Banking and payment technologies are changing quickly and continuously to become more efficient and easier for everybody to use, but the basic way official systems work remains the same. This does not satisfy the expectations of many sectors of society.
Ethical banking cooperatives and democratically run alternative currencies worldwide now face the challenge of benefiting from these technological advances while staying loyal to their own values. As they grow and are able to reach a wider audience, only activists would participate in uncomfortable systems to use, compared to mainstream ones. Now we have the proper tools to broaden the use of these new technologies.
The current tools that are part of the blockchain revolution make it possible to decentralize banking and make it more transparent, so these capacities can be used to recover popular sovereignty in finances, participatory budgeting and money creation.
In order to make these significant improvements happen, it is very important to create economies of scale so as to build shared technologies, integration and services that any local financial cooperative or alternative currency project can use. This is what the Bank of the Commons is about.
The Bank of the Commons’ mission is to facilitate a transition to an ethical post-capitalist space to gradually free us from the control of the current banking system, replacing it by a growing, fair, self-managed system. We want to rethink money and finances as commons.
We intend to build a financial alternative linked to the official banking system, in order to combine both until the new one is strong enough.
This project is for and by the 99%, bringing a breath of fresh air to society in opposition to the murky and opaque world of finances today. Transparency, ethics, self management and the logic of commons are the keys that will let us open the broken safe and escape from the rules of the mainstream banking system.
In order to do so, here are some basic goals we aim for:
To provide payment systems without intermediaries between participants in cooperative and solidarity economy banking.
To provide decentralized technologies to ethical banking and alternative currencies movements.
To interconnect ethical banking and alternative currencies movements with practical tools that simplify their exchanges.
To foster ethical banking and payment possibilities to any part of Europe and progressively to any part of the world.
To re-elaborate the meaning of ‘money creation’, solving the chronic problem of lack of investment both in cooperatives and small scale economies, creating awareness about how money is created and how it can be changed.
You can join the Bank of the Commons and contribute to co-creating this adventure.
Together, let’s shape the world we have in our hearts!
From the website, https://bankofthecommons.coop/vision-and-mission
from FAQs page, https://bankofthecommons.coop/faqs/
Here are some thoughts:
To make it clear that we are changemakers, not just protesters.
To show we have concrete actions to perform, aimed at redressing international finances starting from our own monthly budgets: 5% today, 10% in 2 months, etc.
To become more independent from the mainstream financial system which keeps us in poverty.
To make money useful towards the building of a new kind of society instead of putting it in hands of harmful industries.
To avoid a situation where a few people make huge profits out of my financial transactions.
To participate in the process of money creation and in the decisions to do with how the bank’s money can be invested.