The #FinTech God Particle 🏛💫
Chris Gledhill
Independent FinTech Advisor, Futurist, Writer & Speaker at Chris Gledhill
On July 4th 2012 an announcement was made at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that shook the world. They had discovered a particle consistent in mass with the theorised but mystical Higgs boson, aka the God Particle. It was a significant discovery which furthered our understanding of the universe and earned scientists François Englert and Peter W. Higgs a Nobel Prize as part of a team of 10,000 scientists and engineers from more than 60 countries. It wasn't a cheap discovery either! The LHC was the largest machine every built, costing £2.6BN. It worked by using 9300 magnets to fire protons and lead ions at each other around a 17 mile circular tunnel at 671,000,000 mph and observing the resulting collision (behind some very thick safety glass I suspect!).
In the totally different field of financial services a very different collision is brewing that has similar potential to shake the world. Travelling in one direction we have all the social messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, WeChat, iMessage etc increasingly starting to include the ability to perform payments & commerce along with social messaging. Travelling in the other direction we have all payment apps such as Venmo, Paypal, Square Cash, Paytm, Western Union etc increasingly starting to include the ability to send social messaging along with payments & commerce. Like particles in the Large Hadron Collider, they're rapidly accelerating towards the same point. The resulting collision will split the financial atom ejecting many predictable entities (e.g. conversational payments, bill sharing, emoji transaction references etc) but I theorise an entirely new FinTech phenomenon will also be spawned which I'm calling - The #FinTech God Particle
What happens when Social media collides with Digital banking?
It's the ultimate battle. The unstoppable force of Social media Vs the immovable object of Banking. To fully understand the fallout it's important to take a big step back. Back when I was in school (many years ago!) we traded football cards and conkers in the playground. We didn't have money and didn't need it. As far as our playground economy was concerned, we had a monetary system for value exchange. Fast forward to today. When kids are using social apps like snapchat they're not just chatting, they're exchanging value back and forth. Memes, Songs, Jokes, Emojis, Pokemons, Selfies, Rumours, Opinions, Reviews, Coupons etc - these are the digital currencies of their digital playground but they lack a standardised container for exchange.
Just as the discovery of the Higgs boson takes us back to the beginning of the universe, the FinTech God Particle takes us back to the beginning of money. It puts a powerful microscope on "money" and shows that, what we now call money are actually empty containers for value that once existed. The value we exchange via social media is actually truer in form to the original concept of money but lacks a practical container for exchange.
So how might this FinTech God Particle form and what will it look like? It's quite simple really, let's look at an example: The social value we deal on social media lacks a container so the value fades as fast as a facebook feed dissapears below the fold. How about instead of posting on Facebook that you were moved by the film Dunkirk, you created a coin called "Film Recommendation" which you could then exchange with friends for their equivalent recommendation. Very simply an opinion becomes a currency. It's the 2nd generation sharing economy where a piece of one's time, knowledge, skill, opinions or data all becomes currency which can be spent, lent, invested and saved. As social apps blur with payments apps the concept of what constitutes value will diversify and inherently what it means to be wealthy.
Perhaps it'll all be lost when our kids grow up and realise memes and pokemons don't pay the rent, or perhaps their economic system will grow with them given the right platform. Time will tell. I for one believe we should stop teaching our kids how money works and make money work how they think!
Image Sources: Particle Trails, LHC
Fintech Advisor pursuing engineering excellence in financial services.
6yGreat article Chris. A form of what you describe is already at play with youtube, amazon, etc. e.g. Companies are paying real money in exchange of reviews and opinions that favor their products. People also bear through ads in order to hear someone else's opinion, review, knowledge, etc. Different forms of currency could definitely enable a direct c2c exchange. It's been almost a year since you wrote this, would love to hear your current opinion about the topic.
Associate Partner People Advisory at EY
6yBlack Mirror giving social & economic value to our social digital activity and reputation... China already doing it for a couple of years... Your concept is an evolution of that... However, nowadays we have a liquidity issue for cryptocurrencies if we wanna have traditional currency... And, in your view, one scenario is that social activities could add more... Do we need a standard token to have our Cryptocurrency backed by standard currency?
US Alliances Sales Leader at PwC
6yThe collision between fintech and socialmedia is happening, who can best envision the outcome will be well positioned in the market.