Certainly loan officers at traditional banks are on the chopping block, but are the banks themselves? A confluence of changes in technology and legislation is set to remake lending and borrowing in America, and there are costs and risks embedded in the convenience and opportunity. Maybe the early startups go bust, but the territory is likely to be “settled” sooner or later, much the same way that ridesharing is here to stay regardless of Uber’s fate.

From Zachary Karabell’s lucid WSJ essay:

The most immediate change will be an explosion in peer-to-peer lending. Just as Uber returns us to a world where anyone with a car could offer a ride to anyone with a thumb, peer-to-peer lending is both new and old. Before there was a robust retail and commercial banking system, there were people with money to lend and people who wanted to borrow it. But the current wave of peer-to-peer services takes this much further, into a hypercharged virtual realm where pools of small lenders can combine online to disperse pools of small loans. And they can do it without the friction, cost or heavy regulatory hurdles of traditional banking.

There are already many players in this field, such as Lending Club and Prosper, but most are already a decade old—ancient by tech standards. With less than $7 billion in loans in 2014, they are tiny in the multi-trillion-dollar lending world. Now the sector is showing explosive growth. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that it could be a $150 billion business by 2025.

The downside is that peer-to-peer interest rates are higher than at mainstream banks, sometimes well into the teens. The upside is that people who need modest sums (one site caps them at $35,000) can easily obtain funds from small individual lenders looking for a high return. What makes it attractive for lenders is that they can spread their capital over far more loans than any one peer could make to another peer, which reduces their risk.

And the options are proliferating.•