Digital Trust and Receipting for Credit and Savings

[Nick_M]

Simple community savings schemes need not have a bank or banker if there is a circle of trust. Such schemes have been around for a long time… the poor person’s bank… and rely on mutual support in an extended family.

See wiki:

Rotating savings and credit association

There’s a clear need for good KYC to support these schemes, which is why they are usually based on face to face relationships and handshakes.

Verifiable Creds might provide digital support for these very human schemes, normally limited by geography and locality. Combine the trust of such a scheme with the cleverness of an app like splitwise to manage the record keeping, and you might have something useful to help groups of coop members to support each other in tough times and perhaps find things like deposits in housing schemes without resorting to more toxic and extractive products from the financial services industry.

Just a thought?

[osioke]

This also works for sales based Coops where there only interactions with their customers is via the teller and the receipt. It would be a good way to KYC without collecting any data as coops and business owners can verify the receipts and know their customers and the return ones.

[Nick_M]

Yes there is more on this aspect of ‘receipting’ in this topic:

Privacy-respecting marketing and cross-selling

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Also, ‘Coupons’ often come up in this context: someone gives you a code at one point of sale to ‘redeem’ at another point of sale. These can be ‘one off’ exchanges, or sophisticated coalition loyalty schemes with their own currency. Coupons are familiar, and simple, but coupon codes typically either insecure and easily cheated, or backed up by a shared user / loyalty database and consequent tracking and privacy concerns.