Fine. Triangulate the truth with multiple independent viewpoints. I think my point stands that reputational risk of platforms isn't enough.
One potential problem that I could see with this is the background of the independent view points. There are a lot of people involved in this space who haven't actually had any interaction with traditional lenders (both inside and outside of LC). Sometimes the presence of data can fool us into thinking we know something much better than we actually do. This is why I expect the business loans and potentially subprime loans to be a train wreck for LC -- of all credit, prime consumer credit is a easy to actually know from the data. But maybe LC has staffed up with people experienced in those matters -- I'm doubt the average investor (even institutional) will get it right if LC puts garbage up for investment.
This was one of the problems with the toxic mortgages mentioned earlier. Because the historical dataset said everything would be fine and people involved didn't realize it was a reflexive relationship between the inputs and outputs. But I'm sure if some of those people had actually visited the people making the loans, they would have realized no matter what the data said something was awry.
One thing people are ignoring is that for consumer credit, FICO would be something similar to a third party review although incomplete.
