Breaking Banks

Chapter 1A New Take on Credit and Lending

The Global Financial Crisis saw the first decline in household debt in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom in over a decade, but in the past months we’ve started to see the lending business warm up again, getting closer to its pre-Financial Crisis levels.

When it comes to loan origination, traditional lenders increasingly are finding difficulty in competing with digital services and platforms that are providing more information and options in a more dynamic manner. Approval times have been slashed, built on newly designed processes with far less friction than the typical lender’s loan application. As mistrust of the traditional banking system has increased and as lending has become more expensive, entrepreneurs have been turning to tools of the digital age to offer new solutions to those such as the unbanked, or to those looking for more transparent or cost effective options.

Lending has been around for a very long time. In fact, lending predates formal currency and the formalized banking system by thousands of years.

Archeological digs over the past 150 years or so have found literally hundreds of thousands of these tablets from as far back as 3000 BC. These tablets reveal that silver and barley (and sometimes gold as well) were used as the primary currencies and stores of wealth at the time. Mesopotamian merchants and lenders granted loans of silver and barley, at rates of interest fixed by law¹ to avoid usury. ...