Around 2015, online finance was all the rage in China, and I also spent a few years working on a P2P lending platform. I just saw a new project in the crypto space offering a loan product that we could only dream of back then. Basically, they use data from e-commerce platforms to conduct preliminary reviews, then lend to merchants on those platforms (whose payouts take time to come through). Once the money comes in, they deduct the repayment directly from the merchant’s settlement on platforms like Amazon. The money never reaches the merchant—it goes straight toward repayment. It’s practically perfect. Our biggest headache back then was that a company might have great business data, but could already have used that same data to borrow from several institutions at once. The money really would come in eventually, but once it hit the company’s account, it was a race to see who could grab it first.

So I’m curious: @DowProtocol, how exactly do you automatically deduct payments from the platform? Do platforms like Amazon cooperate?