BOUNTY HUNTER'S CREDIT UNION
Was wondering how a bounty hunter would collect his prize in the OTU. If he had to go back to the source of the price it might take months to get paid. So a credit union is formed that has branches on various likely worlds where BH can bring back their quarry, D or A, and fill their pockets. Probably it would work like a loan, where the CU would pay the BH 50% then and there, and then pay the rest when the cheque's cleared from the bounty putter, less a fee. They would also be the place to post and check for bounties, and maybe even 'unofficial' ones for some under the counter cash.
SPACER'S GUILD
There's no TAS in the Sol Sphere, or at least probably not Spica Sector. A spacer's guild would be both trade union and social club for the space workers out there; traders, dockers, deckhands, belters, pilots, engineers etc. Maybe have albour disputes with corporations, brawls with non-guild crew.
CORPORATE FREE TRADE ZONE
A big corp from another sector or more likely a group of rich financiers and investors form a syndicate and seek some relativley undeveloped space. They find one or possibly two settled worlds that are close to full development (say TL8-9 with class C ports) and pour money into them; buying media, bribing officialls, building factories, upgrading the starport, eventually controlling the government. They form merchant lines, old starships at first, then ones built on their pet planets, setting up mining camps, new colonies, investing in existing ones, until they could set up their Free Trade Zone (FTZ) around a few systems in a cluster.
This would be a place where only profit mattered. The workers would be paid in a corporate scrip that's worthless outside the FTZ (and no ship crew would accept anyway), so the corps would effectively control the distribution of labour. If they didn't have enough population in the FTZ for developement, they could ship more colonists in (maybe there's a settlers futures market?). Ports and trade would have high levies unless you were part of the corporate club, squeezing out the little guy, and space policed ruthlessly. Despite this the population is mainly happy: lots of consumer goods and 1000s of holochannels, and maybe a resort planet with cheap holidays. Dissent is cracked down on firmly.
This is not normal development, its extremely rapid and unstustainable. Its essentially strip mining a whole area of space, pumping vast sums of capital into the economy, extracting all the wealth, and then abandoning the area after its been burnt out (2-300 years altogether). The syndicate doesn't care as its based offworld; just looking for profit.
I was thinking it could be a bunch of Terran bankers, old Earth patricians, with huge amounts of accumulated wealth, looking to do something with it. Maybe some of them have smelt the way the wind is blowing and may alternatively setting this area up as a bolt hole in case the Rim war goes awry. Plenty of opportunity here for trading, mercenary, smuggling, espionage, crime, resistance cells, corp contracts.
I've no idea whether any of the above coincides/conflicts with canon material, so please let me know if it does.