LendingTree: Small Business Lending in Much Better Position

“…Q2 was a trough in the performance of small business lending, and we did see strong sequential growth,” said Scott Peyree, CEO of LendingTree during the Q3 earnings call. “We are still on the path to getting back to our all-time records of Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, but we are feeling that the industry is in a much better position, and we are tracking to continued growth. As a matter of fact, September and October were our two best SMB concierge sales months since January of this year.”

Concierge sales was a reference to their concierge service where they connect small business owners with an expert that can help them compare loan options. “Using this individualized approach, LendingTree’s SMB concierge service has connected more than 5,000 borrowers with over $300 million of loans in the past year,” Lending Tree’s website states.

LendingTree said that it is focused on driving organic traffic to generate more business and that there is a lot of room to grow it.

“We also feel that there’s a lot of growth just in areas where we’ve arguably been under-indexed compared to our competitors over the last number of years, and that would be social media, which is a massive world of consumers, business development, publishers,” said Peyree. “We’ve been building a lot of ad tech around that over the past nine months, and we’ll probably continue investing even more heavily in that to just really get to have really good platforms and good ad tech where we can go and place our ads and have publishers and partners more easy to work with us. We feel like that’s just a major, like I would almost call it, ‘if you build it, they will come’ situation. We just got to build more of the stuff, onboard more partners, and that will just drive a lot more traffic there as well.”