Business Lending
BHG Financial Had a Strong Second Quarter
August 22, 2025
BHG Financial had loan originations of $1.5B in the 2nd quarter of 2025, up from 1.2B YoY. The company is 49% owned by Pinnacle Bank.
The company’s trending 30-day commercial past-due rate has been hovering at around 4% since the same time last year while past-due rates on their consumer loans have been in a consistent decline since Summer 2023.
During the Q2 earnings call, Pinnacle CFO Harold Carpenter, said that both production and credit growth have been good this year.
“I think credit has really been the bigger surprise for the year,” said Carpenter, “and we feel like that it looks like it’s pivoted and hopefully, it will continue to pivot.”
BHG primarily serves as a full-service commercial loan provider to healthcare providers and other skilled professionals for business purposes but also makes consumer loans for various purposes.
Business Finance Brokers in 2025
August 15, 2025
We’re now ten years out from the original “Year of the Broker” article in deBanked Magazine. Brokers are still here, the business has just changed slightly. Here’s some of the top line differences vs. 2015:
Cold Calling: 12% of merchants say they started their search for business funding options from a cold call.
Google Search: Organic search rankings beginning to diminish in favor of AI Q&As.
Training: AI can now listen to every call and grade you on every component of it.
CRMs: Pen and paper are over. Every touch on a deal should be traced and automated and deal tracking organized in a system.
Competition: Every POS solution and merchant fintech software now has a funding button embedded into it.
Commissions: Still high.
Funding Options: Lines of credit, term loans, MCAs, SBA, equipment financing, real estate lending, and more.
Regulations: There are now numerous state registration and disclosure requirements. (See the map here).
Leads: Referral networks are now more valuable than ever. Referrals from CPAs, lawyers, trade associations, chambers of commerce, and more.
Gates: You may have to go through a super broker to get access to a top tier funder.
Startup Costs: The registration requirements in several states has significantly increased the cost of starting a new broker shop today.
Business Finance Companies on Inc 5000 List in 2025
August 12, 2025Here’s where small business finance companies rank on the Inc 5000 list for 2025 (and if we’ve missed you, email info@debanked.com):
| Ranking | Company | 3-Year % Growth |
| 15 | Parafin | 9594 |
| 206 | businessloans.com | 1862 |
| 669 | Pinnacle Funding | 626 |
| 831 | SBG Funding | 508 |
| 1215 | Essential Funding Group | 359 |
| 1240 | Clara Capital | 352 |
| 1417 | Backd | 306 |
| 1705 | Kapitus | 256 |
| 1719 | Channel | 255 |
| 1756 | Fundible | 248 |
| 2027 | 4 Pillar Funding | 214 |
| 2117 | Biz2Credit | 203 |
| 2293 | Byzfunder | 187 |
| 2671 | Critical Financing | 156 |
| 3081 | Lendzi | 131 |
| 3226 | eCapital | 124 |
| 3508 | ApplePie Capital | 111 |
| 3545 | SellersFi | 109 |
| 3901 | Splash Advance | 95 |
| 3973 | Fora Financial | 92 |
| 3993 | Capital Infusion | 91 |
| 4076 | Expansion Capital Group | 88 |
| 4162 | Shore Funding Solutions | 85 |
| 4206 | Direct Funding Now | 83 |
| 4712 | ROK Financial | 63 |
Square Loans Originates $1.64B in Small Business Loans in Q2
August 8, 2025Block’s merchant financing division, Square Loans, continues to lead the competition. The company originated $1.64B in small business loans in Q2, up slightly from $1.59B in Q1. That puts them on pace for $6.5B for the year and allow them to maintain their top position among small business finance companies that deBanked tracks. Square Loans’ advantage is that its customers repay their loans automatically through their daily Square POS transactions.
Overall, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the entire company is “Back on offense.”
“We had a strong second quarter,” wrote Dorsey in his shareholder letter. “Square GPV grew 10% year over year and Cash App gross profit grew 16% year over year, accelerating as we exited Q2.”
LendingTree: ‘Small Business Loan Originations Up 40% On Our Platform’
August 1, 2025LendingTree’s small business loan origination volume is up 40% YoY, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings report.
