Industry News
Bitty Continuing to Perform Well in Q2 2025
August 11, 2025“Our investment in Bitty continued to perform well in the 2025,” said Todd Schwartz, CEO of OppFi, during the Q2 earnings call. “The business continues to add accretive profitability and cash flow to OppFi. Bitty is doing a great job utilizing technology to improve operations and the customer experience, identifying additional growth opportunities in new credit segments and capitalizing on the continued supply/demand imbalance in the small business lending space.”
OppFi holds a 35% stake in Bitty. Their pro-rata share of Bitty’s first half 2025 earnings was significant to their bottom-line.
NerdWallet: ‘AI Answers Are Taking Organic Search Clicks Away’
August 11, 2025NerdWallet, which operates one of the largest online small business lending marketplaces in the US, is experiencing the competitive pressures of AI in real-time. For example, the company has long depended on organic search traffic to generate customers, but Google’s search results now serve more than just links.
“I’d say the story hasn’t changed much since last quarter. Organic search is still pretty challenged,” said NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen during the Q2 earnings call. “What’s happened incrementally is we’ve seen AI-overviews roll out to a much broader swath of queries in recent months, which is resulting in more people getting answers without ever clicking through to websites.”
The company revealed that SMB products revenue of $25 million was down 4% year-over-year, “primarily due to pressures in organic search traffic.”
NerdWallet, however, has also noticed early signs that LLMs are generating referrals for them.
“What’s probably less obvious is that people who click through from LLMs have materially higher intent to transact than people who click through from search engines,” Chen said. “So, while encouraging in terms of that being a new growth channel, it’s still pretty small.”
Shopify Capital: Business Loan & MCA Originations Grow, Loss Rates Consistent
August 6, 2025Shopify Capital purchased $1B worth of business loans and MCAs in Q2, bringing the total to $1.8B for the first half of 2025.
“Our capital business continues to grow, supported by recent product innovations that enhanced our suite of credit offerings and expanded our geographic reach, including launching Capital in Germany and the Netherlands,” said Shopify CFO Jeff J. Hoffmeister. “We’ve introduced new tools that give merchants more choice in how they manage and select loan options, providing greater flexibility to meet their financing needs. Note that loss rates have remained consistent with prior quarters. This is about the successful, thoughtful expansion of capital.”
The company is on pace to outperform last year’s estimated originations of $3B. The company held ~$1.6B in business loans and MCAs on its balance sheet as of June 30.
Certain loans and merchant cash advances are facilitated by Shopify and originated by a bank partner, from whom Shopify then purchases the loans and merchant cash advances obtaining all rights, title and interest or discount. deBanked is able to estimate originations from these figures.
DailyFunder’s Mobile App Returns to iOS
August 4, 2025
DailyFunder’s iOS app is back. DailyFunder 2.0 is now available in the Apple App Store.
The app is a completely new rebuild from the versions that were published in the App Store in 2013 & 2014. Apple’s technical standards forced those versions out of distribution by 2017 and there had been no replacement since. That is until now since DailyFunder recently decided to do a reboot using in-house developers instead of a third party. Given that it’s the first new iteration, consider it a Beta.
DailyFunder 2.0 features:
- The main forum categories
- The Activity Feed
- Make new threads and replies
- PM other users
- Industry news headlines & links
- Advertiser/Vendor directory
- Advertising
What’s not available yet:
- The app for Android (on the list to do)
- The reputation feature
- In-app registration (must do that on the web-based version)
- Perfection (there will be bugs. Please bear with it)
- Ability to edit one’s profile in-app (on the list to do)
DailyFunder has more than 17,000 approved members, making it the largest and most active online small business finance community in the US. The site launched as a forum in 2012. DailyFunder is great for networking, placing a deal, or industry gossip. For questions related to the site or the mobile app, email webmaster@dailyfunder.com.
Idea Financial Hits Milestone, Will Still Fund in Texas
July 9, 2025
Idea Financial, a nationwide small business lender, recently surpassed $1 billion in funding since inception.
