Should I Be a For-Profit or Non-Profit

You have much deeper questions than corporate organization. Making loans is covered by many different laws and regulations, depending on where you live, and there's a lot of compliance rules to follow.

You need to talk with a compliance expert, who will probably be able to answer your question about how corporate governance figures into that. It has much less to do with "profits" as such, and more about who is going to be in charge and how they get to be in charge.

Those people are responsible for determining where the money goes, something that regulators are very concerned about once you get past tiny amounts of money. Getting that right from the start is going to help, and that's going to mean talking to a lawyer. Ideally, you'll have somebody on the board with some expertise in compliance.