Beating SMB Alt Lenders at Their Own Game

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Small businesses are an important segment for banks and credit unions with aggressive growth goals. In the United States, small businesses make up 99.7 percent of employer firms, according to the SBA FAQ Sheet. The top concern for these firms is managing their cash flow needs, which creates a great lending opportunity for banks and credit unions. Unfortunately, it can be a difficult opportunity for them to take advantage of because of their antiquated processes.

As Steven Martin, vice president of strategy at Sageworks, discussed during a recent webinar, the demographic composition of small business owners is shifting away from baby boomers and towards Gen X’ers and millennials. These younger business owners are more tech-savvy than their parents. They are more used to shopping online, including for credit and financing solutions. Additionally, many small business owners are too busy running their businesses to leave to visit a branch to begin the application process. When these small business owners go online looking for loans, they find that over 80 percent of banks and credit unions do not offer a way to apply for a loan online. This causes many small business owners to turn to alternative lenders for credit. These “alt lenders” can provide the funds faster and offer an end-to-end online experience. The number of small business owners who turn to alt lenders instead of banks and credit unions is growing. If financial institutions want to preserve and grow their SMB lending business, they will need to revisit two aspects of their loan origination strategy.

Small business borrowers deserve a better experience
Slow and complex loan application processes at many financial institutions frustrate small business borrowers. On average, an application for a small business loan takes two to four weeks. By the time borrowers submit an application, they have already spent an average of 26 hours researching capital options. Once borrowers decide they are ready to apply for a loan, they do not want to spend weeks waiting to receive their funding.

Many of the alternative online lenders charge much higher interest rates than banks and credit unions, yet, business borrowers short on time are increasingly willing to pay more in fees or interest rates to fix their cash flow problem.

Additionally, the difficulties of traveling to a branch and chasing hard copies of documents make the application process even more tedious. Improving the borrower experience is critical for banks and credit unions that want to grow their SMB portfolios.

Costly origination of SMB loans
A second challenge to growing the SMB portfolio is the cost of originating small loans. On average, the cost to originate a small business loan is almost as high as the cost to originate a much larger loan. The lower profits on smaller loans means that many banks and credit unions struggle with achieving sufficient profitability on SMB loans.

However, simply ignoring the SMB market narrows the institution’s opportunity to grow. Also, banks that already have a depository relationship with a small business may risk the entire relationship if they can’t provide a loan.

How then to increase profitability of small business lending?

First, the institution can reduce costs by making the job easier for lenders. Leveraging tools such as an online loan application, which allows borrowers to enter their information and submit documents online, saves loan officers the time of tracking down all the necessary documentation. Institutions can also reduce the time analysts spend entering data by utilizing a tool such as the Sageworks Electronic Tax Return Reader. The ETRR reads and imports data from the borrower’s tax return into the spreading software.

Another major cost of loan origination is the time spent analyzing and decisioning a loan, and automated tools can help here as well. For example, a bank that specializes in agricultural lending may be very familiar with equipment loans. This bank could see significant time savings by implementing loan decisioning software that can be tailored to its risk appetite for ag loans. The bank sets the required metrics and approval criteria, and the software provides a recommendation on the loan. This allows analysts to enter less information and make a faster decision while maintaining pre-existing credit standards.

Small business lending is an important segment for growth-minded banks and credit unions. However, frustrating borrower experiences and expensive application processes make it difficult for many institutions to build profitable SMB lending programs. By leveraging technology to improve the borrower experience and increase profitability for the institution, banks and credit unions can build a path to growth with business lending.

Online Lenders: Finding the Right Dance Partner

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An increasing number of banks are conceding that innovations introduced by online lenders are here to stay, particularly the seamless, fully digital customer experience. Also, online upstarts have grown to understand that unseating the incumbents may well be heavy-going, not the least because of the difficulties of profitably acquiring borrowers. The result is that both sides have opened up to the potential for partnership, viewing one another’s competitive advantages as synergistically linked. We see five types of partnership emerging.

