Howdy again!  (I think I met you personally in Tokyo if I&#x27;m mapping nicks to names correctly.)<p>Does it make a little more sense if you consider this decision as being generated by two separate entities?  For marketing purposes, that loan appears to be originated by Paypal, but it actually comes from Webbank in Utah.  They are one of the more tech-forward companies which actually has a banking license.  It&#x27;s tough to tell externally which tail is wagging which dog, but I&#x27;d bet you that a) Paypal the low-margin-fraud-kills-us AI company is institutionally very, very risk averse but b) Webbank is primarily thinking of not your business model but rather your existence in a pool of pre-vetted credit risks, and their risk model says &quot;Approved without further need for clarification; this is probabilistically profitable.&quot;<p>(To the extent that a bank would view Paypal having a reserve against your account as a plus or minus in deciding to grant you a loan: it&#x27;s <i>an obvious plus</i>, right?  Heads you pay them back; tails they have recourse against an identifiable pile of money sitting at an affiliated entity!)<p>Assuming that the monetary terms they offered you were roughly in line with what Paypal offered me back in the day: they make <i>substantially</i> more money lending to you than Paypal does through payment services (one&#x27;s expensive, risky to them, and cheap to you; one is inexpensive, not terribly risky to them, and not terribly cheap to you).<p>It doesn&#x27;t change the analysis much if you think of it as two groups with competing imperatives within Paypal, either.  (And who knows, perhaps Webbank has substantially delegated decisionmaking authority to a model developed by Paypal.  I&#x27;d bet somewhere in the midpoint -- Paypal provided a model, Webbank agreed to robostamp most loans consistent with the model insofar as regulations allow them to do so, and then Webbank got Paypal to agree that if performance across the pool was below $FOO then Paypal would pay Webbank $BAR.)