The recent successes of online lenders has made them attractive to investors — and now banks are entering the fray.
Small-business lender Kabbage will soon white-label its service to “a very large financial services company,” according to TechCrunch. The online lender recently secured a $270 million credit facility from Guggenheim Securities, an investment arm of Guggenheim Partners. This is more than the approximately $250 million the company has loaned out to date in its three years of existence.
Kabbage and other online lenders such as CAN Capital target the long tail of merchants that are looking for relatively small loans. Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein told Techcrunch, “Mainstream lenders cannot economically acquire these customers. I think that banks like the space, but they have a lot of regulatory and risk debt right now that makes it hard for them to either re-enter or meaningfully enter these markets…. For them, a ‘small business’ does between $10 million and $15 million in revenues each year. Our average clients bring in between $500,000 and $1 million per year, with some as low as $50,000 per year.”
Bank lending to small businesses increased in March for community banks and credit unions, according to the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index, while loans from big banks decreased slightly. Rates from alternative or online lenders also fell month over month in March.
In what may be a sign of things to come, at least one bank is looking to Kabbage to pick up those customers on its behalf. Banks will take a cut of the already-small spread, but Kabbage’s potential customer base will considerably widen. For the banks, this will mean more customers that may pick up additional products down the road.
Atlanta-based Kabbage has proprietary risk models it has refined over its years in the small business space. It also has a simple and transparent sliding scale for calculating repayments that is publicly viewable on its site. Frohwein cites bad debt rates in “the single digits” and believes the company has plenty of room to grow. Kabbage has 25,000 customers, and he estimates 15 million to 20 million small businesses still need financing. Online lenders have collectively served about 150,000 small businesses, he estimates.
Kabbage has received $54 million in funding from investors and more than $360 million in debt funding.