The Third Age of Credit
Originally @ TechCrunch Society is beginning to wake up to a tremendous shift in one of the most fundamental underpinnings to how we live our lives: the credit system. Even though it’s not commonly known, credit infrastructure has existed about as long as civilization itself. In one way or another, credit systems have always formalized the one essential basis for relationships between people: trust. Over millennia, the way credit looks, feels and is used has changed dramatically. Today, buoyed by a plethora of technologies and a golden age for abundant data, credit is undergoing its most radical change yet. But it is being pulled in many directions by competing forces, each with their own vision for the future. In the beginning, credit was highly personal and subjective — this persisted for thousands of years. Over the last century, a miracle happened: Driven mostly by statistical modeli...