Every thursday, in Paris (and in many cities in the world), entrepreneurs are discussing about their projects around cups of coffee. Informal sessions: great moments to network, share experiments, challenge ideas and build new projects. (In Paris, the group is organised on FaceBook, with more of 850 members).

Open Coffee : nice talk about finance2. (from left to right : Georges, Julien, Jean-Christophe, Olivier = me :), première mise en ligne par danone.communities

I had the pleasure to talk with Jean-Christophe Capelli about new formq of micro-financing through the web. Web2.0 trends are infiltrating different sectors... banking too. We had, then, an interesting conversation about initiatives as Prosper, Zopa, MicroPlace, Kiva and MyC4... new lands for peer to peer micro-credit. Thanks to these websites, people from one side of the planet could lend money to others, who have projects, on the other side of the globe… all in few clicks of a mouse.

A new form of disintermediation, enhancing people to create value, horizontally, with people. For sure, @ danone.communities we are very interested in this kind of financing. With IDEAM, we have been pioneers in Socially Responsible Investment with our SICAV… but we are still imaging new ways to reinforce the adhesion of our communities to our projects. (to be continued… if you have any idea about this topic, don’t hesitate to contact us). 

As an example of new ways to finance projects, let’s share here the story of Open Art Gallery. A group of relatives wanted to get some modern art pieces… hard to buy one on his own. Jean-Christophe, Christophe and their friends organised a “tontine”: a loan system from peer to peer. With this system, they will get enough money, on a large period of time, to buy different pieces and share them, month to month, inside their community. You could find a picture of their first beautiful investment here. Behind this trivial example, Jean-Christophe is working on real laboratories for new forms of loans. He started with La Tontine des Bloggers… be very active to initiate and develop BarcCampBank (participative conference about the banking sector). It is only a beginning… Let's discover (sorry in french) the new perspectives of finance throught the web2.0 :