Fancy lending me five thousand bucks?

By Annie Waite, Global Editor of the Internal Comms Hub, Melcrum

No? Ok, maybe just one then?

Why am I asking YOU, I bet you're wondering? Well, looking at the Chicago RedEye paper last week, the headline "Need cash?" on p3 inevitably caught my eye. The article explained about a growing trend of peer-to-peer lending online. Currently leading the websites offering the facility for such transactions is prosper.com.

A bit like the classified ads of publications like Private Eye or The Oldie, the prosper.com system lets people who are, for one reason or another, on the scrounge and desperate or brave enough to query if anyone out there is rich and generous enough to lend or give them the funding they're after.

What sites like prosper.com do is take the money-lending practice online, out of the dusty crevices of the more traditional areas.

For communicators and other businesspeople, one of the potentials of this trend lies in the social developments and qualities associated with it. For borrowers, the benefit of this method over more traditional money-lending services is that they'll generally find lower lending rates than traditional methods, and for lenders  there's the chance to feel a slight philanthropic twinge when they help out someone in need. From the RedEye:

"The opportunities for social connection appeal to users, said Prosper co-founder and CEO Chris Larsen. Borrowers can appeal to lenders to look past a couple of late payments or spotty credit history, while lenders enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their money help someone in need."

I'm not saying it could happen even in the next year, but surely there's a chance for such an application to be built into sites like The Communicators' Network or Facebook at some time in the future? Ie. I think, from checking out your profile, you seem like someone I can trust. Fancy one of our reports? Well, how about we swap it for one of your webinars - type of thing? Anyone think it'll catch on or could it fall victim to shock stories on the Hub news  of broken communicators' television sets from bailiffs being called in for unpaid loans?

Soundtrack to the blog: Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) by Pet Shop Boys.