This article starts off in an interesting manner, first discussing the origins of credit, but after taking you in, it reads more like an advertorial for Petal than an article projecting the future of credit. It seems like many people these days are taking shots at the FICO score, but instead of talking about a scoring platform that navigated credit markets through endless ups and downs, it poses new, less tested scoring alternatives.
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Society is beginning to wake up to a tremendous shift in one of the most fundamental underpinnings to how we live our lives: the credit
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Even though it’s not commonly known, credit infrastructure has existed about as long as civilization itself.
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In one way or another, credit systems have always formalized the one essential basis for relationships between people: trust.
OK, so I am a credit geek and I’m in for spending the next 15 minutes digesting the article.
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Modern anthropologists paint a picture of early agricultural society as a community of unsophisticated barterers, trading goods and services directly.
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In this picture, there is no room for a credit system: I trade you what I have and you want for what you have and I want.
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But, as historian David Graeber points out in his excellent etymology of credit, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, this account of early civilization is a myth.
About 2/3rds through this 2800 word article, here we find out the author is with Petal, an alternative scoring company, which he announces is in business to democratize credit cards.
We now get a run through various new credit models.
Interesting piece and worth a read, just watch out for when this article shifts from objective background to “you tricked me into reading this.”
Overview by Brain Riley, Director, Credit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
Read the quoted story here
