Banking software is outdated and lacks features, because there is tons of red tape involved. It also took the banks decades and probably hundreds of thousands

Banking software is outdated and lacks features, because there is tons of red tape involved. It also took the banks decades and probably hundreds of thousands of man hours to get the software to a level of acceptable security that most likely won't be present in a startup with a handful of employees. As we've seen with Bitcoin, the next new shiny piece of software isn't necessarily better or more secure. I just checked out: https://www.lendup.com/ https://www.lendup.com/ Here was a sample loan: $250, 30 days. With the base interest (which I assume is without any lender checks) it is $43.30 with a 202% APR. It replaces a credit score with another system that essentially does the same thing, which is to evaluate your risk to the lender. It's clever, and might save some time (which has never really been a problem for me when I needed a loan and was poor), but is absolutely not any different than a payday loan place. In fact, here is a random payday loan site I googled: https://www.flashpayday.com https://www.flashpayday.com The APR is in the same range, they just use a different mechanism to determine your credit worthiness, which really makes no difference to the person borrowing the money. "Sasha says perhaps it’ll license its technology to other banks like it planned to pre-pivot." You just got done telling me that banks are evil, so you are going to take your fantastic new technology to continue to enable this behavior? I don't think banks are inherently evil, but this logic just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. "Sasha says he’d walk by it each day whispering under his breath, “you’re going out of business.”" Really? It seems you are doing the same thing. Payday loans actually help the poor. The APR is huge (like on your site), because of the risk involved. There is really no way around this without the lender losing a large percentage of money invested. It's either this, or not getting a loan at all...and when I was in a bad financial time in my life, it saved me until my next paycheck.