It's Incredible, Most People Don't Understand; The Economy is Built on Debt

Why I work with Incredible.

Working on the fixed-income desk at RBC Capital Markets over 25 years ago taught me that debt is more than a financial instrument; it is the organising principle of economies. Bond markets express the future expectations of nations while household credit expresses the anxieties of the present. In both cases, the pricing of the obligation is as much about information as it is about capital. Those with clarity survive shocks and those without it fall behind them.

The gravitational financial pull of debt propels every modern economy. When measured as a percentage of GDP, public borrowing in the UK is currently c.5%. Yet, household debt is rising faster than disposable income and consumer credit, particularly revolving credit, which has grown into a structural feature of the post-pandemic landscape. The Bank of England notes that credit-card balances have increased at their fastest sustained rate in over a decade, reaching £1,895 per active card (July 2025) and £2,579 per household (August 2025), while interest rate hikes have pushed repayment costs to heights unseen since the mid-2000s.

These figures are not just macroeconomic curiosities. They define the lived reality of millions who experience the financial system not as a set of markets, but as a calendar of obligations.

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It is through that lens that my work with Incredible makes sense. What the company is building may appear simple - consolidating credit-card payments into a single monthly action - but beneath that simplicity lies an architecture shaped by two forces: data connectivity and behavioural economics.

The payments functionality at the heart of Incredible is more than a convenience. It is a structural intervention. By weaving together open-banking rails - which I helped define in my previous venture - with precise payment orchestration, the platform allows users to automate repayments across multiple credit lines without taking on new debt, undergoing a credit check, or engaging with the opaque choreography of billing cycles. In a system designed to maximise interest revenue through fragmentation and friction, automation becomes a financial equaliser.

Where most credit-management tools rely on dashboards and admonitions, Incredible leans on behavioural prompts informed by how people actually make financial decisions. Users are nudged toward strategies - such as the avalanche method - that minimise total interest paid. Progress is surfaced in ways that reinforce a momentum towards consistent debt repayment.

It is surprising how much impact emerges from solving for coherence. One payment instead of many. One strategy instead of a scattered set of reactions. One interface that translates a dozen hidden mechanics into a single monthly outcome. In a country where the average credit-card APR now exceeds 20% and the average household carries several active cards, small improvements in how debt is repaid compound into significant improvements in long-term financial resilience.

These structural improvements not only provide clarity for indebted individuals but also the lenders who are refinancing loans. It also doesn't stop at credit cards used primarily for generalised spending, it touches other parts of consumer credit, including car finance, education and even mortgages.

There is a personal dimension here as well. The founder of Incredible worked for me at Fractal Labs, where I saw a rare blend of technical acuity and mission-driven pragmatism. The product now reflects that combination: technologically sophisticated, behaviourally intelligent and materially useful. It is the kind of innovation that fintech promised a decade ago but too rarely delivered - tools that change outcomes rather than merely reframing information.

If the next chapter of consumer finance is to mean anything, it will require products capable of helping millions navigate a credit system that has grown too complex for intuition alone. Incredible sits squarely in that future. It does not attempt to defy the structure of the debt economy; it makes that structure navigable for the people living inside it.

That, ultimately, is why I work with Incredible. In an era defined by rising obligations and thinning resilience, the most important innovations are those that restore agency to the individual. As debt continues its quiet rise, the ability to manage it - with clarity, automation and dignity - may prove one of the most powerful forms of modern financial progress.

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