Webank | Are people replacing institutions?
OpenBusiness together with Nesta is organizing an event on p2p finance, which seems of particular interest, since financial institutions are having great difficulties (in all sorts of ways). It is also interesting, because while the interweb started a wave of financial innovation in the 90’s, this was mainly limited to reducing the role of the front office and putting account management online.
But now it seems to much more feasible and perhaps desirable to ‘disintermediate’ the role of banks in such crucial areas as borrowing and lending.
OpenBusiness published a short report almost 2 years ago, which showed that businesses started to innovate essential functions of banks such as ‘lending and borrowing’ by replacing them with people.
It will be interesting to learn what has been achieved in those two years and to ask ‘where are the opportunities for financial innovation in the downturn?’.
Read more about the event below from Nesta’s blog by Rohan:
Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?
While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether. Â Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.
Following NESTA’s publication last month’s of Attacking the Recession, Christian Alhert at Open Business and I are convening this event to explore the trends, opportunities and risks that these new web-enabled approaches provide.
webank is on Wednesday 21st January at NESTA HQ and will be an unique opportunity to meet the companies pioneering in this area, explore their business models and debate the opportunities and issues this area faces. The innovative companies presenting on the night will include Zopa, Kubera Money and Midpoint with debate speakers including Giles Andrews (MD, Zopa UK), James Gardner (Bankervision) and Umair Haque (Havas Media Lab).
If you’d like to attend, please sign up here.
Comments
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
