Kabbage To Be “Relaunched” by Amex End of Q1 Into Q2

American Express was fairly vague about details related to its recently acquired small business lending platform, Kabbage, in its Q4 earnings disclosed last month, but analysts were curious and asked executives for more information on the call.

“As far as Kabbage goes,” said Stephen Squeri, Amex’s CEO, “I think the thing that we’re really excited about is Kabbage is it gives us a platform that we can interact with our small businesses. And so, to be able to go to one platform to not only get a working capital loan, to get a term loan, to have now a business checking account, to be able to have your card product, to do cash flow analysis on the platform, it gives us sort of an all-in-one platform to serve the needs of small businesses, which is why we did that and what we’ve been shooting for over the last couple of years, it was just a very fortuitous time and a very fortuitous acquisition for us. And we’ll be rolling that out end of Q1 into Q2 and continuing to make enhancements on Kabbage. So we’re really excited about it and the opportunities that it brings from a small business perspective.”

Earlier in the call Squeri said that work was already underway “to integrate and relaunch Kabbage’s suite of products.”

In 2019, Kabbage had been among the top 3 online small business lenders in the country. Covid-related stress likely played a factor in their being acquired by Amex in 2020.

Following that, Kabbage co-founder Kathryn Petralia told deBanked: “American Express shares our vision to be an essential partner to small businesses, and we couldn’t be more excited at the opportunity to continue the important work of providing solutions and innovative capabilities that address a range of small business cash flow needs alongside AmEx.”