An SMB Financing Brokerage Experiences Strong Growth in a Changing Digital Marketing Era

“You will really have trouble in the long term growing out an SMB financing brokerage if you don’t have a robust digital marketing strategy in place.” That’s what Zack Fiddle, co-founder and CEO of CapFront, told deBanked in early 2023, before the AI revolution swept across the internet. The company has kept up so well, in fact, that it recorded a three-year growth rate of 124%, landing it at No. 2,607 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2026.

“This year we’ve made a big push on strategic partnerships and affiliates for lead acquisition,” Fiddle told deBanked just this month. “If you do some quick Google searches or LLM searches for top business loans and top financing providers, you’ll find us on a lot of those rate comparison chart lists.”

Fiddle said that in previous years, CapFront hadn’t really delved into that style of marketing. More recently, however, the company has gotten into a rhythm of leaning on key relationships with a broader reach than CapFront has on its own—and has been leveraging them with considerable success.

“Obviously AI has come in, it’s really changed the landscape for digital marketing, especially in the SEO space,” he said.

Fiddle is not alone in that observation. Some of the larger online customer aggregators in finance, including publicly traded companies, have reported similar trends over the last 18 months, that traditional online search engines are not as dependable as they used to be.

“Diversification is always really important,” Fiddle said. “We have a number of different strategies beyond affiliate and partnership lead acquisition to try to find the most high quality and diverse leads, and that’s been a main focus for us this year.”

Along the way, they’re using every new technology available.

“Our Claude Cowork bill has definitely increased exponentially over the past few months, but I’ll just say this, I think that it’s allowed us to move significantly faster than we had in prior years,” he said.

For example, a major project initially expected to be completed by the end of the year accelerated to the point that it is now nearly finished.

“Things, are just moving a lot faster and if you have the right people and allocation of resources at your disposal, you can make things happen pretty quickly,” he said.

While there are numerous ways that “AI” is doing “cool and interesting” things at the company, Fiddle volunteered one of the more exotic use cases CapFront has begun rolling out.

“For the sales enablement’s part of it, we’re utilizing our VP of Sales Training’s mind as [a] sales coach.”

It is what it sounds like. They’ve essentially encapsulated a working replica of an employee’s mind into an AI chatbot that anyone at the company can interact with.

“I ran all sorts of tests on this myself and it’s just really cool to see, like I feel like I’m talking to this guy,” Fiddle asserted, as if such capabilities are simply to be expected these days.

The AI VP bot was given access to hundreds of thousands of the company’s sales call transcripts, with the real VP’s feedback and advice on those calls modeled into it. That’s the most basic way to describe it but it’s actually considerably more built out and complex.

“I’m able to do some mental exercises now and spit out some ideas that maybe a couple years ago I had in the back of my mind but I just knew they weren’t really in reach with what we had at our disposal,” Fiddle said. “But now it’s starting to get to the point where I feel like if I can imagine it, I could build it.”

For all the fanfare around technology, Fiddle acknowledges that one thing hasn’t changed: a business owner’s dependence on human interaction to help navigate financing options. CapFront can do everything in its power to make the process as efficient and user-friendly as possible, but there is still a personal side to it.

“You still want to be able to give them access to a human at the end of the day, because human relationships are what drive customer relationships, not self-servicing. I guess for some borrowers, maybe they like that, but I think in my experience, even this year in 2026, the majority of borrowers want to speak to a human.”

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.