Online marketplace that everybody can sell their wares in — not just the select few — set to open as statisticians weigh up the size of the new, peer-to-peer, economy
Officials are waking up to the power of the new, peer-to-peer economy as the Humaniq App opens up online markets to those currently shut out of the opportunities globalisation presents.
The U.K statistics agency, the Office of National Statistics, is to carry out a survey on sharing-economy activities in order to revise its measure of GDP to reflect this currently unaccounted-for exchange, it is reported. The sharing economy is referred to as activity that is facilitated by digital platforms that allows people to share resources, time and skills. Person-to-person marketplaces such as Etsy provide platforms for people to earn from their talents — allowing, the P2P Foundation says, new or fledgling entrepreneurs to quickly “scale up and compete with mega-retailers”. However, currently there is no such levelling effect for many entrepreneurial people in Africa, who often lack banking and identification, and therefore access to platforms necessary to connect to new purchasers.
This is where the Humaniq App comes in. Launched in the Play Store at the start of the month, the app brings verified identities and the ability to make online transactions to the 2bn people around the world who have no access to banking. This is just the start. A planned marketplace in the app would allow everyone with businesses or business ideas to connect with others to sell, collaborate and borrow the necessary capital to invest — as the Humaniq team said at a summer launch in London’s FinTech quarter, to “let the world know they have talent”. The potential impact is huge.
There is growing concern that official figures understate the size of the economy because they fail to capture some activities, The Times reported. Sir Charlie Bean, a former Bank of England deputy governor, has “estimated that growth [in the U.K] could be as much as 0.75 percentage points higher if the data properly picked up the digital industry, which includes the sharing economy”. In other parts of the world, such huge growth in economic activity is staved off because of the barriers to accessing the global market, barriers that cannot be torn down with ‘business as usual’. As the World Bank has suggested, a target for everybody to be financially included by 2020 is a big challenge with current progress.
Those downloading the Humaniq App are encouraged to transact and refer others to the app straight away by the incentive of receiving cryptocurrency, the HMQ coin, for doing so. Upon downloading, the app gives an option to the user to invite contacts that are not already using the app to join the Humaniq community. And once a number of people join, this is when the app gets really interesting.
The app’s Discover API will allow users to locate and match each other and allow users to promote their services on the Humaniq platform: be it for currency exchange, loan services, or even simply a Humaniq community meetup. Such collaborations can get started through the encrypted messaging and voice calls that the app also provides. And payments can be requested or sent simply by selecting a contact, entering a phone number, or with a QR code.
This peer-to-peer offering will allow a community to be created on the Humaniq platform and more value to be exchanged and created — boosting the size of nations’ economies, as the statisticians have already started to realise.
“Sharing economy set for take-off as size of exciting opportunity cited by officials” https://blog.humaniq.co/sharing-economy-set-for-take-off-as-size-of-exciting-opportunity-cited-by-officials-db3dbf2c7054