A half-empty ballroom at the Hilton Hotel was the venue for a discussion about the estimated 30 million working Americans who can't make their pay cheques last to the end of the month. "The Future of Consumer Lending" paired a panel of entrepreneurs with chair Paul Leonard, an advocate for responsible lending. The result was an hour that revealed shocking statistics about levels of personal debt among working Americans, if not a sense that a solution is around the corner.
The most interesting of the panelists was Douglas Merrill, a former chief information officer at Google and Rand Corporation staffer who is now in the business of providing small, "friendly" loans to individuals through his start-up ZestCash. His rhetoric about the social injustices endured by many of his clients – "My borrowers aren't trying to buy flat-screen TVs, they're trying to eat" – was matched by standard-issue Cupertino, California, zeal regarding the power of data and the efficacy of "clear" markets.
Also on the panel were Ryan Gilbert of BillFloat – a company that pays bills directly for clients who then pay it back – and Dana Mauriello, the founder of ProFounder, which is in the slightly different space of crowdsourcing funding for local, small businesses. Each displayed a degree of evangelism about the work they were doing but weren't shy of declaring that they were in business for profit.
As for what was absent from the event, two things stood out: 1) an idea of how much the application of data was really changing the nature of loans to high-risk – that is, broke – customers (Merrill has an algorithm that takes in 150 different criteria, but he wasn't saying which); 2) the sense that proper old-school advocate Leonard, while happy to share a panel with the entrepreneurs, was willing to endorse any of them.
