Business Model Mapping: A Social Lending Case Study And Preliminary Work

Transformation in the financial industry as a result of the financial crises, changing customer behaviors, constant innovations based on information technology, the Internet, and financing services offered by non-banks is here to stay. Web 2.0 or Social Web further redefined the ways users enlist for services. It is now easy to be influenced to make choices of services based on recommendations of friends and popularity amongst peers. Information technology is leveling the playing field for new participants, who are capable of causing disruptive changes, in every industry. These inter-playing reasons have led to the critical reception of nontraditional peer-to-peer financing models to counter the effects of the rigid lending practices of conventional banking. Lenders can now pool their resources together online and make them available as loans at a premium to borrowers who need it. This increases the efficiency of the financing process by reducing the rigor experienced from traditional banking. Little is known about peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. This paper maps the value chain activity of the peer lending space and identifies future work with respective implementation using agents