A Digital Chicago Plan: How Social Media Will Change Banking

The Chicago Plan, one of the most important ideas to emerge from the Great Depression of the 1930s, sought to abolish banks as we know them. The plan, promoted by a group of economists including Irving Fisher, pushed for all customer deposits to be backed by reserves at the central bank. Something closely resembling the plan is now in place, but not in a way anyone could have predicted. The ambitions of the model are reflected on the balance sheet of Monzo, a small UK fintech start-up, which aims to use deposits in a very different way to conventional banks.