“This is a historic milestone,” said Larry Bassuk, president and co-founder of Idea Financial. “Only a few years ago, this company was just a concept with potential. Like many of the small businesses we serve, we started with confidence, grit, and the unyielding belief that we would succeed. Today, I can proudly announce that Idea Financial’s impact on the small business lending community is significant and positive. This moment belongs to our team, past and present, whose dedication has gotten us here.”
Because the company does term loans and lines of credit, it is not impacted by the recently-passed sales-based financing legislation in Texas and will continue to fund there like normal.
For background, Bassuk and Idea Financial CEO Justin Leto, actually started out in the legal profession as attorneys before taking a risk in small business lending. When deBanked first interviewed the duo in 2019, they said, “We’re not from the finance space, we’re not from the alternative lending space either, we came at this opportunity with a different approach.”
At that time, Idea had only funded $50 million since inception. Much of Idea’s growth since then can be attributed to their broker business, which it is still growing.
“Brokers and referral partners are critical to Idea’s success,” the company said. “While our borrowers are our clients, we also consider brokers and referral partners as clients by our team. We value their business and have made it a focus to develop close, mutually beneficial relationships with them.”
“We have been so fortunate to work with such a talented team, all of whom have contributed to the incredible growth of Idea,” said Leto. “We identified a problem with small business funding when we embarked on this journey, and we are so proud to have played a role in providing the solution that has fueled so many Main Street success stories.”
deBanked Celebrates 15 Year Anniversary
July 1, 2025deBanked celebrates its 15th anniversary this month. Launched in 2010 as a blog under the name Merchant Processing Resource, its original focus was on payments and merchant cash advances.The site went through several iterations and began transitioning to the name deBanked in the Fall of 2014.
A look at the MCA content portal in 2010:
If you’re interested in some of the pre-2020 headline history, you can review this old 2019 post we made here.
Thanks for reading and cheers to another 15 years??????
P2P Lending / Former ‘LendAcademy Forum’ Has Moved Again
June 19, 2025deBanked has migrated the old LendAcademy p2p lending forum it acquired in 2021 to DailyFunder. Due to software compatibility issues, it was frequently offline on deBanked’s servers. It has now been moved to DailyFunder whose software was able to integrate the content somewhat successfully.
The LendAcademy forum, launched in 2011, was the most popular p2p lending forum in the US. An unfortunate incident, however, caused the data to be permanently lost in 2021. When that happened, deBanked used proprietary forensic techniques to restore as much of it as possible in a takeover deal it inked with the former operators.
DailyFunder, launched in 2012, is the oldest and most popular small business finance forum in the US. Any issues relating to it going further should be referred to DailyFunder at webmaster@dailyfunder.com.
FundKite, Aquamark Partner on Watermarking Submission Docs
June 17, 2025
As more brokers rush to watermark submission documents to minimize the likelihood of their deals being backdoored, FundKite is codifying the trend into policy by partnering with Aquamark. Aquamark, as readers may recall, was recently spotlighted on deBanked for its defensive watermarking technology which enables brokers to stamp documents in a tamper-resistant manner, marking them as having originated from the broker. If these stamped documents end up in the hands of an unauthorized third party, the watermark reveals their original source. With watermarked submissions on the rise, FundKite will only accept them if they match the originating broker. The company will also encourage brokers to use Aquamark to protect their submissions if they aren’t already doing so.
“At FundKite, we take submissions very seriously and want to ensure that the documents we receive have been originated by the ISO submitting them and were not backdoored, which has been a major issue in the industry,” said Alex Shvarts, CEO of FundKite. “We encourage all our ISO partners to watermark their submissions for this reason. Aquamark provides a seamless and inexpensive process we tested and strongly recommend.”
“This partnership reflects a rapidly growing shift in the industry — brokers are fed up with deal theft, and they’re increasingly aware of how critical compliance will be over the next 12 to 24 months,” said Christina Duncan, Founder of Aquamark. “We’re grateful to partner with Alex at FundKite, who’s stepping up to address these challenges by reducing risk, building trust, and helping preserve the integrity of the space as it evolves.”
