LendIt Conference 2017: Upstart's CEO Dave Girouard Talks Millenial Loans Market

Girouard: With a third of our management team from Google, we're the first consumer platform to leverage machine learning and modern technology to power our platform. A lot of other lenders give lip service to being technology companies when they're really finance companies who hired a few Web developers. We're the real deal when it comes to data science and technology. We have a team of data scientists who are predominantly math and statistics PhDs - they don't come from traditional credit modeling backgrounds. If you looked inside 99% of lenders, you would see fairly simple modeling techniques that amount to look-up tables, or at best simple linear regression.