Wonga: How the Net Should Kill the Finance Industry | Hacker News Reader

Wonga: How the Net Should Kill the Finance Industry

techcrunch.com

17 pointsvaksel11 comments

Wonga seems to be just the payday loans business "on the internet" Consider in contrrast to Zopa (http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/), on the grounds it's more innovative as it fosters disintermediation (or a close facsimile - there is still a cut for Zopa), which gives real benefits to both lenders and borrowers.

The title is overblown, even for TC. The article talks about short term cash loans to individuals- hardly a core component of the finance industry.

1% daily? I don't care how revolutionary techcrunch thinks this is; that number means they are nothing more than a gussied-up payday loan operation -- the vultures of the financial industry food chain.

As usual, the people using this service will end up being those least able to afford it. (e.g.: If you're financially stable enough to have access to one, you can use a credit card to meet the same needs. Many don't start charging interest at all until after 30 days, Wonga's maximum term.)

A noteworthy sentence from the article:

> ... it’s the first time I’m aware of that a bank that has actually aligned its incentives with what’s right for the customer.

Worth thinking about.

The net is nowhere near being able to kill the finance industry. Do you know how hard it is to get data in an immediately usable format without dropping a significant amount of money? There's a lot that can be done in this area in just laying ground work. If I weren't loaded down in student debt and knew how to do more than just writing code that values financial products, I'd gather up two more people and apply to YC.

I'd rather see the net kill the ISP's themselves, or to put it another way, I would rather see more choice when it comes to ISP's.

There are a lot of industries the Net should 'kill.'

Take health care technology for example. At the end of the day electronic medical records are just getting data in/out of a system. The Net, or the web, is great at this. You can make this adequately secure and distributable and scalable across the globe with little or no setup expense.

The key is getting the good-old-boys to except and institute change, and this requires a large effort in educating.

Or realty (buying and selling houses). At least here in the USA it's a complete racket. You simply cannot buy a house without a Realtor (TM). It's disgusting.

This is a great start-up website opportunity (like AutoTrader.com), but I've heard (anecdotally of course) that legal pitfalls abound.

Redfin.com is working to make this a little better, and is already profitable.

Electronic medical records are a lot more complicated than getting data in/out of a system. You also need alerts for new data, query mechanisms, prescription writing, ordering, trending, etc. All all of that functionality needs to be available through a fast and usable UI. None of that is impossible, there are a lot of EMR / EHR products, but building everything and getting all the details right is a huge development effort.

Then if you want to share data across multiple organizations it's an even higher level of complexity. Industry organizations like HL7, HITSP, IHE, and CCHIT are doing good work to decrease interoperability costs. But we're still far from being able to build plug-and-play systems across the whole industry. The US has no central registry of healthcare provider organizations, so in general if you need data on a particular patient you won't even know who to query. And to even be allowed to electronically connect to another organization you need to have a legal contract in place first, either directly or through an umbrella organization.

The good-old-boys network isn't (much) of a problem in healthcare informatics. The real problems are irreducible complexity and legal / political issues.

Notice I said, "at the end of the day." I certainly didn't mean to trivialize the task. Only to say that you can build a web app (and certainly some already exist) the could "kill" the traditional EMR systems. I'm well aware of the complexities involved, but wanted to avoid diluting the topic at hand.

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