Navigating the Complexities of Digital Lending for Small Businesses

This chapter explores the complexities of digital lending and the challenges small business owners face in conveying their unique needs to lenders. It contrasts traditional lending methods with modern automated systems, emphasizing the need for both personalized data and efficient practices.

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Hello, and welcome back to Source of Truth, a new miniseries sponsored by our friends at SOLO. This series is about information asymmetry; the enemy of financial services.

Until now, we’ve focused on theory: the broken data infrastructure we’ve inherited.

In Episode 3, we move from theory to reality. I ask four veteran founders and operators:

What are the most difficult challenges you face when building and scaling up a consumer or small business lending business?

What hard lessons can be learned from overcoming or in some cases failing to overcome those challenges?

And what do those hard lessons tell us about the future of lending and data infrastructure in the U.S.?

These conversations are short but illuminating: expect war stories from the early days of well-known fintechs, insights and creative ideas for scaling up in our heavily regulated industry, and candid admissions about the problems they still haven’t cracked (and why).

Guests (in order of appearance):

Luke Voiles: CEO of Pipe; longtime SMB lending operator & executive

Rob Frohwein: Co-founder and former CEO of Kabbage

Jill Sheckman: former Global Chief Credit Risk Officer at PayPal; longtime credit risk executive at AmEx

Brian Hamilton: Co-founder and former CEO of ONE; President at Coastal

Episode 3 is your field guide to the real constraints operators face — and the data standards and product choices that actually moved loss curves, conversion, and access.

Don’t forget to subscribe and catch more insights in upcoming episodes of Source of Truth!

This miniseries is brought to you by SOLO.

SOLO resolves and connects customer data across silos — so teams stop rekeying the same customer info for the hundredth time and finally move forward.

Break the cycle at SOLO.one - That’s SOLO dot o-n-e.

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