Business Lending
Organic Search Headwinds Persist for SMB Lending Products at NerdWallet
November 13, 2026NerdWallet’s SMB finance referral business grew only 6% year-over-year last quarter. The company said that “an increase in business loan originations was partially offset by continued pressures in organic search traffic.”
NerdWallet execs have previously stated that borrowers shifting to AI to get their answers to monetary questions is impacting the industry. And that’s been a challenge for them since they’ve historically depended on organic search traffic to source customers.
“In terms of SEO, organic search has become a fraction of what it was for us after 3.5 years of rapid declines,” said NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen during the Q3 earnings call, “the pace of declines has stabilized a bit, in recent months. So just as a reminder, educational content has been severely impacted as Google puts AI summaries in search results.”
One analyst asked how NerdWallet could continue to compete with some of the big LLMs that are now veering into personal finance functionality and product recommendations all on their own.
“I think for us, a big piece of this is the marketplace dynamic,” Chen responded. “Consumers have to often make complex decisions, especially in areas like insurance, personal loans, mortgages, where there is risk-based pricing. And in order to do that in a compliant manner, you really need a trusted marketplace that has inventory and the pricing that is going to send you to the right place. And so that is where we are in conversations with both the model companies as well as constantly with consumers. And I think there is an opportunity to do that in an agentic world. Now exactly what shape that takes I think it is still being sorted out in terms of how the economics work. I think it is going to be much more liquid in some verticals and not going to change that much in others. But we want to be ready for all eventualities there, so we are definitely making the investment today.”
California Celebrates Its Own Business Loan Marketplace and Partnership With State-Backed Revenue Based Financing Providers
November 10, 2026The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank), a state government agency and capital access bank housed within the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), announced that it had surpassed $5 million in small business loans through its California loan match website.
“The platform is unique in that every lender is enrolled to use California IBank’s Small Business Loan Guarantees, a state-government program that reduces lending risk for financial institutions that want to serve small businesses,” the State agency says.
That includes revenue-based financing providers. Back in January, deBanked discovered one, but that number has grown. Among the 30 lender partners listed, at least three offer revenue based financing in their product suite: AltCap California, Capital Impact Partners, and Mission Driven Finance.
AltCap California
Every agreement is unique.
- Loans up to $500,000—typically sized at up to one-third of the previous year’s revenue.
- Monthly loan payments tied to monthly revenue—up to 8% of sales.
- Total repaid: 1.4 to 1.5 times the original loan amount.
- Borrower has up to 7 years to repay the loan.
- Either no personal guarantee OR no collateral required.
Capital Impact Partners
Revenue Share Mezzanine Debt
Unsecured mezzanine debt whereby businesses pay a percentage of revenues and interest.
Criteria
- Minimum revenue: $4 million+
- Positive cash balance
Terms
- Investment amount: $1–$15 million
- No collateral or personal guarantees
- Variable revenue share payment + fixed interest payment
- Use of proceeds: growth or acquisition capital
- 3–5 year term with set maturity date
Mission Driven Finance
Revenue-based and Islamic financing available.
“The Small Business Loan Match tool narrows the confusing array of lending options for small business owners,” said Andy Nakahata, IBank Executive Director in the announcement. “By tailoring matches to lenders that can choose to use IBank’s Small Business Loan Guarantee Program, we’re reducing barriers small businesses often encounter when searching for loans. We’re thrilled to celebrate California small businesses accessing $5 million to move their businesses into the future.”
Square Loans Has Consistently Beat its 4% Loss Target
November 5, 2026Square Loans isn’t just the largest originator of online small business loans that deBanked tracks, they’ve also managed to beat their 4% loss target every year for the last 10+ years.
“Since launching Square Loans in 2014, we’ve been able to hold loss rates consistent with our target while meaningfully expanding eligibility to more and more customers,” the company said in its Q3 shareholder letter. “Every annual Square loan cohort has performed in line with or better than our 4% loss target, and we’ve been able to grow Square Loans at a 27% CAGR over the past decade because of our disciplined underwriting approach, proprietary data, and world-class expertise.”
During the earnings call, Block’s Head of Underwriting, Juan Hernandez, said that their success with Square Loans is a “core part of their DNA.”
Square Loans benefits from the POS ecosystem that Square provides its clients.
LendingTree: Small Business Lending in Much Better Position
November 3, 2026“…Q2 was a trough in the performance of small business lending, and we did see strong sequential growth,” said Scott Peyree, CEO of LendingTree during the Q3 earnings call. “We are still on the path to getting back to our all-time records of Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, but we are feeling that the industry is in a much better position, and we are tracking to continued growth. As a matter of fact, September and October were our two best SMB concierge sales months since January of this year.”
