A few months ago I sold my car. Nothing fancy – just a small VW Polo I’d bought to tootle around in. But after crunching some numbers I realised I was paying two times more per mile to run it than to use Uber, so I put it up for sale.
It turned out to be a useful experience. For a start, I made money on the trade. Even though I’d added to its mileage (and scuffed its hubcaps) I sold the car for more than I’d bought it. Some of that was attributable to unusually high used car price inflation. Some was due to subsidies I creamed off dealers at both ends of the trade. These were unicorn start-ups with a mission to disrupt the used car market, each of them eager to bolster sales numbers ahead of their next funding round.
More fundamentally though – and to the subject of this piece – the sales process demonstrated the economic power unleashed by real-time bank payments. To sell the car, I used the services of a unicorn startup whose online marketplace matches retail sellers with professiona…