“In small business, we made a strategic investment to grow our sales force and it has paid off in more business and more efficiency,” said LendingTree CEO Doug Lebda. “I think that small business can be a real growth driver for us.”
Lebda added that profitability had been consistently growing each quarter and that the company was “on a roll.” And part of that is being attributed to staying on top of AI.
“Eighteen months ago, I told our board and our company that we’re going to be an AI first company,” Lebda said. “And today, effectively, all of our employees are using AI in their day jobs, including having enterprise GPT for everyone.”
Enova on Business Loan Originations Growth: ‘Like Running Downhill’
July 28, 2025Enova originated $1.2B in small business loans in Q2 2025, marking the fourth time they’ve exceeded $1B. When asked how that segment of their business has continued to perform so consistently, Enova CEO David Fisher said that small businesses had a couple of rock solid quarters in a row.
“It’s almost like running downhill,” Fisher said. “It’s not like you’re trying that hard. It just kind of happens. Credit has been incredibly stable…and when you have rock solid credit and you’re in a very strong competitive position, yes, generating origination growth is like I said, kind of like running downhill. It’s not like we’re trying super hard to do it. We just let the business perform the way it was performing.”
Later on Fisher added that “the competitive dynamics on the small business side are more stable. There’s fewer players. We know who they are. Brand matters more. And so that super strong position we have in SMB, I think helps with the stability a bit.”
In regards to how they’ve evolved their approach to TV advertising, Fisher said:
“So ten years ago, we were running a lot of national TV. Now it’s almost all digital TV, where you can almost target city by city and certainly state by state and even different types of groups within those markets. So that all plays into what we do super well because we develop models ‘that the more data focused that we’re looking at, the easier it is for us.’ So TV was never our favorite thing, but if we can target specific states, specific groups, specific times of days, figuring out which types of programming work the best, that’s really amazing for us to be able to plug that all into our algorithms and become more and more efficient with marketing.”
Lastly, Fisher is retiring as CEO to become Executive Chairman effective January 1, 2026. During the call Fisher said that with the business on super stable footing, that it was simply the right time. CFO Steve Cunningham will take over the CEO position.
Heron Makes Big Splash in Small Business Finance Industry
July 15, 2025
Heron, a startup using AI to automate workflows, just raised a $16M Series A round. Already a well-known brand in the small business finance industry, the funds will be used to grow their presence, expand into adjacent verticals, and grow their go-to market & and engineering teams.
While Heron serves top tier clientele like insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks, its technology can be utilized at almost any level.
“Our technology is built to serve funders of all sizes from industry leaders like Bitty, Forward, Vox, and CFG to sub-five person shops originating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month,” the company told deBanked. “If a team is receiving 25 or more submission documents per day, Heron can deliver immediate value by automating their document intake and reducing manual review time. Our platform scales to meet volume, and we often see smaller, fast-moving teams who want to scale submissions and originations without scaling headcount benefit the most from Heron.”
Heron noticed that small business lenders were employing teams of underwriting analysts that spend hours on repetitive intake work and created a process to streamline it within seconds. Consequently, they’ve seen that improving efficiencies in this market has had a positive impact on the economy overall.
“At Heron, we believe that SMB lending is the backbone of the American economy — it powers everything from local restaurants to trucking fleets,” the company said. “But outdated, document-heavy processes slow things down. Heron helps lenders move faster and smarter, so they can get capital to the businesses that need it most.”
QuickBooks Capital Continues to Grow
June 8, 2025Intuit’s small business loan program, QuickBooks Capital, is continuing to grow. It generated $35M more revenue in FY Q3 2025 than it did over the same period last year, according to the company’s latest earnings report. Considering Intuit’s total quarterly revenue was $7.8B, its funding business, a small percentage of the total in comparison, is only mentioned in detailed on occasion.
QuickBooks Capital benefits from having a funding button in the widely used QuickBooks Capital software, a feature so effective that they were effectively the sixth largest online small business lender that deBanked tracked in 2024. Its two main products are a term loan and a line of credit.
