E-pawnshop : investigating the possibility to incorporate the usage of Internet for pawnshop specific processes

The pawnshop industry is a considerable business today. There is an obvious and even growing demand for small short term loans. These kind of loans are something that traditional banks are generally not interested in offering due to high costs to initiate a loan. Pawnbroking is the oldest method of lending money and the way of conduct is virtually still the same. This means that most processes at a pawnshop are manual. Owners of SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises, pawnshops included) often assume that theirbusiness is unique and not fitted for incorporating informational technology such as Internet. This belief often proves to be incorrect making the business less effective andtherefore less competitive. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and, if possible,suggest possible improvements for the pawnshop business. By studying Swedish laws and legislation and examining solutions that a few Swedish pawnshops are using, a detailed description of work processes were made. These were used to create a new and improved work processes focusing on lowering manual workload, in other words reducing the demand for human input and involvement. This research shows that the processes at a pawnshop are actually very fitted for Internet. A big portion of the manual work can be made more effective and in some cases even automatic. These mostly concern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) which is an major part of the workload. An interesting detail that appeared was that the pawnshop business, when deconstructed into processes, was not that unique or complicated as it might seem.Validerat; 20101217 (root