Now here’s something pretty unique – Prospero is a sort of peer to peer banking system. You create an account and then can either choose to lend others money by bidding on their requests for loans, or you can borrow money. To help spread the risk of users defaulting on loans you can also band together in consortia to help spread the financial risk across your membership. Consortias also help build a credit history for your members which increases your chances of succesfully getting other users business. This is pretty cool stuff. I’m immediately sure that this will be ripe for abuse in the same way that paypal and ebay have been, but despite this I’m sufficiently interested in trying it that I’ll risk some money on the concept. Anyone interested in joining together in a consortium to spread the risk? We could each put up $100 and see how it goes. Who knows, we could be the next Bank of America. Post in the comments if you want in.

[via Futurismic]

As a brief aside, whoever’s in charge of Prospero’s website has done a fantastic job – clear, helpful infographics and a nice clean style.