Disintermediarization : how a 2.0 practice can help against credit crunch

Enterprise 2.0 is enterprise before being 2.0 and social tools are tools before being social. It’s very important to understand that anything 2.0 is, before all, characterized by a vision of interactions between people before being about the use of such or such tools. And a relevant vision can help bringing an old legacy business back to youth without changing its purposes nor its main characteristics.

The current economic situation shows us how once “what can’t be changed” faces a major crisis despite a presupposed infallibility, it’s possible to makes things change since the “we’ve always done things this way so there’s no other way” reflex is not relevant anymore. But it needs a real paradigm shift.

Banks don’t have money anymore ? They don’t trust people ? They don’t lend anymore ? They don’t even trust other ? Add to that the fact people don’t trust banks anymore too and you get all the required elements for a credit cruch.

So, strangely, everything that was only about mathematics, based on foresseable nature of things, cartesian risk scoring, showed its limits and more and more attention is paid to what was ignored : people, trust and what underlies all that, that’s to say the existence of links, of interpersonnal exchanges that make trust possible. Perhaps the beginning of an answer for those for are convinced that discussions and networkings had no business value.

In the lending industry, most of all if you consider personal loan, professionals used to focus on the loan and to forget about the personal. And in the same logic I described in my introduction about enterprise 2.0 and social tools, it seems that the “personal side” of the loan, its people centric aspect, is now back on the scene.

As an example, let me say you some things about a new french company called Friends Clear and which is the first P2P lending company in our country.

Because of french regulation, Friendsclear is not a clone of similar foreign services such as Prosper or Zopa that allow people who don’t know each other to “find themselves” and lend money one another. Friendsclea is about making it easier for people who already know each other and trust one another to formalize and secure the lending, so it’s more about facilitation. They slogan is meaningful : “between friends everything is clear”. That’s the 2.0 side of the business : banking 2.0 is not about tools but about the vision they have of their industry and of the way things should be done. So what’s 2.0 is the logic behind all that : disintermediarization and the fact the bank is no more a screen between the lender and the borrower. It’s a little bit like the difference having a hub and a P2P approach depending on the situation.

Finally I find this even more 2.0 than their foreign competitors because it relies on real trust that was built in real life.

One more thing.. The triptyque made of people / network / trust seems to be the solution when modelization shows its limits, unforeseeble things seeming to be more reliable if you consider the failure statistics.

To be meditated on…

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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