Google will not be giving out any loans. It has billions of Gmail accounts. If it wanted to get into merchant lending here's what it does:

1. Wait for the SEC to finalize rules regarding the ability for non-accredited investors to purchase securities in businesses.
2. Build a platform. I'm pretty sure one of the thousands of 2 or 3 peson teams they have at Google have one completely built. Google has thousands of products we will never see, who knows, this may be one.
3. Run a beta. It has the largest e-mail list in the world, so they can make an announcement there.
4. Optimize.
5. Launch.
6. Own alternative lending.

I am not so sure that is the play Google is after, but I wouldn't be surprised. I think they're after the data - based on past behavior, but this could be a double whammy.

Google makes a lot of moves, not all of them you can take at face value. Remember their mission is to organize the worlds' information. That's a mission that should take another few lifetimes to accomplish.

Google Ventures is run by Kevin Rose (Founder of Digg). The "first" dot.com golden boy of the late zeroes. The relationship between Google Ventures and Google Inc., is one where Kevin and his team have been charged to separately find, and incubate the best ideas - outside of Google. Kevin Rose doesn't answer to Larry or Sergey. He answers to his own board.

OnDeck are Geniuses.

OnDeck is right not to focus on making a profit from lending money. They were brilliant to spend millions on data scientists. I remember seeing exactly what they saw back in 2009... I didn't have the team, they did.OnDeck gets it. It's not about profit from loans. It's about the data. They knew they would have a paying customer for their data before they started their journey. Furthermore, Google would not risk it's own money.

MCA is sitting on a Gold mine... Those little pieces of paper you collect through yoru fax machine allow you to aggregate data that Google, Facebook, etc would salivate over... Those little pieces of paper you collect through the fax machine allow you to sort, analyze, and innovate.

Google is to be taken seriously but never at face value. Remember Google 411 - late 90's / early 2000's? They didn't launch that product to help you find phone numbers. They launched it to get voice data to make its' speech recognition technology work better. Huge and successful tech companies are always "head faking" their way to domination... These guys are billionaires. Billionaires do billionaire things.

Random though: OnDeck is probably one of the very few companies positioned to dominate direct (snail) mail. If you know who you should be mailing things to, and when, it's easy.