But the market for expensive, short term loans, from people who can access and use the internet and/or apps is smaller.
I don't imagine a payday loan customer is thinking about that new financial service option they read about in the paper.
Which increases cost of customer acquisition. Which makes this more of a Palantir market and less of a scalable one.
Square has a much better shot, as pivoting an existing customer relationship seems a much better angle.
I'm not sure if I understood you correctly, so I apologize if I misunderstood.
I would expect American Express--a lending bank--to track more closely with Discover Financial--also a lending bank--rather than Visa or MasterCard, which are card network operators. Visa and MasterCard don't write the actual lines of credit issued to customers; the card-issuing financial institutions (Bank of America, Chase, Your Local Credit Union[tm], and so on) do and the latter carry the loan risk.
American Express and Discover also happen to operate their own card networks and issue card-accessed loans on them. You can get an American Express network card from other banks (like Wells Fargo and Bank of America) and you used to be able to get Discover network cards from other banks but I can't think of a non-debit one off the top of my head at the moment.
From their 10-Q: "Square Capital, which has historically been a significant component of the subscriptions and services revenue, suspended facilitating loans to sellers in the second quarter of 2020, other than PPP loans."