SmartBiz in the News

You have plenty of options when it comes to small-business loans as morealternative lenders extend credit to businesses considered too risky for banks. The myriad choices can get confusing, and some borrowers are making bad selections because they misunderstood the loan’s terms, or were misled about them. Moreover, there is little regulation of the online lending industry.

If you’re in the market for a small-business loan, you may have heard of online lenders, alternative lenders or marketplace lenders. These phrases all describe the new class of unregulated, non-bank lenders that have emerged in recent years, providing financing to small businesses that banks consider too risky.

If you have bad credit – a personal FICO score between 300 and 629 – it’s not wise to apply for a small-business loan from a bank. You’ll likely get rejected, and that will hurt your score even more. But you have small-business loan options from online lenders. They use algorithms to analyze borrowers’ creditworthiness based on a combination of data points, not just credit score.

Matt Quinlan calls it a pain in the ass. Investing in the stock market, that is (or shall we say, of course). So the San Francisco-based personal injury attorney says he didn’t bother with it until about a year ago, when he got an email from GoPro, the wearable videocam maker, explaining that he could buy into the company’s initial public offering of shares — for free — through a little-known company called Loyal3.

If you need to borrow money to buy a house or a car, you don’t want a FICO score of 500. But to get a small-business loan, that dismal number is not necessarily a dealbreaker.

The wave of alternative lending options for small businesses has, without question, filled a hole in the credit markets left in the wake of the Great Recession. The old problem was that small business owners simply weren’t able to gain access to credit – and that problem rapidly grew beyond startups with a limited history or companies with uneven credit records.

It’s no secret that it has become harder and harder to get a small business loan from a bank. Luckily for small businesses, many other ways of borrowing money are now available. These range from short-term loans for those with bad credit, to loans for online businesses, to peer2peer loans.

Schedule Guests: John Havens shows small business owners how to discover their happiness. Lori Loridan guides us through the latest changes for Obamacare. Evan Singer shows how to get a 7A loan from the SBA in 30 minutes.

If your small business is looking for working capital, a small business administration (SBA) loan may be a great way to go.

When Kelly Kolterman went to Bank of America (BAC) for a small business loan late last year, they sent her to her local Small Business Development Center.

I’ve become somewhat known — and sometimes criticized — for being an opponent of “alternative lenders.”

My critics think that I am against the alternative-lending industry as a whole. This isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, in our loan brokerage we put business owners into alternative loans when we can’t get them bank or SBA loans, and we get paid for it.

OK, maybe not quite that fast, but faster than I’ve ever heard of. Last week I met Evan Singer of SmartBiz for the first time. Yes, they specialize in small business loans. Yes, they have SBA loans under $150,000 figured out down to a science. And yes, they are on the Lendio platform—but their relationship with Lendio isn’t why I’m talking about them nor am I being compensated by them to share their story.