SBA Hot Topic Tuesday — PayPal is Officially a Small Business Lending Giant
May 14, 2019
By Bob Coleman
Editor, SBA Hot Topic Tuesday
SBA Hot Topic Tuesday — PayPal is Officially a Small Business Lending Giant
From Steven Anderson — paymentweek.com
Depending on who you talk to, PayPal is either the top of the heap in small business lending or just fairly near to it. That’s an unusual discrepancy, and one that recently emerged as part of the flood of news that comes out quarterly as part of earnings season. So what’s behind this discrepancy, and what does it mean for PayPal overall?
As part of a recent earnings call with PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, the details emerged that PayPal had made fully $10 billion in small business loans. That by itself is no mean feat, but it gets better: with that kind of number, deBanked analysts have examined the market and discovered that that passes the previous leader in small business lending, OnDeck.
OnDeck had loaned $7.5 billion between Fall 2015 and the fourth quarter of 2018, deBanked’s analysts figure. But with PayPal now reporting $10 billion in loans, that means the company had likely loaned about $9 billion out in that same interval, handily beating OnDeck’s figures. Credit for the win, in part, went to PayPal’s 2017 acquisition of Swift Capital, a move that gave it plenty of extra room to operate in the small business market.