Business Lending
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.”
How Mike Brooks Battled in the Ring and Won Top Broker in Equipment Financing
March 6, 2025
“Equipment Financing is HUGE,” declares Mike Brooks, CEO of New York-based Best Connect Capital and recent winner at Broker Battle 2025 in the equipment finance category at deBanked CONNECT MIAMI. If his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he appeared on stage as one of six finalists in the previous year’s competition. He refused to give up after his loss and returned this year for round two, leading to him securing a title and prizes along with it. To hear him tell it, it had been a long road to get there.
When Brooks got his start as a 27-year-old broker in 2015, for example, he had technically been battling in a ring for most of his life already.
“I had [boxing] on my mind in high school, without any influence,” says Brooks, “and I walked into a gym one day and the rest was history.” That history includes 60 fights in just amateur-level boxing, resulting in 45 wins and 15 losses. When he followed that at the pro level he went 11-2-1.
“I started fighting at the regular club shows, the Golden Gloves, the metro tournaments, national tournaments, and at one point, I was ranked number seven in the whole country,” Brooks recalls. “I beat some really good fighters, lost to some really good fighters and I made it to the highest levels in the country.”
Some of those fights even aired on live TV. As he bobbed and weaved for years in the ring, he started to think about what a possible career in business might look like afterwards. When that day came, he went to work for a local financial service company on Long Island who taught him about helping small businesses access working capital. Eventually he realized it was a business that he was uniquely suited for and now he runs his own company doing it.
First, there’s the endurance aspect, he explains. There’s a lot of calls, leads that don’t pan out, and heartbreak that hits when deals get declined at the finish line.
“A very small percentage of people can be a successful broker,” Brooks says. “You have to be able to take rejections all day long.”
To that point, Brooks noticed that as the industry grew he was not the only broker offering revenue-based financing to a client. Sometimes there were even as many as four or five other brokers talking to the same client at the same time, which meant that he wasn’t going to win every one and he did not want to bend his ethics just to eke it out. That’s when he started considering another approach and expanded his offerings.
“An equipment financing deal was my first big check during [the covid] lockdowns,” Brooks says. It was a $200,000 deal for a packaging plant. The terms were very attractive and he had the help of an equipment finance veteran who mentored him through it. When it worked out, he knew he had something very big in his arsenal and he’s been offering it ever since to anyone that qualifies for it.
“I said to myself anybody that needs equipment, this is a no brainer right here,” Brooks recalls of it. Now Brooks says when there is competition, he’s almost always the only one asking questions about equipment and the only one prepared to actually move forward with a deal tied to it. Of that experience, Brooks says he’s realized that some brokers have become so accustomed to the mindset of telling customers to take a specific deal, that they don’t stop to consider what they actually want. So his approach is to go in and diagnose what it is they’re trying to do first and then advise them of their options accordingly. And that’s what he does day after day.
At Broker Battle 2025, it was very much like time spent in the office. He was expected to be his normal self, but on stage in front of a large audience, while three judges played the role of prospective client and asked him questions about what they should do. The end result of it all was that Mike Brooks, former fighter in the ring, walked away as the Broker Battle champion in the equipment finance category in 2025.
“It felt amazing to be able to showcase what I do on a daily basis,” Brooks says, making it a point to say that even the venue took note of his win and offered him a personal congratulations on social media.
In the final photo-op on stage with his prize check, Brooks was the epitome of his dual life—the suit and tie spoke of business, while the cigar and sunglasses hinted at his former life in the ring. “I was a crowd pleaser,” he jokes. “You want to be like ‘bam bam bam’ and the crowd to be like ‘AHHHH!!!’ I want them to do that. I had a great time at deBanked.”
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.
Ryan Showe on Winning This Year’s Broker Battle
March 3, 2025
“What being a broker means to me is servicing your clients in the best way possible, really putting their needs before anyone else’s,” says Ryan Showe, VP of Sales at Long Island-based Lexington Capital Holdings. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, we don’t have a job if our clients aren’t happy, so just constantly doing the right thing, putting your best foot forward, and making sure that you’re doing everything ethically and honest.”
Showe was the winner of the 2025 Broker Battle at deBanked CONNECT Miami for the revenue-based financing category, earning him the recognition of Top Broker and the recipient of some prizes along with it. Showe has been in the business for just a little over three years, starting at Lexington during its beginnings. Back then, learning the ropes while doing the work meant putting in 70-80 hour weeks on a regular basis. That included not only seeking out advice from the experts but also watching videos and reading books to fully immerse himself in the mindset of what it would take to become successful.