1) Buying loans originated on an alternative lender’s platform
In this option, alternative lenders securitize loans originated on their platform to free up capital to make more loans while removing risk from their balance sheets. Banks then purchase these securitized loans as a way to diversify investments. This type of partnership is among the most prolific in the online small business lending world, with banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and SunTrust buying assets from leading online lenders. The benefits of this option include the ability to delineate the type of assets the bank wants to be exposed to, and potential for a new source of balance sheet growth. However, the downside include may include the difficulty of assessing risk, as alternative lenders are less likely to share details of proprietary underwriting technology. Moreover, the lack of historical data on alternative lenders’ performance means limited access to data on how these investments will fare in a downturn.

2) Routing declined loan applicants to an alternative lender or to an online credit marketplace
Banks decline the majority of customers who apply for a loan. This partnership option allows such banks to find a home for these loans by referring declined borrowers directly to an online lender or credit marketplace like Fundera, which may be more capable of approving the borrower in question. The advantages of this approach include the ability of the bank to provide their customers with access to a wider suite of products through a vetted solution, a reduced need to expand the bank’s credit box and increased revenue in the form of referral fees. Examples of this type of partnership are few and far between in the United States. Thus far, OnDeck has partnerships of this nature with BBVA and Opus Bank. In our view, a big reason why more banks haven’t followed suit is the loss of control over a borrower’s experience, since agreements typically require a full customer handoff to the alternative lender. In addition, regulators have become increasingly reticent to endorse such agreements, with guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. being particularly restrictive.

3) Making the bank’s small business product line available through an online marketplace
Marketplace players, like Fundera, aim to empower borrowers with the tools needed to shop and compare multiple credit products from a curated network of reputable bank and non-bank lenders. They can be natural partners for traditional banks, as they can be lender agnostic, offering banks an opportunity to compete head-to-head with online lenders to acquire customers. Banks can choose to make any and all of their small business product lines (e.g. term loans, SBA loans, lines of credit, credit cards) available. Examples of this include partnerships with Celtic Bank, LiveOak and Direct Capital (a division of CIT Bank) currently have with Fundera. This option allows a bank to explore digital distribution of products within their lending portfolio, as well as the opportunity to acquire a high-intent, fully packaged borrower that comes from outside the bank’s existing footprint. In addition, this option enables banks to offer products only to the customers which meet eligibility criteria set by the bank (e.g., industry, state, credit box). The downsides of this option can be the upfront investment in technology required by banks to integrate with a marketplace lender.

4) Utilizing an alternative lender’s technology to power an online application
In this option, the alternative lender or lending-as-a-service provider powers a digital application, collecting all the application information and documentation that a bank requires to underwrite a small business loan. Capital, however, is still deployed by the bank. Examples of this partnership type include the collaboration between lending solutions provider Fundation and Regions Bank. This improves the usability of a traditional lender’s products by giving business owners the flexibility to apply online. This partnership also provides access to technology that is difficult and costly for a bank to develop. It may also reduce dependency on paper documents while reducing time to complete a loan application. The downsides of this option are that it can require deployment of significant resources for compliance and due diligence.

5) Utilizing an alternative lender’s technology to power an online application, loan underwriting and servicing
In addition to powering a digital application, the alternative lender can provide access to its proprietary technology for pricing, underwriting and servicing. As with option four, however, capital is still deployed by the bank. The example that comes closest to this type of partnership is the partnership between OnDeck and JPMorgan Chase. This option gives a bank access to underwriting technology that may be costly for them to develop on its own. By leveraging this technology, the bank may also be able to address segments of the market that would have been deemed uncreditworthy by its existing, more conventional underwriting process. Banks should only move forward with this option if they trust an alternative lender’s underwriting criteria, and the bank believes that the alternative lender can meet their compliance requirements.