Ditch the bank – borrow from the crowd
Melvin Carvalho
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Lending Club CEO Renaud LaPlanche says that if his company sustains
its current growth rate, then within seven years it will be bigger
than Citibank
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isn't a bank already a kind of social network? By playing a more
transparent role in matching their customers with money to lend to
customers who wish to borrow, banks may adapt and even thrive in a
financial system dominated by P2P transactions. You might say that if
Facebook becomes like a bank, banks will become more like Facebook
...
And never mind the banks. If citizen banking takes off, it could
change people's day-to-day reality in the fundamental ways that the
now-global Occupy movement is clamouring for. With interest payments
going directly to the masses, rather than to banker bonuses and
skyscrapers, P2P lending could cause more money to circulate in the
real economy. It also naturally distributes risk among many
individuals in a potentially more transparent way, rather than
concentrating it in large, "too big to fail" institutions.