That effort is paying off and today Showe specializes in the most delicate part of the process at Lexington, helping clients who have applied get to the finish line with a deal while managing lender-side negotiations and communications. On the latter side, that means being highly familiar with the guidelines of more than 60 financial service companies at any given time.
“Anybody can get someone to apply and just fill out a quick one-page application, send over a couple bank statements, but really selling the deal, there’s a specific art to it,” says Showe. “It’s really important to be an expert in your industry and know all the lender guidelines, know what the backend process looks like, because every lender is going to have a different process, whether there’s certain steps that some lenders want, whether it’s a manual-login or DecisionLogic. There’s so many ins and outs to every different lender. And just being able to know all that off the top of your head and just really sound like an expert.”
At Lexington, one of the recent educational team-building strategies was to host an internal Broker Battle in which 30 employees participated in a double-elimination competition. The company’s CEO, Frankie DiAntonio, devised the format and questions—not only role‑playing scenarios but also testing general industry knowledge with trivia. Showe says it’s good practice to be put on the spot in front of a crowd, because a key part of sales is thinking on your feet and executing when it counts. Doing it together with colleagues made for a fun experience in a company that prides itself on a family‑like atmosphere, while also mirroring the competitive nature of the industry where many brokers vie to serve the same customers. It’s game time all the time.
“I even tell my clients, ‘competition is always going to breed the best results,'” Showe says. “If you want the best of the best, you have to make people compete. And it goes down to even selling a deal, right? So if I have a deal and another company has a deal, compare my numbers against their numbers. I’m going to do anything I can to win that business.”
By happenstance, Lexington’s Corey Digiantomasso was one of the six finalists selected to compete in deBanked’s inaugural Broker Battle in 2024, where he put up a very impressive performance. This year was Showe’s turn where contestants weren’t given much background on the format other than that it would be roleplay-based. Showe kind of liked the mysteriousness of it.
“I’m best at showing up and just getting the job done,” Showe says. “So just doing what I do every single day made it easier for me at least.”
On his victory, Showe described the feeling as awesome while also recognizing that his opponent in the Battle, Joe Sasson, was a very worthy competitor. A large crowed showed up to support both of them during the championship.
“It was great to just see all the hard work that I’ve been putting in over the last three years pay off and be crowned #1 in the industry. It goes a long way for not only myself, but for the company as well.”
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.”
Square Loans Originated $5.7B in Business Loans in 2024
February 25, 2025Block subsidiary Square Loans had a huge Q4, originating $1.54 billion in business loans. That brought the year-end total to $5.7 billion, enough to continue their streak as the largest online business lender that deBanked tracks. Enova is #2.
Square Loans customers typically experience growth when taking the funds. Block CEO Jack Dorsey said this of the program in the previous quarter:
“In 2013, we began offering capital to sellers because we saw a meaningful gap in the market: small businesses were often denied access to credit, in the same way they were once denied access to accepting credit cards. We utilized our deep understanding of the seller and their business to build a technology that invited them to accept a loan with transparent rates, and pay back simply by making sales to their customers. We called it Square Capital (which is now known as Square Loans).
Since then, we’ve underwritten more than $22 billion in loans globally, with aggregate loss rates below 3%. And we’ve proven we can expand access: 58% of Square Loans are to women-owned businesses, and 36% are to minority-owned businesses, both of which are higher than the benchmark we track If our sellers grow, we grow – and we believe Square Loans has a direct impact on our sellers’ growth. Sellers who take out a Square Loan grew on average 6% faster than sellers who did not take out a loan.
Many financial products trap borrowers in cycles of revolving debt. We don’t allow customers to take on new loans if they have an overdue balance. And repayment is built into how our products work: Square sellers repay loans through a fixed percentage of their revenue, creating a manageable-real-time payment flow.
On credit risk management, we have a long history of maintaining stable loss rates and these products act as working capital, which means they are usually short in duration. What that means for us is that a dollar used on our balance sheet can turn multiple times, driving capital efficiency while providing us with high-quality data to continually refine our technology-driven underwriting.”
-Jack Dorsey
What to Look Out For in Back-up Servicing
February 17, 2025
“There is a misconception that back-up servicing is merely an Insurance Policy,” states Larry Chiavaro, Chairman of Paramount Servicing Group, in a recently released White Paper on the subject. “That is not the case in today’s rapidly changing markets. Fluctuating interest rates, the creation of many new asset classes, and emerging technology have created many new opportunities for all.”
The 12-page paper on back-up servicing dispels many myths while educating lenders about what to look out for when choosing a servicer. It is clear that the selection process should not be an afterthought and can be very consequential for one’s business. Chiavaro breaks it down well. You can download the paper here.
