Lend a hand: Peer to peer banking?

Image: Check Writ­ing by car­bon­NYC

With the intro­duc­tion of Nap­ster some years ago, peer-to-peer quickly became a buzz­word that chal­lenged the typ­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion model for music first, and for movies & TV shows later. Nowa­days, talk about tor­rent down­loads and online music ser­vices is an accepted part of our dig­i­tal land­scape. Some vision­ar­ies have even started pro­duc­ing their own web-tv shows and dis­trib­ut­ing them using peer-to-peer tech­nol­ogy (link).

There are now other indus­tries that are to be chal­lenged by the peer-to-peer busi­ness model; of those, the most unlikely and sur­pris­ing is our tra­di­tional and well-established bank­ing sys­tem. Accord­ing to an arti­cle in Trip­wire (link), research from Gart­ner indi­cates that peer-to-peer online money lend­ing net­works are expected to grab 10% of the world­wide lend­ing mar­ket by 2,010. I am not sure I would like to lend thou­sands of dol­lars to an indi­vid­ual directly, unless there is an inter­me­di­ary that is will­ing to man­age and col­lect on bad debts on my and other lenders’ behalf. But stranger things have hap­pened before.