Italian Venture Incubator Digital Magics, through its controlled incubator 56CUBE, has acquired a 12 pct stake in Cambiomerci.com, the Milan-based startup operating an online barter platform specialized on a corporate barter systems, allowing companies to buy and sell products and services among themselves, without cash transactions, but with a complementary currency.
With this operation, the Digital Magics through its controlled incubator 56CUBE add the startup innovative within its portfolio, and will support Cambiomerci.com with acceleration services of digital business for the development of newborn start-up comoany. 56CUBE will have the chance to climb up to 20% of Cambiomerci.com, based on the achieved results.
The web platform of Cambiomerci.com will be renewed by the technological point of view with innovative tools and features, and its new look will also be released in the coming weeks. The two incubators will provide the startup with its proper network of Italian and international relations, with the aim of expanding the circuit Cambiomerci.com with more than 5,000 companies. Cambiomerci.com will strengthen its market position and will be seeking to become the first complementary payment system in Italy, integrating within the traditional payment system and responding to the need to combine the current historical moment of economic crisis with extraordinary opportunities of growth of digital space.
Cambiomerci.com is based on the innovative business model of Barter System and gives the opportunity to member companies to purchase raw materials, semi-finished products and services from other companies, paying with their products and services. On www.cambiomerci.com all can be exchanged in a logic of multilateralism: who sells gets complementary currencies that can be used for purchases to be made in later times, and not necessarily with the same company with which the exchange took place, but only with the companies that offer what you need. The mechanism, guaranteed by the expiration of receivables and payables, allows both to get the goods in the absence of liquidity and to dispose of stocks by avoiding the use of debt.
In July 2014 Cambiomerci.com was chosen by the University of Liverpool as the only Italian realty for the conduction of a research of the Faculty of Business Administration on complementary currency in Italy and its use in the trade business. This year, the startup has received a special mention from the Working Capital Accelerator 2014 program of Telecom Italy. In January 2014 Cambiomerci.com was selected by Confindustria to become a part of AdottUp, the program of the Confederation of Small Industry in the case of start-ups' adoption by SMEs.
BARTER MARKET: 7 BILLION DOLLARS AND 500,000 ENTERPRISES IN THE USA
The business model of the Barter System is based on the European system of the Swiss WIR Bank, founded in 1934 as a result of the global economic crisis erupted in 1929. The idea of this economic circle was to counter the lack of liquidity resulting from overproduction, using a kind of business and operating barter without recourse to cash. About 80 years after its foundation, in 2013 there are more than 50,000 small and medium enterprises that have joined the WIR clearing system, and have achieved 1.43 billion francs as transactions [1].
Globally, the Barter market is quite divided in the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and Europe, and does not count a leading operator. According to estimates of IRTA (International Reciprocal Trade Association) - an association that brings together the leading global players in the Barter space - every year Barter System records between 12 and 14 billion transactions [2], and the sector of complementary currency is estimated to be between 1% and 5% of the entire market.
In the U.S. alone every year estimates records 7 billion dollars of transactions and 500,000 companies involved [3].
[1] Source: WIRPLUS, Official magazine of the WIR bank, April 2014.
[2] Includes all the data of Corporate Barter, Barter, trades, WIR and organizations of complementary currency.
[3] Fonte: Annual IRTA Convention, September 2013.
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