In the past 5 years, financial technologies are suddenly light years ahead of the banking industry, which is still based on medieval concepts even while adopting technology.
Fintech apps disrupt and redefine old ways of doing things everyday. Practitioners come in two overlapping tones:
- Some use technology to build on the existing banking and finance system, and give more power to it, finding and filling gaps to make incremental changes. Established financial institutions are wary of changes to their legacy systems, but are really interested in technology — So, lots is happening in the Fintech space, the best of which eventually gets adapted to modernize what's working already.
- Others go outside the box to germinate new products, to provide solutions for the many pain points in society which have been ignored by big banks, or in many cases caused by financial institutions themselves.
FALSE GOD
The more technology advances, the more atrocious becomes one single idea:
The Interest based lending and deposit system.
Interest is considered an “immutable” law of banking and therefore it becomes part of all business. Like a law of nature itself! On which the universal system of business is dependent to run. A “blind” justice, reflected as the interest 'rate' which applies to everyone. That idea is false and has become obsolete in an age where we can go granular into customer data and find exactly where the more fruitful earning opportunities are, instead of having a one dimensional rate for everyone.
Most of the population, especially those earning minimum wage, could do much better without mandatory interest and fees — instead; a transparent digital treasury everyone is part of, and democratically running, in the benefit of anyone — is the way to go.
MONEY IS OXYGEN
A person with declining oxygen first fumbles mentally and with further deprivation, actually dies.
Not having enough money does the same thing. Extreme poverty puts people on the street, creates abusers and the abused, exacerbates crime, affects the quality of family life, health, and the fundamental ability to think.
Some in society have adequate oxygen. But many who do not, are progressing slower, fumbling, some are choking.
For low earners, “interest” just should not apply to a loan. The heavy burden of high interest generates ever higher levels of distress to “meet” the payment.
For a family earning under the national average required for basic healthy life, the stress is significantly more than for someone who has access to all the basics. It is good to have more oxygen than what one’s lungs can hold, although according to Nobel laureate Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s lecture “The riddle of experience versus memory” — beyond a certain band of earning, happiness is not associated with money. But being under the minimum threshold, the stress is devastating.
For example, one of the largest demographic of payday loan borrowers in the US are hardworking single mothers, working paycheck to paycheck. Paying an “average” 390% annualized rate on the short term of 2 weeks which revolves an average of 5 months. On paper: “Twelve million American adults use payday loans annually. On average, a borrower takes out eight loans of $375 each per year and spends $520 on interest”. In reality that interest payout can be much higher for many, who are on the upside of the average in the total curve.
Decade upon decade this predatory promotion of poverty undermines the potential of a neighborhood and ultimately society. In the US and around the world. Every year, people die from this prevalent one-dimensional financial system.
In modern society, money like oxygen permeates the very being of life and is the source for most “growing” things. The interest-based system applied most harshly to those least able to pay, stunts growth and causes illness. People are kept in the cycle of poverty so that their ticket collectors can keep on earning.
There is no moral justification to earn “cash rental” for enabling life’s basic standards from those earning minimum wage. By removing the burden of interest, loan repayments should be easier to “meet” for those who are not quick pacers.
Even 5 years ago, we did not have the technology to make interest-free financial services a part of mass consumer habit, risk managed, cost effective and still profitable. Today, we do.
BANKING FOR THE MANY NOT THE FEW
There would be fewer social security checks for government to write and lesser human degradation problems for local authorities to handle if the private sector financial system was aligned to nurture those with inadequate means. Rather than ignore that broad segment of society which wallows in an endless cycle of systemic circumstances sustaining poverty. Taking a significant amount of their meagre earnings away, in “charges”.
The regular citizen does not need to bet on foreign exchange, stocks or sophisticated “financial instruments”, most of which contributed to the crash of the global economy. In fact, if enough of the public get together to form an Interest Free crowd treasury online, they would be able to give themselves a better deal than the banks.
Big banks give less than 1 percent on deposits and when it comes to charging Interest on loans, banks can charge 20% upwards. Less regulated financial institutions can take that beyond 390%.
INSIDE THE BOX
One can almost hear some financial managers and treasury officers saying: “where will one get the money to lend interest free”? “how will we make good enough money, we are not an NGO”?
Sometimes these are the very questions that professionals should not ask anyone else but themselves.
Or they could ask media people instead of bankers.
Transactional abilities going digital is where banking becomes the kinship of media.
In advertising, if managers asked those sorts of questions for very long, instead of coming up with mind blowing creativity that actually pays back — one would not last very long in an agency.
There are Pricing lessons to learn from the social and broadcast industry.
Like freedom versus charges and hybrid sources of earning.
Moral lessons, like the fact that some concepts are great, they would sell the product through the roof, but are morally wrong or illegal. Only when one shuts out the obvious “what one can do — but will not do” is when the true charisma of inherent genius is born again.
Every human has that capability of invention. If one gives oneself that chance to come outside the box.
How can you find something valuable, that you are not looking for, and if it’s not looking for you either?
One of the best ways to do that is via Web3 by creating a customer DAO (distributed autonomous organization), to make your customers your shareholders with or without being your investors.
Let everyone breathe, there is plenty of oxygen for all in the digital economy where wealth and opportunity is available to the many not just the few.
This chat at Block Connect conference in San Francisco explains a bit about the directions Pineapple is taking with Web3 enabled mobile connectivity.
OPEN SOURCE MONEY
available to anyone - owned by everyone
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