CRÉSUS STORY

We created this idea of co-construction and ofstarted thinking of building a partnership with banking institutions for supporting over-indebted households in 2008 at the moment of the subprimes crise. During this crisise of over-indebtness, loans had been allocated without verification. The first who ones who are able to detect fragile clients customers are the bankers (at the view ofthanks to the bank overdraft). We cannot waitcannot afford to wait for indebt people to for the public to come to us., Ppeople generally come to us come very late, ly when their situation is already compromised. If banks handle the mission of to detect them early, instead of doing major heavy surgery, we will be able to support them and help them to go away out from theiris situation. An otherAnother observation:, when we help helping someone who is financially fragile to redress the balanceraise the bar, it is also profitable for public authorities.

We then created 27 associations, with 600 volunteers and welcome 130 000 households per year. In 2008 we went further: we wanted to professionalize our actions, and build a national platform at Strasbourg. We started in 2008, it was very hard because you know, working with banks is not easy. They wanted to have results rapidly, but in the social economy sector we look at results from a social perspective. Finally we succeeded, thanks to digital tools, to show that it was relevant to work together.

It is at this moment that we presented our application to the Convergences Award.

It encouraged us, and gave us the will to keep going that way. From the beginning of the project, the Convergences Award encouraged us to pursue our actions as it meant a recognition of the originality of the project and its impact. It helped us value our model: we had 5 partners at the beginning, now we have more than 60 and a waiting list of institutions willing to join us.

What is interesting is the idea of hybridization of social economy towards real economy. At the beginning we were associated to companies’ CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility): banks, institutions, mutual insurance companies prided themselves for their participation to the battle against over-indebtness. Today we are asked for services, to train bank employees, to work on tools, on detection algorithms. We became more and more professional and we share our expertise with other economic agents. The only actor which did not follow us yet is the Government. The Government is undergoing a significant overhaul and faces budget concerns. This is why we built a model that enabled us to develop without public support.

Conciliate technological innovation and ethical values. Not losing our ethic in innovation is essential but also, it is important to remain able to measure our impact, to measure the added value we bring at the economic, human and relational level between citizens and the banks. The most important thing today is that we are able to measure our impact in real time.

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After the failure of the idea of a national credit file in France, we were looking for a project that could become a tool for all citizens. A tool that could calculate a budget in 5 minutes, give daily alerts when there are risks that can have fearsome consequences for households’ budgetary balance. The project will start in January 2018. We will recruit engineers and create a revolutionary application that could be extended to other countries.

Our system will present to households the ideal budget. It will create an expense budget, including electricity and phone bills… It will then calculate what remains and divide it per day, which will allow you to have a real time overview of your budget. The purpose is bring people from passive consumer to active actor. You can for example receive alerts that inform you about a higher energy consumption than usual and that can encourage you to consume less. It will also participate to a greener economy. When you will contract a credit in a bank, you will just have to show to the bank the number of credits you already have. That will prevent you from contracting a new credit that will drive you to over-indebtness and will help you to find other solutions! It is both a tool to tackle over-indebtness and poverty and a very effective tool for a personal budgetary support.

The latest story I have in mind dates back to October 30, during a TV show on LCP. Parliamentarians and a beneficiary from our actions were invited. “Droit de suite” is a TV show that you can replay online and that was preceded by the documentary “Mort à crédit”. I was invited for the debate part of the show. During the discussion, there was a woman I didn’t know because we don’t know all CRÉSUS beneficiaries, but I remember her. She was saying thanks to CRÉSUS explaining how it saved her.

Oh no, it will never be reached. There will always be people who will have difficulties but thanks to our actions, we can see a decrease of the number of over-indebtness files of 10%. The web service project that will be launched in 2018 will strengthen this impact as we will be able to scale up and reach millions of people.

The web platform is the last step. It is an objective tool (not made by the banks nor oriented toward rich people). We want to use it as a universal tool and I think that if we reach a couple million users, these people will be independent. We also have a project in Luxembourg. I hope that by 2040 the project will have extended to other European countries, particularly in countries such as Poland which need structures like ours.