Margareta Pagano:
Crowdfunding carries torch for shadow banking
Former banker Simon Dixon, founder of BankToTheFuture,
which has raised £250,000 for five small businesses, says the last thing he and
his crowdfunding peers want to do is cut off their new sources of finance. There
are signs the Financial Services Authority is becoming more pro-active and, at
present, only a platform offering collective investment schemes – shares for
money – have to be authorised.
It is too early to tell whether Nesta’s UK estimate of
£15bn a year will ever become a reality. But industry supporters warn
regulators that they should tread carefully if they do not want to choke off
this new way of helping transform the economy.
They should certainly drop the high-net worth
box-ticking; they say it is patronising and out of date.
Despite its size, the US market has yet to suffer a single crowd fraud. The
transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook are viewed as by far the best
antidote to cheating.
