Bye bye bankers?

I have used Zopa, the peer to peer banking system, at the end of my presentations for a number of years now as an example of what is possible when you start to see the world in more "social" and connected ways. Looks like I was right to be interested as Gartner are now predicting that "ten percent of all retail lending and financial advice services will go to social banking applications"

Comments

[Mark]

Zopa sounds a lot like a Credit Union, we've got some great ones here in Western Canada.

[Badger Gravling]

I can't say I have much sympathy for traditional banks, as they've always been one of the least user friendly, most anti-social institutions around.

If social banking can allay the obvious fears over online security - which shouldn't be a problem if Egg etc managed it - then I can't see much to stand in their way, judging by how eager most people are to share banking horror stories.

[Ian Wood]

Only problem I have with Social Banking is that it does not have the the ability to large scale banking.

Whilst I agree that the Banking system fails when it comes to micropayments. The problem is that whilst Gartner is selling its report about alternative payments it does not answer the Merchant element with much more than PayPal.

I think that some of what you can see with mobile payments are interesting. In South Africa payments by phone have added some 1.2M people to the Banking System. In Kenya it is helping Businesses expand, the local Eddie Stombard no long needs to give his drivers a float to pay for repairs. Rather he pays via text message.

The new payments service in Afghanistan is focused on micro finance as well as payroll services for some NGOs.

Next time we have lunch happy to give more detail.

[Badger Gravling]

I've actually had a moment of clarity about social banking.

The thing that stops me from social banking is mainly due to the fear that I'm not financially astute enough and could make some kind of mistake or find myself getting ripped off.

And yet that fear means I stay with a global corporation whose entire aim is to make money out of me by occasionally ripping me off with exorbitant overdraft charges etc, and requires the same, or greater, level of financial knowledge to even think about challenging...

[Jo]

@ Badger

Good point. Trust is the commodity as much as the service or the finance.

Have you heard of TradeMe? It is New Zealand's ebay and you can only use it with an NZ or Aus bank account. The newspapers bought it last year for 700m NZ. Divide by 3 to get into pounds. Think 4m people - Scotland. Nothing in 2.0 in the UK has sold for that much.

Commentators put the control of bank accountants as one of the reason - a pragmatic way of managing trust.