
Wonga: How the Net Should Kill the Finance Industry - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/20/wonga-how-the-net-should-kill-the-finance-industry/
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dart
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.

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Dilpil
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.

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crux_
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.)

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ggchappell
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.

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BrentRitterbeck
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.

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TrevorJ
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.

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dmillar
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.

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nradov
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.

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dmillar
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.

