Small Biz Online Lenders Thrive on Loan Broker Business

March 12, 2015

By Bob Coleman
Editor, Coleman Report

While most online lenders tout web technology and data algorithms as key to their success, you may not know they also rely heavily on the commercial loan broker professionals for a chunk of their loan volume.

Yesterday, I keynoted a speech about loan broker and lender fraud at the first annual National Alliance of Commercial Loan Brokers conference. That was enjoyable and I’ll run some excerpts tomorrow.

A goal of Boefly’s co-president, David Nayor is to create a forum that matches small business loan brokers with small business lenders. That goal has been met with this event.

Anyway, there were about 50 lenders in attendance. Add about 300 loan brokers, all who had deals ready to place. The event was lively.

Many SBA lenders wisely chose to sponsor the event and sent BDOs to exhibit — Ridgestone Bank, Pacific Premier Bank, Celtic Bank, Stearns Bank, Conestoga Bank, PMC, smartbiz and Paragon Small Business Capital Group.

However, I was surprised by the number of small business online lenders who sponsored and manned trade show booths. And we’re talking about some of the largest in the industry:

OnDeck Capital
Funding Circle
LenCred
Fundation

My takeaway?

Online small business lenders aren’t solely relying on search engine optimization strategies and speed to market execution for deals.

They are also employing pre-web, old-school, 20th century marketing strategies to network the commercial loan broker industry one-on-one.