Articles by deBanked Staff
Lending Tree: LLM Referrals Are Very “High-Intent Consumers”
March 3, 2026
During Lending Tree’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Scott Peyree echoed the same conclusion on LLMs that was uttered by rival NerdWallet, that LLM referrals convert better than normal search referrals.
“There are a number of fronts we are working on there,” said Peyree. “There is obviously the SEO front where you are getting referenced by the LLMs, driving consumers to our site. We continue to focus on that and it continues to grow. It is very high-intent consumers, as I have mentioned on previous calls. I would say, materially, it is still a pretty small percentage of our overall consumer base, but it is continuing to grow.”
Lending Tree hinted that there was an opportunity to capture more LLM traffic through paid LLM advertising going forward but that they couldn’t say to what extent yet for 2026.
“Some of the LLMs, ChatGPT being an example, are looking to start testing some advertising, which we are excited about participating in,” Peyree said.
Trigger Leads Law to Go Into Effect March 4, 2026
March 3, 2026On March 4, the national “trigger leads” law will go into effect.
Scott Peyree, the CEO of Lending Tree, recently shared this explanation of trigger leads on the company’s Q4 earnings call.
“For those that do not know the trigger leads, the very basic version of that is when, for example, we develop a lead and sell to our mortgage providers and then they do a hard credit pull to provide a firm offer to the consumers, the credit bureaus will trigger them—this is what they call trigger leads—to sell it off to a bunch of third-party buyers that we have no association with, our clients have no association with.
It is basically saying, ‘hey, this consumer just got a hard pull on their credit from a mortgage company, so maybe you might want to call them.’ It turns into a really horrible consumer experience where they are about to close a mortgage, and then all of a sudden, they are getting another 50 or 60 calls from who knows who. Long story short, Congress passed a bill that basically said that can no longer happen, and that is coming in.”
– Scott Peyree, CEO, Lending Tree
NerdWallet: LLM Referrals Convert Much Better, Licensing Regulations A Barrier to AI Shopping Takeover
March 3, 2026“…in terms of what we’re seeing on our side, the conversion rates on that LLM referral traffic are much higher and growing rapidly,” said NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen during the Q4 earnings call. “People, I think, are searching more both on traditional search engines as well as LLMs.”
NerdWallet had taken a hit on organic search traffic throughout 2025 due to search engines like Google adjusting organic search layouts and rankings but they’ve made up for the lost business by a combination of paid marketing and referrals coming in from AI. Although the AI LLM traffic isn’t enough to replace the loss in organic search traffic, those referrals are said to have a much better conversion rate. The LLMs themselves aren’t a threat to replace the entire shopping experience, however, because of existing regulations.
“I mean I think if you think about the scenario where you’re trying to do some form of agentic shopping or LLMs are trying to get more integrated, there’s kind of 2 obstacles you really need to think about,” said Chen.
So the first is regulatory. For example, you can’t get an insurance quote from someone without an insurance license. And so if you look across, for example, credit, insurance, mortgages and investing, they require licensing where institutions need deterministic and compliant outputs, not probabilistic answers.”
NerdWallet is a platform that connects consumers and SMBs with financial products.
Quickbooks Capital: Another $1.3B Funded to Merchants, Has Protective Moat from AI
March 2, 2026Intuit’s Quickbooks Capital originated $1.3B in business loans to its customers for its fiscal Q2 2026. The number was a repeat of the previous quarter but still puts them on a trajectory to surpass yet another rival (Shopify Capital) on originations in 2026.
Quickbooks users are presented a “button” in their Quickbooks software to obtain funding.
“We are switching that conversation from being a sales pitch to helping address a customer need,” said Intuit CFO Sandeep Singh Aujla during the latest quarterly earnings call. “As an example, our customer could have a payroll due tomorrow, but the invoice is not going to get paid till next week. With a click of a button, they can access the Capital loans. Payroll is done. The employees are paid. Employees are happy. Next week when the customers pay the invoices, the agent automatically pays down the debt.”
When an analyst raised a concern about their partnership with LLMs, Intuit said there was nothing to worry about because their data is not shared with the LLMs.
“Our moat comes from being the core of the flow of funds, whether it is access to capital, whether it is hours worked by the employees, whether it is money flow—that is not being touched by these LLMs,” said Aujla.
BROKER FAIR Returns to New York City – June 1, 2026
March 2, 2026Broker Fair returns to New York City this Spring on June 1, 2026 at The Glasshouse. This will be Broker Fair’s NINTH event since its inception in and it will once again bring together the commercial finance industry from small business lending, merchant cash advance, equipment financing, SBA lending, factoring, tech, legal, and more. As always, brokers PAY less to attend!
