As powerful as the human brain is, it still actually relies on a few simple cheats to get through life efficiently. Things like pattern recognition, deduction and assumption are cheats that mean we don’t have to be constantly re-assessing everything about life every moment of every day … that would get tiring, difficult, and distracting.

We use pattern recognition, deduction and assumption to tell us that after the sun goes down tonight, it will rise tomorrow morning and then travel across the sky and set in the evening. This idea, this set of deductions and assumptions shape our other thoughts and behavior. We live our lives absolutely 100% believing the sun will come up the next day … so much so that we don’t even realize we believe it … it’s just written in to our understanding of the world.

That’s a great example of a paradigm.

So what if one morning you got up and sun HADN’T risen! … what if it just never showed again?!?! That would be a paradigm shift wouldn’t it!

Mind you it’s actually a simple one because it’s just a shift from something that used to happen, to it not happening anymore. A bigger shift would be if one morning you got up and the sun had turned blue! Or next to the sun in the sky there was a giant teapot traveling in parallel. Those would be some very serious paradigm shifts!

The point is that sometimes we are living in a paradigm and we don’t realize it until we are shown that it can be different.

That’s what Branche is doing.

Branche is showing that financial services don’t need to be centered around centralized corporate storefronts like banks or payday loan stores. That even with all the things these types of business’ do differently, when it comes to basic consumer level financial services they have more things in common than not: they exist in the same paradigm!

Here’s a list of their basic features:

1. Brick-and-mortar storefront

2. Manage and store cash (hard currency)

3. Provide customer service

4. Perform identity verification

5. Access pools of money for lending

6. Process cheques through a universal clearinghouse system

7. Utilize point of sale (POS) software tools

8. Ensure secure and safe transactions

There are a couple of interesting things about this list:

- The last 4 items are actually done through simple existing technology

- The 3rd and 4th items can be done by anyone without special training or licensing

- if you have the other 6 items, you don’t need the first 2

Interestingly, those first two things: the brick-and-mortar storefront, and the infrastructure needed for handling cash (along with the staffing costs that go with them), are by far the most expensive part of providing financial services.

So. If items 1 and 2 are the most expensive parts, and items 3 and 4 can be done by almost anyone, and items 5 through 8 are just technology …

(Maybe you can see where I’m going here.)

… then with the right technology, you could create a platform that allows anyone to fulfill items 3 and 4 anywhere, at any time, using electronic payout methods that already exist. You could even go a step further, and instead of getting the liquidity for these services from large single sources like banks or other financial institutions, you could create a system that allows dozens or hundreds or even thousands of individuals to contribute amounts of all different sizes!

When you realize that the current paradigm of “storefronts and cash” is both the biggest root problem with financial services and the easiest thing to change … that’s a fairly significant shift.