PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKS ARE CHALLENGING ESTABLISHED PLAYERS
“Banks find it difficult to individually price a borrower so
they don’t bother and stick us all in one bag. Credit cards
are a one-size-fits-all product. We all pay the same rate
with the good guys subsidising the bad. Peer to peer says,
“Maybe they shouldn’t”.’
Simon Champ,
Chief Executive of P2P’s investment manager Eaglewood Europe
NEW LANDSCAPE
Fuelled by the ubiquity of the Internet and advances in
social platforms, peer-to-peer networks have become
a powerful consumer tool. These reputation systems
are now a fast-growing model for a vast array of
community-based services offering smarter, swifter
and more cost efficient ways to transact goods –
bypassing that offered by established brands. Think of
AirBnb disrupting the hospitality sector by letting us rent
out our living spaces, or Udemy allowing to gain and
share skills and knowledge.
16
PR E S E N T A N D P O T E NTIA L F UTURE S IN F IN A N CIA L SE RVICES
These peer-to-peer networks have started to make
inroads into the financial services space. Nibbling
away at the established order of intermediaries
and circumventing process-heavy, time-consuming
banking procedures. Lending and investment sites
such as Zopa, Funding Circle and Lending Club
empower people to bypass the bank to fund their
futures. Crowdfunding initiatives such as Kickstarter
rely on smaller investors working together to invest in
new ideas. In the future we could see sites exploiting
our data trails from around the web, with software
pulling in reputation data from different sites to present
‘reputation profiles’.