Shared Interest Society Limited is a fair trade financial co-operative based in the United Kingdom formed in 1990.

[1][2][3][4] The idea that led to Shared Interest was the creation of Mark Gerard Hayes, then an investment banker with 3i, now an academic economist at Cambridge University, who was the first managing director from 1990 to 1999.

[5] The initial £100,000 funding (subsequently repaid) for the launch of the Society came from Traidcraft, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and a similar co-operative established in 1975 in the Netherlands, now called Oikocredit.

Once Shared Interest had reached a capital of £4 million (1994), a planned transition took place to establish its own lending business by the creation of a clearing house with what is now the World Fair Trade Organization, to finance directly fair trade between the Global North and Global South and increasingly within Southern markets themselves.

Its membership is almost entirely composed of UK individuals (some 11,500 in 2018),[6] who invest withdrawable share capital (£43 million in 2019), which is used to provide credit facilities to organisations engaged in fair trade.

Furthermore, a majority of the members of Council are nominated for election by a process of random selection, similar to jury service, in the interests of wider participation.

For example, many months elapse between the sowing of a crop in the tropics and the final purchase by a consumer of a finished product in a European supermarket.