ABSTRACT
Consumption communities, collaborative consumption, collaborative marketplaces, peer-to-peer markets, sharing, and the access economy, these are some of the hottest buzzwords in the marketplace, powered by a wave of consumer-driven trends toward a new way of consuming. Credit unions have continued in a member-to-member, collaborative financial model that is, in light of the access economy people see today, extremely far-sighted. Collaborative consumption takes place in social networks where value is added in synchronous, as well as asynchronous sequential, collaboration. Credit unions were founded to aggregate financial resources among those with little capital, in order to collectively buy prohibitively expensive farm equipment in the 1800s. Members of the focus groups actively considered innovative products and services for the shared access economy. The following collaborative multi-family/multi-generational financial instruments were put forth as potentially feasible and important in this new sharing economy: mortgages, insurance, car purchases, savings accounts, vacation destinations, and loans.
