Last month we learned that small business lender, StreetShares, closed on a $23 million Series B. This got us thinking....
First proposed in June and recently signed by Governor Cuomo the 7 person task force will be focused on reviewing online lending activities in NY; the task force will be chosen by the governor, president of the senate and speaker of the assembly; they will report their findings on small business and consumer lending back to the governor. Source.
Crowdfund Insider sat down with Karen Mills at LendIt Europe 2017; Mills is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and was previously head of the US Small Business Administration; she believes we are between two phases in the market: the banks waking up and the platforms arriving, including Alibaba, Amazon, Square etc. Source
India’s lending network for small businesses has increasingly become reliant on the growing sector of non bank lenders; the non bank market has been steadily increasing loan books by 25 percent per year as bank lending has not increased according to data from Edelweiss Financial Services; access to non traditional forms of data has helped non banks to be able to better asses borrower risk instead of using income taxes which were seen an unreliable. Source.
deBanked has taken the Inc 5000 list and provided a table of the top alternative small business companies by revenue; the top 5 include Square, OnDeck, Kabbage, Swift Capital and National Funding. Source
UK based p2p lender RateSetter has decided to no longer accept unsecured small business lending applications; the company said it will limit commercial lending to property and asset backed loans; “we have a clear framework around which to grow our commercial finance volumes and continue to deliver access to healthy returns to investors,” said Rhydian Lewis, founder and CEO of RateSetter, to AltFi. Source.
Intuit has launched a new lending product called QuickBooks Capital; clients of the accounting software provider will be able to access up to $35,000 in credit with terms between three and six months. Rania Succar, head of QuickBooks Capital stated, “As the largest small business accounting platform with approximately 2.4 million customers, the QuickBooks platform provides the most complete set of small business data available in the market.” Source
J.D. Power is out with their most recent Small Business Banking Satisfaction Study and small businesses are still dissatisfied with banks; the biggest issue that could increase positive interaction with small businesses and banks is more account representatives; having someone available to speak to SMBs and help them is something that is sorely lacking; banks have seen market share go to fintechs and digital banks in recent years so better serving this key customer group is something the banks need to recognize. Source.
An opinion piece in American Banker highlights the challenges the marketplace lending industry faced in 2016; Alenka Grealish, a senior analyst at Celent believes that we will see consolidation and more partnerships in the remainder of 2017 and into 2018; discusses the advantages and challenges both fintechs and banks have and what may happen in a downturn. Source
If asked where to get a small business loan most people would state their local banks or even some of the bigger traditional...