Articles by deBanked Staff
Book Your Room for Broker Fair 2025 – NYC – May 19
March 21, 2025Book your room at ModernHaus located in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan using our special link. The pre-show party will be on the hotel’s rooftop bar JIMMY. The conference itself is just blocks away at Tribeca 360. To register for the pre-show and/or the conference, click here.
For any questions, email events@debanked.com or call 917-722-0808.
$312M of COVID-era SBA Loans Went to Children-Owned Businesses?
March 10, 2025According to the Department of Government Efficiency, the SBA funded 5,593 loans for $312M to businesses during 2020-2021 where the only listed owner was 11 years-old or younger.
“While it is possible to have business arrangements where this is legal, that is highly unlikely for these 5,593 loans, as they all also used an SSN with the incorrect name,” the Department states.
As previously reported, $333M was also funded to business owners older than 115 years-old. That extreme shenanigans took place during the covid era, particularly with respect to PPP and EIDL, is not new information. What DOGE is revealing, however, is that some fraud should have been detected at the time.
COVID-EIDL chargeoffs had already exceeded $70B by end of FY 2024.
Top Online Small Business Lenders of 2024
March 7, 2025Below is a list of the top online small business lenders in 2024 for those that disclose their data:
| Company | 2024 Origination Volume |
| Square Loans | $5.7B |
| Enova | $3.98B |
| Bankers Healthcare Group | $3.7B |
| Shopify Capital | $3B |
| PayPal | $3B |
| QuickBooks Capital | $1.8B |
| North Mill Equipment Finance | $654M |
Bankers Healthcare Group Originates $1.16B in Q4 2024
March 7, 2025Bankers Healthcare Group, which is 49% owned by Pinnacle Financial Partners, originated $1.16B in loans in Q4 2024. That’s a combination of both commercial and consumer loans.
“There remains great demand for BHG paper both in the community bank network and Wall Street,” said Pinnacle CFO Harold Carpenter during the earnings call. “As to production, we need to emphasize BHG has not expanded its credit box at all. It began restricting its credit appetite in late ’22 and early ’23 and has not adjusted its credit box for consumer or commercial credit since that time.”
OppFi: Bitty to Disrupt the SMB Financing Space
March 5, 2025
OppFi continues to like what they see with its investment in Bitty. During the Q4 earnings call this morning, CEO Todd Schwartz gave the latest update on that relationship.
“As you may recall, Bitty was our first outside investment in the small business financing space,” Schwartz said. “Similar to our consumer business, we continue to see a large supply demand imbalance in the working capital space for small business. Bitty has experienced significant growth and we believe it will continue to provide profitability and cash flow to OppFi in 2025. We are excited to continue working with Bitty as they seek to disrupt the space with best-in-class products, modeling, and servicing.”
OppFi says that with the amount of cash it has on hand, it may decide to make an investment in another company similar to Bitty but that it was currently looking at a menu of options, including the possibility of share buybacks.
Bitty recently updated its logo and website.
Thousands of PPP & EIDL Loans Went to Business Owners Older Than 115 Years Old
March 5, 2025
According to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), 3,095 SBA loans issued during the 2020-2021 covid era went to businesses where the owner was recorded as being older than 115 years old. The oldest person living in the US currently is only 114. Overall, this amounted to $333M deployed. No additional details were shared on the loans. The DOGE website mostly just embeds tweets made on X.
That shenanigans occurred during the PPP & EIDL covid era is nothing new. As of FY 2024, for example, the SBA had already written off $70B in covid EIDL loans alone. What’s new with the above information is perhaps how cross-checking may have easily prevented some of the obvious fraud.
Connecticut General Assembly Banking Committee Discusses Prejudgment Remedies and MCA
March 4, 2025The scheduled hearing on Connecticut Bill 1093 as it pertains to Ex Parte Prejudgment Remedies for Merchant Cash Advances took place this morning, the discussion of which was broadcast live.
It’s the very first bill discussed in this video below. I’d make the video start where the discussion starts but at present it is still being streamed live and won’t let me do that. Watch below:
NerdWallet: Still Pressure in SMB Loan Originations
March 2, 2025NerdWallet’s CEO Tim Chen explained during the company’s Q4 earnings call that headwinds across both consumer and SMB lending have not let up.
“We continue to see pressure in SMB loan originations with rates remaining elevated and underwriting remaining tight, while also seeing increased pressure in our renewals portfolio as the 10-year rates reversed course and began to climb,” he said.
NerdWallet originates borrowers through the internet, a significant portion of which comes from organic search traffic. That organic traffic dipped about a year ago after changes to Google’s algorithm but has been recovering over the last two quarters for SMB loans. During the earning’s call, one analyst, Ralph Schackart of William Blair & Company LLC, had a question about the continued reliance on that channel given the rise of competing AI chat assistants.
“I guess as you are sitting here today and sort of operating this business, obviously for a while here, how different do you think these changes are to the business with AI overviews?” Schackart asked. “And some digital buyers are saying that the ads that are generated from Gen-AI are actually performing better than some of the organic results. Just kind of curious, what’s your confidence that this is something you’ll be able to navigate longer term versus your previous history? ”
This was Chen’s response:
“I’ll split it up between kind of the shorter-term stuff we’re seeing and longer-term thoughts. I mean in the near term, there’s two drivers here. Which is, one is more ads and modules on top of the search results. And the other factor is rank. Where in the very recent past, financial institutions and some government websites are winning in some areas where they traditionally haven’t, which as I’ve alluded to in past calls, is a bit of a head scratcher when considering consumer intent.
We do think this period of frenetic testing will eventually stabilize, and when that happens, it should play to our favor. Longer term, I do think that it’s important to look at broader industry trends. First, AI search engines or chatbots, are they taking share from traditional search engines?
I mean from what we can tell, not really. If you look top-down, more people are using search engines than they did last year, but you also see triple-digit growth in AI usage. Which says to me that people are basically just asking more questions that they weren’t asking before. And second, the things like AI overviews, how is that affecting the ecosystem?
So I know we’re not focusing on MUUs operationally, but it’s helpful to understand that if simple questions have simple answers, and if a search engine can serve that up in a faster way that consumers prefer, then that’s good for the ecosystem.
And for us, we’re seeing these features do a really good job of answering simple educational questions, and that’s affecting traffic to some of our noncommercial pages. That has not been the case yet for our monetizing pages, which are fundamentally just a little more complicated.
Like if you need to shop for a mortgage for instance, you really need to go through a marketplace experience. So yes, on balance, we think that this period of frenetic testing will stabilize. We’ve seen a few things like this in the past, and we can grow from there.”
