Articles by deBanked Staff
Enova: $1.4B in Small Business Loans in Q3 2025
October 30, 2025Enova continued to set a new internal quarterly record for small business loan originations with $1.4 billion in Q3.
“Since our acquisition of OnDeck five years ago, we’ve not only maintained our strong profit margins, we’ve done so while cutting our consolidated net charge-off rate in half,” said Enova CFO Steven Cunningham during the recent earnings call. Cunningham is scheduled to replace David Fisher in the CEO role this coming January.
Meanwhile, all the major indicators they review continue to show that small businesses are doing well.
“Insights from internal and external sources reflect solid underlying trends for small businesses,” said Fisher. “In conjunction with Ocrolus, we released the eighth iteration of our small business cash flow trend report earlier this week. This offers key insights into the state of small businesses and highlights ongoing trends observed over the past year. Small business confidence is high, as tariffs remain manageable and the economy, and in particular consumer spending, remained strong.”
OppFi: ‘Bitty is a Great Partner’
October 29, 2025Bitty generated $1.4 million in equity income for OppFi in Q3. OppFi, publicly traded, owns a 35% stake in Bitty.
“Bitty is a great partner that we have enjoyed working with and learning from in the SMB space,” said OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz during the company’s Q3 earnings call. “The company shares OppFi’s business principles and corporate values and consistently uses technology to enhance operations and the customer experience. Bitty has identified significant additional growth opportunities and continues to capitalize on the ongoing supply-demand imbalance in the small business revenue-based finance space.”
Overall, OppFi said it had delivered another strong quarter that had outperformed expectations. It raised earnings guidance for the third time this year.
See You in Las Vegas for B2B Finance Expo
October 24, 2025The team is now heading to Las Vegas for B2B Finance Expo. Hopefully you have your ticket already to the two-day conference taking place on Oct 28-29 at the Wynn in collaboration with the SBFA.
Here’s what you need to know:
For Merchants: It’s Not Just Cards vs. Cash Anymore
October 22, 2025
38% of small businesses accept Zelle as a form of payment, according to the latest Small Business Cash Flow Trend Report produced by OnDeck and Ocrolus. 29.2% accept Venmo and 28.6% accept PayPal. Apple Pay / Google Pay and CashApp were right behind them at 22.6% and 16.4% respectively.
These figures emphasize the diversity of payment streams that Main Street has now become accustomed to. Long ago it was simply cash vs. card. 40.1%, however, said that they still don’t accept any alternative payment methods at all.
The survey did not ask if businesses accept Bitcoin or crypto but it could in the future. Block, for example, which owns CashApp, recently began rolling out Bitcoin acceptance tech to all of its Square merchants.
While small businesses have historically been cost conscious about which payment method they prefer to accept payments, 31.6% of those surveyed said they passed their credit card processing fees on to their customers.
See Who’s Speaking at B2B Finance Expo
October 10, 2025See who’s speaking at B2B Finance Expo: Speaker page | Agenda Page
Register Here
People Are Using AI as a Replacement for Search
October 6, 2025It used to always be Google when it came to search, but a recent study shared by OpenAI shows that people are using LLMs in a manner that is very similar to how they used Google.
21.3% of ChatGPT interactions, for example, are about seeking information, 28.3% are about practical guidance, and 7.5% are about technical help.
The data was based on 1.1 million sampled conversations between May 15, 2024 and June 26, 2025.
“While users can seek information and advice from traditional web search engines as well as from ChatGPT, the ability to produce writing, software code, spreadsheets, and other digital products distinguishes generative AI from existing technologies,” the report says. “ChatGPT is also more flexible than web search even for traditional applications like Seeking Information and Practical Guidance, because users receive customized responses (e.g., tailored workout plans, new product ideas, ideas for fantasy football team names) that represent newly generated content or novel modification of user-provided content and follow-up requests.”
ChatGPT’s crossover as a search engine is already going one step further. Last week the company announced that it was partnering with Stripe on in-chat checkout.
“The flow is simple: a ChatGPT user asks for product recommendations in the chat,” Stripe said of it. “When they are ready to buy, they are presented with a Stripe-powered checkout inline in the chat.”
And just as recently, ChatGPT is now also leaning into auto-complete queries, similar to what Google already does.
Typing “line of cred” into a query box, for example, shows “line of credit options for small businesses” as a potential query for the user to choose from.
Revenue Based Financing Continues to Spread at Global Pace
September 30, 2025
Earlier this month, Uber Eats joined the revenue-based financing movement by partnering with Pipe Capital.
Karl Hebert, Vice President of Global Commerce and Financial Services at Uber, said of it, “We are happy to team up with Pipe to bring working capital to Uber Eats. Restaurants are our partners at Uber, and the backbone of our communities, yet many struggle with access to capital.”
It’s an unsurprising step considering rival DoorDash rolled out a merchant cash advance program nearly four years ago, though Uber arguably began experimenting with MCAs nearly ten years ago. And Uber is hardly doing it just to do it. Uber, for example, rolled out Uber Eats Financing, a revenue based financing product in Mexico through a partnership with R2 this past January, which went so well that they also rolled it out in Chile months later.
📢 Announcing a big milestone for R2 & @Uber!
Following a successful launch in Mexico, we’ve expanded our partnership with Uber Eats to Chile — bringing frictionless access to capital to thousands of merchants across the region. https://t.co/61WgP1ZtHy
— Roger Larach (@rogerlarach) April 30, 2025
In Chile with R2, the service is described as taking place entirely within the Uber Eats Manager App with a 5-minute application process and payments made automatically and deducted by a fixed percentage from sales made using the platform.
In the US with Pipe, it says that the Uber Eats App Manager will show capital offers from Pipe that are customized based on restaurant revenue, cash flow, and business performance.
Uber joins Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Intuit, Stripe, DoorDash, PayPal, Square, GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace and others in offering a revenue-based financing product.
Revenue-based financing as a product type is available in but not limited to the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, and more.
Covid EIDLs With Real Estate as Collateral Have Much Lower Default Rate
September 29, 2025369,588 Covid-era EIDL loans valued at $47 billion had been charged off by December 2024, according to a recent report issued by the Office of Inspector General (OIG).
It turns out that collateralizing real estate may have made all the difference in the outcome. For loans over $25,000, for example, the SBA relied on simple blanket liens as collateral. This allowed the agency the right to take possession of the borrower’s assets upon default, such as inventory, equipment, and any other tangible or intangible property owned by a business. If that was supposed to be a deterrent to default, it hasn’t shown considering the raw number of defaults so far.
On loans over $500,000, however, business borrowers were supposedly required to put up real estate as collateral but according to the OIG, they approved the loans regardless. Consequently, of the 58,024 COVID-19 EIDLs exceeding $500,000, only 4,718 were secured with real estate. Only five of those real-estate-backed loans had defaulted as of July 2024. Compare that with the 4,605 loans over $500,000 without real estate as collateral that have already defaulted and been charged off. The difference is clear.
As of July 2024, none of the five defaults with real estate had been foreclosed on yet.
Full OIG Report here.