Attendees can expect:
- Education
- Inspiration
- Networking
- Many Opportunities
Prosecutors: Industry’s Mystery Fraudster Spent Money on Lavish Lifestyle
February 27, 2026
The suspect in the small business finance industry’s long running mysterious fraud was living large before being arrested in Spain and extradited to the United States. Saul Shalev has been charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft for stealing the identities of merchants, setting up fake loan brokerages, and tricking business owners and funders into funding his personal bank accounts. When the American authorities finally caught up with him, he had been residing in Dubai but vacationing at the Hotel Nobu Barcelona inside a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. That’s where they got him and his laptop with all the evidence.
According to the US Attorney, Shalev rented a Dubai apartment for $18,000/month, was photographed with a $250,000 McLaren 650S, rented yachts, and paid for chauffeured limousines in Paris. Shalev is currently 36 years old. He had been a fugitive from justice even before these charges. He fled the US in 2019 with three pending warrants against him in New Jersey and New York. His fraud scheme against the industry was carried out from abroad.
His alleged fake ISOs include the names Silver Oak Capital Funding, LEM Enterprises, and SpBiz. Authorities obtained a spreadsheet of 27 funders he had compiled on his computer that noted which ones he had already signed up with or “used and abused.”
Shalev is said to have determined which merchants had small business loans and the approximate date in which the loans were obtained through basic public UCC filing data. That was enough to contact those merchants and pretend to be their lender of record and initiate the first step of each scam.
In total, prosecutors believe Shalev fraudulently obtained over $4 million from merchants and funders.
Shalev has made a request to be moved from jail to home detention. Prosecutors have argued, however, that he is a classic case of an imminent flight risk because his dramatic overseas capture was a result of him having fled the law already
“If Shalev is released and flees the country again, it is very unlikely that the many small business owners and employees who suffered as a result of his criminal conduct will ever see justice,” they wrote.
Square Loans: $7 Billion Funded in 2025, Block Lays Off 40% of All Staff Due to AI
February 26, 2026Square Loans finished 2025 with a whopping $7 billion funded to merchants. And just as has been the case previously, payment performance on these loans has been so good that “the amount of loans that were identified as nonperforming loans was immaterial,” according to the year-end report.
Despite Square Loans being the largest originator of online business loans in the country that deBanked tracks, the product is merely a value-add to its parent company’s (Block) merchant processing and point-of-sale business. Block’s year-end figures were overshadowed by the announcement that it was laying off 40% of its staff on the basis that AI has unlocked new efficiencies that no longer require such a high headcount. Layoffs amounted to more than 4,000 employees in a single day.
“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble,” Company CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on X following the news. “Our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”
Biggest Challenge of Low Cost Business Lending: The customers couldn’t distinguish the difference
February 26, 2026In a podcast between Ballard Spahr attorney Alan S. Kaplinsky and Executive Director of the Responsible Business Lending Coalition Louis Caditz-Peck, the latter revealed one of the biggest revelations he had while previously working in the small business lending division of LendingClub. Winning on price doesn’t work if your customers don’t realize your product is actually a lower price.
“[…] part of that strategy [LendingClub] was to be the lowest cost financing that a small business could get online while properly managing risk and be as fast and easy as some of the fastest and easiest financing a business could get online,” said Caditz-Peck. “And what I found was that strategy of being lower cost really had challenges because customers could not tell that our products were lower cost and that was our biggest challenge.”
Caditz-Peck gave an example of how a quoted “rate” might have different meanings or reflect a different aspect of a deal:
“What was a challenge to our business was losing deals over and over again to competitors that were offering a much worse product, because the customer can’t tell. So this is a San Francisco open floor plan. And I can hear all the conversations happening of our folks that are talking to the small business owners, the kind of loan officer type folks, and they were having this conversation just constantly where they would say, ‘hey, Alan, congratulations, you’re pre-approved. We can lend to you at ________.’ The average APR at the time was about 22% that we were charging. ‘So we can get you financing at 22%’ and the small business borrower would often say, ‘Well, such and such company is offering me 10%’ and then our loan officer would say, ‘okay, but when they say 10%, what is that? Is that an APR? is it an interest rate?’ Usually it was bullshit. It just meant it was a percentage number that had no relationship to how we compute a real interest rate, and was probably equivalent to an interest rate of—in some cases if they’re saying 10% maybe it was like 40%, maybe it was like 300%, but this business owner didn’t know who to trust, and so that was squelching innovation, and that is what continues to be squelching innovation.”
