Hace unos días atendimos a France24, el canal francés de noticias 24h que emite para todo el mundo y que cuenta con ediciones en inglés, francés y árabe. Querían saber qué ofrecía Partizipa en estos "tiempos revueltos" y resultó una conversación muy agradable de más de una hora con Adeline PERCEPT y Clément PERROUAULT (corresponsales en Madrid de este canal).
El resultado (no os preocupéis, dura mucho menos) lo podéis encontrar en el siguiente enlace.
Os dejamos el texto íntegro que aparece junto al video:
In Spain, as a result of the economic crisis, bank loans to families plummeted 95 percent in the third quarter of 2008. The credit tap is closed. Nonetheless, some see an opportunity. The founders of Partizipa.com are in the process of creating a new kind of loan system, one between individuals.
Everything in this scheme is done on the Internet, within a web community in which each person describes his or her tastes, ideas and projects. Then each individual borrows or lends money according to his or her affinity with other members. "This would be a community similar to that of Facebook. It will be a community of people among which money can be loaned with the only objective being to help one another", says Juan José Martinez, co-founder of Partizipa.com.
According to his colleague Agustin Cardenas, "in an internet community, you join a group because you see that someone you trust has joined this particular group or other people tell you about it. That's exactly the kind of model that we want to get up and running."
In the same spirit, clients of Caja Navarra, a Spanish savings bank, can choose to put aside a portion of their money to help borrowers buy a home, for example. This is how David Armendariz, a chemist and father of three, has borrowed the money to buy an apartment under construction in a suburb of Pamplona. Less and less people are buying new homes like these in Spain, and very few people are taking out loans. David has taken the plunge, and he enjoys one advantage: an interest rate of 0.6 percent below market rates: "This is all because some of my loan comes from people who have decided that their money benefits others who, like me, buy an officially subsidised home", he says.
Even though those who put their money into this scheme may earn less than with other investments, this type of loan will be more and more common in Spain, according to the financial institutions involved. "We have already received 94 million euros ofr this type of loan; that's from a total of 23,000 clients who have decided to do this with their funds," says Juan-Carlos Esquiroz, Head of Caja Navarra in the Madrid region. "We believe that this type of financing will definitely develop, because this is a time when our clients, and people in general, want to take part in it."
The founders of partizipa.com are banking on the values of trust and solidarity within Spanish society. In order to ride the crisis and ensure a profitable business, their challenge is to attract, with these values, enough lenders.
