In this article, we explain how the sharing economy will need a compliance solution for standards and accountability.
TL;DR
– The sharing economy is expected to capture at least 20% of traditional markets in the coming years.
– With assets being consistently shared, meeting standards and tracking accountability will be paramount.
– Our current compliance platform, Compliance Checkpoint, can quickly meet this need.
Uber. Airbnb. Lime scooters. The sharing economy is growing at a good pace, and current estimates say that it will represent 20% of the traditional markets it’s disrupting in the coming years. Of course, that could be a very conservative estimate. When CDs made records and cassettes obsolete, who would have guessed that within two short decades all forms of hard media would be outdated, replaced by online streaming? Twenty years ago mobile phones were still a novelty for most. Today the saturation of that market is a given.
When sharing starts seriously competing with ownership or perhaps overtaking it, a serious compliance-related issue will need to be addressed and solved – the aspect of an item or asset meeting standards before a user takes possession of it and when it’s turned back in or passed on to the next user. The perfect example of this issue is shown by the introduction of CarBar, a new startup which serves as a sharing economy replacement for buying and leasing vehicles. CarBar customers pay a weekly subscription and choose any of the 600-plus models in stock to drive as they need, then turn it back in when they don’t need it. They forecast that within the next five years people won’t buy or lease vehicles anymore – they will share them through services like theirs.
Each vehicle in this type of situation will need to go through a check-in and check-out process to make sure that it is in the expected condition and so that any potential issues are attributed to the correct party. Just as the CarBar example illustrates the need for such a system across all sharing economy industries, it also provides the genesis for a better-developed system when looking at current car rental practices, which requires a physical examination of each vehicle and a paper checklist for recording the results.
Of course, paper-copy checklists are quickly going the way of the cassette and CD, so a digital solution is needed. Our Compliance Checkpoint software has been providing the answer for years, in the form of a compliance platform that can be used by any and every participant in business, including supply chain participants and other third-party interests. We see our Compliance Checkpoint solution as easily adaptable to enable both asset owners and shared economy participants the opportunity to perform all these checks in a single platform in real time.
Compliance Experts provide clients with access to the Compliance Checkpoint Software Technology, which is complemented by our Professional Auditing and Consulting services. This is our unique point of difference. To learn more, visit our website or download the 30 Day Free Trial of Compliance Checkpoint.
