What’s awe­some about the Inter­net is how it breaks up monop­o­lis­tic mar­kets where mid­dle­men unfairly gob­ble up out­sized fees, leav­ing us lit­tle choice but to keep pay­ing them. It hap­pened with soft­ware, it hap­pened with music, and it’s hap­pen­ing now with media. But there are a few sec­tors of our econ­omy that have stayed mostly undis­rupted — one of them is banking.

Sure there are com­pa­nies like eTrade that opened up the mar­ket for buy­ing and sell­ing stocks. But it didn’t fun­da­men­tally change the mar­ket that much, it just moved part of it online. The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too con­trolled, too reg­u­lated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit melt­down hit and we saw just how reck­less these so-called safe and reg­u­lated insti­tu­tions were.

The time is right for the Web to unleash its full market-destroying power on the finance world and while I was in the UK I found a com­pany mak­ing a promis­ing start: Wonga.

Now, Wonga would hardly say its role is to upend the world’s finan­cial insti­tu­tions. But it’s one of the most dra­matic exam­ples I’ve seen of a Web com­pany using what the Web does well to remake lending.

Full story at http://www.techcrunch.com

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