Articles by deBanked Staff

Small Business Administration Upgrades its Business Loan Marketplace

Add the SBA to the list of organizations capitalizing on the popularity of business loan marketplaces. The Administration recently announced the next generation of its Lender Match tool.

“The enhanced Lender Match will provide Americans seeking funding to start and grow their businesses with a simple, online tool that will more effectively match them with the SBA’s competitive lending products and additional offerings from a trusted network of banks and private lenders,” the SBA said.

The updated homepage says that the tool will match applicants with competitive rates and fees while offering unique benefits like lower down payments, flexible overhead requirements, and no collateral needed for some loans.

“Borrowers will now be able to easily view all of their matched lenders in one place, allowing the borrower to find and compare lenders to help them decide where to apply for a loan. The enhanced tool will also verify borrowers and screen for fraud to streamline the process for both lenders and borrowers. Importantly, with Lender Match, small businesses that are not matched to lenders will be connected to the SBA’s local network of free advisors to help them get capital-ready.”

The SBA says that it gets 50,000 requests for capital every month through Lender Match, a platform which now has nearly 1,000 SBA lenders and 257 community-based lenders.

Matching borrowers with lenders is big business right now. In January, for example, SoFi launched its own small business loan marketplace.

Intuit Experiences Big Business Loan Surge

Intuit experienced a significant surge in small business lending activity, according to the company’s most recent earnings report, originating $469M in FY Q2 2024 (which ended Jan 31, 2024) which was up from $279M in FY Q1 2024. That’s a jump of nearly 70%! Intuit makes these loans via Quickbooks Capital through a partnership with WebBank. The increase warranted no mention during the earnings call.

The positive sentiment echoes that of its rivals, including Square Loans and Enova who both just reported their biggest quarters ever for originations.

The Biggest Small Business Funders

Although all of the specific data isn’t entirely available, we’ve compiled a short list of who the largest small business funders were in 2023:

1. Square
2. Enova
3. PayPal
4. Shopify
5. Amazon
6. Intuit
7. Parafin

Illinois State Rep Proposes Database of All Funded Deals

A Representative of the Illinois State legislature has introduced its own version of a commercial financing licensing bill. HB5587, which makes licensing sound like one is consenting to judgment and references the word subpoena 29 times, calls for a state-controlled commercial financing database that would require all licensed providers to upload their deals into it after they’re funded. The bill says that such a database would not be made public but would be used to monitor licensees, prepare industry reports, and to refer instances of illegal activity to law enforcement.

This proposal is aimed at non-bank providers of commercial financing rather than brokers or technology services, and it’s not limited to just loans. For instance, it says that providers would have to include “the amount of the receivables purchase price paid to the recipient and, if different from the purchase price, the amount disbursed to the recipient after any amount deducted or withheld at disbursement, if applicable” when submitting funded deals to the database.

Overall, the database component to this licensing bill somewhat overlaps with what will soon be required at the national level by the CFPB under the small business lending data collection rules. Are you prepared to comply with those rulex already?

This Illinois bill is new. You can read the full thing here.