They loan money to people that have either bad understanding of money, or who no other lender will work with. A lot of their revenue also rely on discretionary spending on consumer goods (the kind of stuff that people stop buying first when things go badly).

They kept getting surprised by how many of their loans go unpaid on top of all that.

So they are lending to the riskiest consumers, and they kept underestimating the risk, though they might have fixed that. The past three quarters they have finally become profitable, but given their portfolio of risky consumer loans that are unsecured, any kind of economic downturn could really hurt them.

They aren’t really on their way out right now, but they are in a dangerous position if, say, some global economic event were to cause a massive economic shock…