Out of meltdown comes opportunity. In the aftermath of the financial crisis that gripped the world a decade ago, one of the outcomes was that banks began to dictate strict limits on consumer loans and obtaining funds became about as easy as finding a taxi in rush hour during a downpour. Enter peer-to-peer lending.

As the financial world began its slow recovery, P2P lending rose from the ashes and has become a major player in global capital markets with predictions of $460 billion in extended funding by 2022.

One of the companies that has capitalized on growing consumer interest in P2P is LendingClub Inc. The company has issued $38 billion in loans since its founding in 2007, and the firm has built a sophisticated technology platform on which to evaluate risk and put investors and borrowers together.

“We actually are the nation’s largest personal loan lender in this market space,” said Steven McCaa (pictured), director of infrastructure and end user services at LendingClub, who described the model as connecting people needing loans with others willing to invest in the funding risk. “We provide a marketplace for those two halves to meet.”

McCaa spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the crucial role technology plays in running the company, how Cohesity Inc. provided data backup and recovery solutions to meet LendingClub’s needs, the changing nature of information technology, and McCaa’s decision to run operations using only his phone. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features McCaa as its Guest of the Week.

Algorithms drive lending decisions

Technology has played a critical role in LendingClub’s rise to a position of prominence in the P2P arena. The company uses its own proprietary platform — LendingMatch — to pair supply with demand and evaluate common personal attributes between borrower and investor.

LendingMatch is essentially the firm’s secret sauce. The system relies on algorithms that can weigh a number of key factors, including an investor’s risk tolerance and the borrower’s credit score, to determine a suitable match. Other factors include geography, education and connectedness within social networks.

“We do use a wide variety of the traditional sorts of things that people are familiar with, but we look at things that are a little bit outside the box too,” McCaa explained. “It has a lot more to do with who you are as a person and the type of credit you have had in the past.”

Need for modern data backup

That kind of sophisticated analysis takes data, a lot of data, and constant modeling to account for the myriad possibilities involved in serving over 2 million borrowers and 180,000 investors, as reported by the company in 2017.

The challenge for LendingClub as it grew was to backup a growing number of data-heavy models used to calculate the advanced formulas required for ideal and accurate lending decisions. The company had relied on a legacy backup solution that was state of the art — a decade ago.

“It was time to look outside the box and shake things up a little bit,” McCaa said. “Cohesity is basically our new backup platform.”

An increasingly complicated processing environment motivated LendingClub to seek a solution that could meet demands for data recovery and retention, while improving operational efficiencies with a modern architecture. Working with Cohesity, LendingClub migrated away from its legacy backup system.

Cohesity’s ability to deliver scale-out file and object storage was a key element in LendingClub’s migration strategy. “The competitive differentiator was that file system,” McCaa said. “It has some great capabilities to move data into the cloud, into the Amazon Web Services space.”

Storage era evolves: PC to phone convergence

McCaa has been directing LendingClub’s corporate technology initiatives for nearly three years, but his career includes prior enterprise computing work with Salesforce.com Inc. and Medtronic PLC. He can remember a different storage era going back to a period in the early 2000s when gigabytes represented the promised land.

“Back when I started in IT, I was backing up four-gigabyte hard drives,” McCaa recalled. “Four gigs were awesome. Now my phone is a lot bigger than four gigs.”

Increased computing capacity for today’s smartphones led McCaa to make the decision to surrender his laptop computer entirely. Now he runs LendingClub’s IT operation primarily though his phone.

The notion is not that far-fetched. PC to phone convergence has been evolving over the past several years as the same processors, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, which run smartphones, are now being integrated into new Windows 10 laptops.

“A month ago, I turned my laptop into my desktop support team, and I now run everything off my phone,” McCaa said. “The whole idea of mobile first is kind of like mobile only.”

LendingClub’s saga and McCaa’s role in helping drive the technology to enable P2P lending offers yet another example of how information technology sits at the heart of nearly every enterprise today. Without the ability to store and process data essential to making the right decision in the high stakes world of consumer lending, McCaa’s company wouldn’t last a week.

“I make sure that employees have the tools that they need to do their job on a daily basis,” McCaa said. “I keep busy with making our internal employees happy.”

Watch the entire video interview with McCaa below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE