In order to reveal how crowdfunding is different from mainstream finance, we first need to say something about the typical ways in which people understand and use their money. Since most people believe they cannot be trusted with money and so lack confidence when it comes to finance – a convenient story to tell people if you are running the financial system – it’s important to begin our journey in familiar territory. After all, it is still the case that the average school leaver in the UK will have spent longer studying the mechanics of sexual reproduction than they will the workings of financial services products. Many young adults leave full-time education in the mistaken belief that a ‘credit’ card is somehow preferable to a ‘debit’ card – and who can blame them, when ‘credit’ is something that school teaches them to pursue, and ‘debit’ looks rather too much like the word ‘debt’ to be immediately reassuring. This confusion of a means of immediate payment with the idea of personal debt (actually acquired through using a credit card) does little to instil confidence.
This point is exaggerated along gender lines too. As we saw in Chapter One, women have been frequently positioned by mainstream finance as too emotional or irrational to be eligible for access to mainstream products like current and savings accounts. In a 2015 study by Abundance Investment, however, when investors were asked a question about the effects of inflation, or the risk of loss to housing equity from a drop in house prices, it was male respondents who were frequently mistaken in their calculations. Female respondents were far more likely to admit they didn’t know the answer, and so only to select responses that they were relatively certain about. What this small study shows is that despite the assumptions of mainstream financial institutions, men are more likely to be ‘confidently wrong’ and women to be ‘cautiously right’, which perhaps hints that one of the main problems we face is who currently runs finance and who typically invests their money.
For the purposes of understanding where crowdfunding and P2P finance fits into our story, next we define some of the basic building blocks of the modern ‘consumer’ experience of money and finance.
