Competitors

Check out this hideous Membership agreement form which Bartercard make you sign (online via Docusign) before you can join their network - it took me a while how to enlarge it and make it a pdf - but most people will not be able to read all the T&Cs because they come up small on the screen and are typeset at about 6pt type! We can do better... I haven't read the full details yet but I bet it contains a few nasty clauses too...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ac60BFa1_Et8CGScLFViqsr-6tmvjuMs

I'm not sure I'm up for giving them my bank details just yet, in order to test their systems... any volunteers!? ;)

the Bartercard form demands you agree that:

I CONFIRM that the Bartercard trading programme and member options have been fully explained and understood by myself/ourselves.

I ACKNOWLEDGE that I have read and/or received Barter Traders Limited, terms and conditions contained in the Rules of the Trading Programme.

That sounds OK - until you realise it is a 57 page PDF!!! https://www.bartercard.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Trading-Rules-Regulations-March-2018.pdf

I/We agree to Barter Traders Limited obtaining from a Credit Reporting Agency which will keep a record of that search and will share that information with
other businesses, a credit report containing personal credit information about me/us in relation to the commercial credit line facility provided by Barter Traders Limited.

I guess that's ok too...

Bartercard will monitor and record information relating to your Bartercard account performance and such records will be made available to credit reference agencies, who will share that information with other businesses in assessing applications for credit and fraud prevention.

So they feed back your trading record to credit agencies!

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All in all it seems very unlikely that anyone who joins Bartercard actually reads the full T&Cs which implies nobody really knows what they are signing up to!

So maybe one of our USPs could be (if we manage to have a short and simple, plain English Membership Agreement) about having more transparent terms than any other credit network.

Very interesting and useful. I am interested to see that they have a two-org approach - the 'Exchange Company' ( which operates what we might call the platform) and a Management Company which administers the operation of the platform. The Manager is explicitly protected from responsibility to Members for the actions of other Members.

good spot - which makes this feel even less co-operative / collaborative... I would hope we can engender more of a feeling of mutual responsibility.

We should be looking at membership agreements of several different trade exchanges. The Bartercard agreement seems to be loaded with legal boilerplate to protect if from its members.
A cooperative trade exchange needs to protect the members from one another.