LAS VEGAS – The CEOs of Prosper Marketplace, Lending Club, and Social Finance Inc. all spoke to a common theme – preparing for the coming storm and choosing loans for quality, not quantity. JPMorgan Chase has predicted a 60% chance of recession by 2020, and it’s not clear how traumatic an event it will be for the U.S. economy.

But U.S. consumers carrying debt are already beginning to feel the pinch of rising interest rates, which could be good news for lenders whose business is helping consumers consolidate debt.

Alternative lending has grown up. The founders are no longer running the companies (they’re off launching new ventures) and the bruising news cycles of 2016 are in the rearview mirror.

SoFi CEO Anthony Noto, the former COO of Twitter, told CNBC’s Leslie Picker on stage at Money20/20 in Las Vegas that “in a benign environment where interest rates are low, people will take out debt. They don’t realize the true cost of that debt” until rates rise, which they have been for over a year now. A rising rate environment is never a tailwind, he said, even for a company whose business is refinancing debt. Noto joined SoFi in January when founder Mike Cagney left under a cloud of misconduct allegations.

David Kimball, CEO of Prosper, has spent his two years at the helm of the company “strengthening core fundamentals,” he told Bank Innovation. Under Kimball, Prosper has grown “much more conservative,” he said, and not only in choosing borrowers, whose average FICO is now around 720. Prosper has also cut staff from 670 to around 400, and has brought on a more diverse group of investors, “away from hedge funds to a wide dispersed differentiated set of investors,” Kimball said.

Lending Club CEO Scott Sanborn told Bank Innovation that though his company is seeing record loan application volume, up 48% last quarter, loan issuance rose 27%, and the average FICO score rose to around 694. Lending Club is also working on diversifying its investors, 40% of which are banks, Sanborn said. “We have 2.5 million customers,” Sanborn said, referring to borrowers, “which would make us a Top 25 bank.”

David Gilbert, CEO of San Diego-based National Funding, a small business lender, told Bank Innovation the company was “busy as hell,” and that regarding the coming years, “We couldn’t be set up better. We keep adding to our program.” Gilbert, who spoke in early October, had recently announced the acquisition of rival QuickBridge.

Lending Club and Prosper’s product set is tightly focused compared with SoFi’s, though Lending Club now offers an auto loan product, and Sanborn hinted at some proactive financial management tools to come.

Despite the belt-tightening among market leaders, alternative lenders are busy. David Kimball noted that personal loan solicitations by direct mail exceeded credit card offers in the first half of the year.