In Spring 2014 we worked with Consolidated PR and the Payments Council to support the launch of a major new peer-to-peer payments service in the UK, Paym.
Small, informal loans or IOUs are part of our everyday life, and are imbued with a range of different expectations around paying it back; when do you need to pay it back by, or how do you go about chasing money from a friend.
Our research involved a mix of quantitative and qualitative research aimed at uncovering how much money people lent and borrowed informally between family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. In doing so we not only calculated the size of the IOU market in the UK (a whopping £12bn) but also identified the rules of informal lending and borrowing and the impact (positive and negative) it has on people.