THE FUTURE CONCEPT OF TRANSACTIONS FOR VISA
“… Whenever you see an unethical banana being sold or given away, you can just post it. People are suddenly so aware.”
- Fredrik Gertten
Thinking about the Future…
The future is a concept that refers to a time that does not exist yet. It is a landscape of possibilities; thinking about it requires us scanning the present environment, understand current trends and think about what we can do with our ideas to achieve the futures we want.
But, how do we actually change or achieve certain future ideas? To do this, we need to take decisions and actions to disrupt and change the way in which things are happening, developing scenarios and creating narratives for the future that can actually inform our today’s actions.
Major disruptive shifts in the area…
Disruptive Technologies // Antique Banking Regulations // Poor Customer Loyalty // Virtual Currencies // Non Financial Institutions Offering Transaction Systems // Peer To Peer Payments And Lendings // Blockchain Technologies // Encrypted Currencies And Databases // Participatory Service Networks // Personal Data Economy // Internet Of Things
Going Bananas!
In December 2002, Nicaragua’s Supreme Court ordered Dow Chemical Co., Shell Chemical Co. and Dole Food Co. to pay $490 million in compensation to 583 Nicaraguan banana workers who have suffered from the effects of using for over more that 3 decades, pesticides that causes sterilization, cancer and birth defects (Adbusters)
Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten stood up to Dole, in a documentary called Bananas!* where he captured the court case between the corporation and a handful of its Nicaraguan laborers. Before the release of the film, Dole corporation tried to stop the project.
Protecting Sweden’s constitutional right to open expression, citizens noisily backed the director’s freedom of speech, a powerful social impact that made the Swedish people started to boycott Dole products. And so it was until a decrease in the demand of bananas occurred in Sweden that the government and corporations started to make big structural changes, questioning their allegiance to Dole products. (Bananasthemovie.com, 2016)
Impact
To understand the effect in the economy of this case, it is necessary to review the IS/LM principles, a macroeconomic model that shows how does the market for economic goods (IS) interacts with the loanable funds market (LM), or money market, and it is represented as a graph in which the IS and LM curve intersect to show the short-run equilibrium between interest rates and output (Investopedia, 2016)
Expanding the product offering
The IS/LM model shows the equilibrium between supply and demand, where prices plays an important role to determine the flow of this equilibrium. But what it doesn’t show this model is the causes that made this changes occur.
Having this frame of work, the question that arises is:
How can we offer a model of transactions that could embrace ethical consumption?
We propose a concept of transactions with an on-demand price fixator, based on an ethical consumption- production pattern to influence decision-making processes and promote fair-trade economies. The transactions will be available and transparent to everyone. People will be able to access to this information freely through different display gadgets.
In this scenario, Visa acts as the supplier of the system and collector/ administrator of the data.
This concept of informed transactions, will contribute to promote conscious consumption, affecting the price of goods and the flow of the energy of the market.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES:
Bananasthemovie.com. (2016). Pesticide lawsuits – a DBCP overview | BANANAS!*. [online] Available at: http://www.bananasthemovie.com/pesticide-lawsuits-%E2%80%93-a-dbcp-overview [Accessed 22 Jun. 2016].
Made in Brunel (2009), Thinking Out Loud: Designing for a Positive Future,, Brunel University
Claropartners.com. (2016). Claro Partners consulting for service design and business innovation » The Rise of the On-Demand Economy. [online] Available at: http://www.claropartners.com/the-rise-of-the-on-demand-economy/ [Accessed 22 Jun. 2016].
Investopidia (2016), ISLM Model Definition [online] Available at: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/islmmodel.asp#ixzz4CFu2HJtd
