Saturday 8 October 2011

The Finance Innovation Lab: Escape to the Country

A few weeks ago a group of wayward individuals met at Waterloo station. We hitched a ride on a train going north into the English wilderness. Bertrand was forward-thinking enough to have brought beers for the journey, a skill he learnt in his 10 years working for Deutsche Bank as a structured equity derivatives trader. Next to him was Ingo. Ingo does things that make my mind hurt, which involves channelling and managing innovation and systems design, in Sweden. Behind me was Neil. He works for the Young Foundation, helping to design things called Social Impact Bonds, ways of allowing private investors to get involved in financing early interventions that might reduce social malladies. He was chatting to David, who specialises in design, and in particular, new means of mapping and visualising the financial sector. Bertrand started talking about social CDOs, and that's when people on the train started to look at us funny. A girl sitting next to me asked me who we were. Um, how do you explain that? We kind of work in finance, but at the same time are trying to disrupt it, alter it, play with it. I gave her my card. "Come to the dark side", I said, "there are cool things going on". Enter the Finance Innovation Lab.


This is me, trying to talk on camera after three days of mind-disruption. We were talking financial reform and innovation, but most of all, the group of 21 of us were all together to discuss and map the potential future strategy and vision for the Finance Lab. The Lab was originally set up to bring people together under the common goal of finding out what a 'financial system that served people and planet looked like'. I'm a comparative newcomer to the group, but in the year or so that I've been hanging around I've seen the fantastic potential the Lab has to connect people, and to promote learning and collaboration. The next challenge though, is how to scale it up to the next level, to bring in new streams of funding, target more people, and incubate more projects. Jen Morgan, Charlotte Millar, Richard Spencer, Rachel Sinha, Tina Santiago, Maria Scordialos, Vanessa Reid and Hendrik Tiesinga set up the frameworks to help us to think about these questions, and then let it run. A particular discussion point concerned the extent to which the Lab should shift from its current role as a facilitating and connecting organisation, to an organisation with a more explicit focus on advocating specific policies. The process of shifting to a more political stance isn't likely to be easy, but that why Chris Hewett has come in to explore the possibilities for 'finance policy for a green economy', with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation, represented at the weekend by Louisa Hooper.

SPOT THE EX-GOLD TRADER
Note the beautiful setting, on the grounds of West Lexham, a fantastic enterprise on an old converted farm. Manager Edmund wants it to be a hub for community empowerment, permaculture, renewable energy and creative solutions for sustainability, so that suited us pretty well. In our crew was Niahm, a whirlwind helping to drive WWF's sustainable food initiative, Tasting the Future - concerned with issues around sustainable food systems. We had Bruce, one of the guys behind peer-to-peer lending site Zopa, and now launching Abundance, a means for retail investors to put their money directly into financing wind farms and solar energy. We had the guys interested in unorthodox monetary systems - including Ben, pushing the boundaries of the monetary reform debate, and Leander, working on nurturing the complementary currency ecosystem. I shared a room in an old piggery with Maxime, representing both France and the socially responsible investment community.

PURE INNOVATION


The Fellowship of the Ning
BERTRAND SHARES HIS FEELINGS
The Finance Innovation Lab is a great space for those looking to get involved in designing a sustainable financial system. The first point of contact for those who are interested in getting involved is the online network hosted by Ning, but the core team is working on setting up a new website with enhanced capabilities. The plans are grand. By 2013, I expect we should own a large part of Canary Wharf. Until then, we get our strength from diversity. It's certainly not just for financialismos. It's for anyone with an interest in sustainability, creative design, systemic thinking, chaos theory, food systems, climate change, social justice, and last but not least, all those who just like causing a little bit of havoc.


THE MAIN REASON TO JOIN THE LAB: HOT GIRLS

6 comments:

  1. Link bankers income tax to unemployment levels.

    This one step will solve the economic growth problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As Mervyn King said, "By far the most effective way of helping SMEs quickly would be to provide incentives for lending by existing banks because they can assess credit risk in a way that no other institution could do in the immediate future."
    I completely agree, however; a disincentive for not lending would work equally well.
    The bankers broke the economy, tax them until it is fixed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unemployment reduction is the reason to push for loans to SME's; it grows the economy - I'm stating the obvious.

    As Mervyn King said in August 2010, "about a million more people are unemployed now compared to before the crisis".

    Set the top-rate of income tax at 10 times the percentage unemployment rate.
    At 2007 levels this would be about 50%
    Currently this would give a top-rate of 81%.
    How's that for an incentive to loan to SME's?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bro, while your comments are interesting, they're not exactly responding to the blog post. Comments welcome, but only if they're on topic please. Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  5. You said, "The Finance Innovation Lab is a great space for those looking to get involved in designing a sustainable financial system."

    Are you saying my proposals do not meet this description?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well the blog post isn't exploring macroeconomic policies, which is what you're writing about. A more appropriate forum for that would be, say, an economics blog

    ReplyDelete