Mutual Credit Services was delighted to give a five minute ’lightning pitch’ at this year’s FinTech North conference in Manchester’s Whitworth Hall, appearing in the FinTech Showcase alongside twelve other up-and-coming and established companies.

The presentation started out by introducing MCS’ work as a leader in the emerging Collaborative Finance scene, adapting powerful tools used by the financial sector in service of SMEs and communities. We see this is offering a novel, network-based lens on the economy, which can provide insights that neither of the two dominant lenses - the ‘atomistic’ view of businesses in isolation, or aggregated statistics collected by government - can provide.

In turn, this enables us to design platforms - like Local Loop Merseyside - that alleviate the systemic issues that afflict local economies, such as chronic over-indebtedness and late payment, whilst boosting the circular economy (an angle that we felt was missing from the panel discussion on green fintech). The presentation illustrated this by explaining our simplest mechanism, loop-clearing, which resolves payment gridlocks and minimises working capital requirements (watch our video to see how it’s done).

The talk finished bang on time with a call-to-action from other fintechs who see themselves as working with network effects - let’s make ’network fintech’ a thing!

The presentation slides are available here - contact us if you’d like a version with speaker notes.