yes, i think that's pretty obvious.

For taking on the risk of an unsecured lender, they get a very high interest rate - ~20% a month! That's almost illegal!

That’s the tricky part with interest rates. They have to make sense in gross dollar terms as well as percentages.

That’s why merchant credit card fees are painful for small shops. Ie 3% + 35 cents isn’t so much until your average ticket size is $5 and all of the sudden 10% of your revenue is going to intermediary.

There’s fixed cost associated with moving cash around so that 20% return is likely negative under current infrastructure.

So credit in this case would just be a way for a third party to benefit from the disparity without altering the situation much. That doesn't sound very useful to me.