Concierge sales was a reference to their concierge service where they connect small business owners with an expert that can help them compare loan options. “Using this individualized approach, LendingTree’s SMB concierge service has connected more than 5,000 borrowers with over $300 million of loans in the past year,” Lending Tree’s website states.
LendingTree said that it is focused on driving organic traffic to generate more business and that there is a lot of room to grow it.
“We also feel that there’s a lot of growth just in areas where we’ve arguably been under-indexed compared to our competitors over the last number of years, and that would be social media, which is a massive world of consumers, business development, publishers,” said Peyree. “We’ve been building a lot of ad tech around that over the past nine months, and we’ll probably continue investing even more heavily in that to just really get to have really good platforms and good ad tech where we can go and place our ads and have publishers and partners more easy to work with us. We feel like that’s just a major, like I would almost call it, ‘if you build it, they will come’ situation. We just got to build more of the stuff, onboard more partners, and that will just drive a lot more traffic there as well.”
Shopify Capital Originates $1.5B in SMB Loans and MCAs in Q3, Shares Delinquency Data
November 3, 2026Shopify Capital originated $1.5 billion in small business loans and merchant cash advances in Q3, putting the company at $4.3B for the year so far and already ahead of 2025’s full-year total.
This data came from their quarterly report:
The following table presents the delinquency status of the gross amount of loans and merchant cash advances by year of origination. The delinquency status is determined based on the number of days past the contractual or expected repayment date for which the Company anticipates to receive the amounts outstanding. The “current” category represents balances that are anticipated to be repaid within 29 days of the contractual repayment dates, or are anticipated to be repaid within 29 days of the expected repayment date.
91.1% of their deals are current while 6% are more than 180 days delinquent.
PayPal: Business Loan & Working Capital Merchants Have Higher Retention Rate
October 27, 2026Businesses that use PayPal’s Working Capital or business loan products have a 15% higher retention rate with PayPal’s payment processing product than those that don’t. That’s according to a study they conducted on 2025 data that they revealed in their Q3 2026 earnings report. The company also shared that their merchant lending business is growing.
Stripe had previously made a bid to acquire PayPal this summer but a deal never happened. PayPal has been trying to turn its business around ever since it brought on a new CEO earlier this year. AI is part of that strategy.
“We have reduced headcount by more than 2,000 and removed three organizational layers across most areas of the company,” said Enrique Lores, the CEO of PayPal during the Q3 earnings call. “We are also using AI and automation to drive productivity. For example, our AI chat agents now support customer service across 190 countries and six languages and have resolved more than 24 million contacts year-to-date.”
SoFi Originates $27 Million in Small Business Loans in Inaugural Quarter
October 27, 2026“I would say the SMB business is at a very nascent stage,” said Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi during the Q3 earnings call. “It is still a startup business.”
SoFi originated $27M in small business loans in Q3, its first quarter generating business loans internally. It has a lot of room to grow especially considering its $3 billion partnership with Basepoint Capital for this product.
The company says that it will ease into it.
“It has great prospects and one we will invest in over time and will continue to grow,” Noto added. “Now, getting the credit right is important. Building relationships and the unit economics are important. Why? Because these are high repeat customers. Businesses need capital to grow. When they take out a loan, it helps them grow. That gives them motivation and economic incentive to take out another loan and then another loan. Just like the largest corporations in our country, that capital fuels the growth. So we want to make sure we build relationships first and foremost, achieve the right unit economics, and we continue to expand that over and over on a nice linear line. So we are really pleased with where we are, but it is nowhere near where it will be in the future.”
SoFi previously referred all small business loan inquiries to third parties but they have since rethought that approach.
Enova: SMB Loan Originations of $1.8B in Q3
October 26, 2026Enova generated $1.8 billion in small business loans in Q3, up from the previous quarter and up 28% year-over-year. The company said during their earnings call that charge-offs have remained stable, that the environment is strong, and that they see very stable to improving credit overall across their portfolio which has supported their ability to continue to grow nicely.
Enova CEO Steve Cunningham also said that the company may expand its product line. “We’ll explore expanded offerings such as a deposit advance product, secured consumer lending, and SMB-embedded finance offerings,” he said.
There was virtually no mention of last month’s decision to withdraw its bid to acquire Grasshopper Bank. The company and analysts have already moved on from it.
