ZestCash, a new financial product just came to the market. It is based around short-term lending with a technology-focused, and paperless approach.  ZestCash focuses on ease of payments, and targets consumers with a credit score on the lower end.  Many expectations have been pinned up with this start-up, as the founding team includes Douglas Merill (Ex -CIO Google) and Shawn Budde (Finance guru from Citibank). The essence and strategy of the company were described by the founding team as follows:

“We’re going to use Google-style data analytics to make sure you don’t take a loan you can’t afford,” said Merrill. “We’re going to apply all the technology we learned at Google to loan underwriting, which no one’s ever done before.”

This service might just get the positive response it is looking for, reason being, the tough economic and financial situation prevalent.  ZestCash is setting out to virtualize yet another aspect of the finance industry, putting a more direct spin on a concept that’s been floating across the web for years, from companies like LendingClub.

ZestCash and others like it will also continue to grow demand for the cloud, from an enterprise level, as well as an internal structure shift.  This is in response to consumer needs, which are circling the online sector, following corporate’s just-as-important need to instant access, searchable databases, and an overall more efficient way to deal with the information we have at hand.This is where we see trends emerge around increasing frequencies for mergers and acquisitions, such as the one speculated about Oracle buying EMC.