I performed a presentation about « Crowdfunding for SME » (Small and Medium Enterprise) at the EFMA Retail Credit Conference, 20-21 june 2013 in Amsterdam.
I have shared it on slideshare (see below)
My main conclusions :
- Crowdfunding is a very attractive service with a high level of involvement, interaction and virality from client and very differenciated from traditional financial products
- Non financial involvements are also important and interesting than funding (you can build crowdfunding service without funding or with a traditional funding separated from crowdfunding)
- There are multiple models of crowdfunding mainly determined by the project amount requested and the average funder amount (« ticket ») defining 2 kinds of community (Ad hoc community (Social Media) vs recurrent structured funding community)
- Regulation is an issue but not a problem (except if you are a bank with a one to one relationship with the regulator)
- Crowdfunding is much more complementary than competition for traditional bank
- bank underserved segments
- can be « packaged » to be retailed by traditional banks
- Best way for a bank to enter into crowdfunding is partnership with startups or domain specialists « because it’s complicated » and to speed learning curve.