were happy.

A year later she called me into the kitchen. Jimmy, come and look at this. I don't understand. She was holding the annual letter from GE Money Bank. The original loan was ten thousand kronor. The balance now read eighteen thousand. I had helped her pay every month, the number on the invoice. I assumed it was a misprint. I rang the bank.

It was not a misprint. The rep explained, calmly, that the minimum payment did not cover the interest. If my mother wanted the loan to go down, she would have had to do the maths her self.

Somebody designed that product.

We scrambled. My mother carried the year of paying it off without once putting it on me, a quiet kind of fairness I have never stopped thinking about.

Twenty years later, after exiting my last company and two years happily lost in theatre, including, of all things, a 2016 futuristic play about AI (its own post for another day), my brother and I sat down to figure out what to build next.

We told ourselves this was a 1990s problem. It was not. The same machinery still runs inside most credit cards today, just with better marketing. The effective rate depends on how you use it, what fees you trigger, in what order you pay. Nobody can tell you what it costs. The product, like the one in 1996, is doing exactly what somebody designed it to do.

So we built the answer my mother could not get on the phone that day. Every Fairlo product amortises automatically, whether you do the maths or not. The real cost of every withdrawal sits on the screen before you take it, not buried in the terms and conditions. Repayments run through open banking the moment your salary lands, so the debt cannot grow while you are doing the right thing.

Every customer gets a Fairness Receipt with each transaction, the only one of its kind, showing what it cost, where the money went, and what we made on it.

We believe in a fair world, even when it comes to money. We say believe deliberately. Not achieve. Not promise. Believe. Because fair is a direction, not a destination.

I still think about my mother, in the kitchen, holding that letter. What I cannot get over is how careful she was, and how little it protected her.

Fairlo is, in many ways, just a long answer to that letter.

Jimmy Hanna
CEO & Co-Founder, Fairlo UK Limited