With the recent announcement of this fall’s International Reciprocal Trade Association’s 27th Annual Convention, it brought to mind where the industry was a decade ago. In issue #39 of BarterNews we reported on the 17th annual convention.

Some 165 attendees traveled to our northern neighbor’s Mont Gabriel Resort, a one hour drive from Montreal.

Most noteworthy was the members’ unanimous adoption of a proposed Universal Currency (UC) wherein IRTA would oversee and operate a currency for inter-exchange trading. The objective was for barter companies to look at each other as cooperative partners in serving their members with more products and services to their client base.

The idea of a common currency, to be used among exchange owners for inter-exchange trading, never has reached its potential as industry cooperation failed to materialized.

Instead, other organizations (within the commercial barter industry) quickly copied the concept and came out with a similar currency—further solidifying industry fragmentation.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.