Modern Small Business Credit Platform Tillful Facilitates Over $10m in Loans
As PPP focuses on providing government support to the smallest businesses, a quickly-growing market-based solution offers equal access to all small business applicants
SAN FRANCISCO, March 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- With the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) pivoting last week to focus on supporting the nation's smallest businesses, business credit platform Tillful announced today that in only two months it has already facilitated over 350 small business loans, worth over $10m.
The company also announced that it is currently experiencing 100% customer growth every month.
"There's incredible demand among small business owners for credit that they can repay and won't burden American taxpayers," says Ken So, founder and CEO of Tillful and its parent company, Flowcast Inc. "We see the need and the promise of this sector every day as entrepreneurs lay the foundation for post-COVID economic growth."
Small business loans—typically ranging from a few thousand dollars to in a few cases several hundred thousand—have been marginalized by the traditional banking system as unprofitable. In addition, bank-based lending has historically often been suspected of ethnic and geographic bias.
In contrast, Tillful has leveraged modern technology to provide a completely automated, online business credit score, providing equal access to all applicants regardless of background or location. The scores generated by Tillful help financial institutions quickly identify the most promising companies and offer the most attractive credit terms.
While the PPP is specifically designed to compensate businesses for challenges during the pandemic, and where most loans turn into grants absorbed by the federal government, Tillful's lending partners are lending at competitive market rates to companies who commit to repaying the loan. After criticism that the first PPP funds were being directed to larger companies, the federal government announced that for two weeks the program would only accept applications from companies with 20 or fewer employees.
According to Census data, companies with 20 or fewer employees make up 89% of all companies registered in the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further undermined an already-struggling conventional business credit scoring process that relies on limited data and static models that don't capture rapid shifts in the business climate. In contrast, Tillful can instantly generate a credit score for almost any company once they've connected their bank account and answered a few questions—and the score can be updated daily based on the latest company data.
Tillful then matches and pre-approves companies with credit offers from dozens of lending partners. Tillful is signing up a number of new lending partners to be part of its business credit ecosystem.
Launched by Flowcast, a leading provider of AI credit risk models, Tillful leverages the company's proprietary, patent-pending machine learning solution that has been trained and validated with real-world data in partnership with some of the world's most innovative financial institutions. The resulting score provides some of the most accurate assessments of creditworthiness ever created for small and medium sized enterprises.
About Flowcast
Flowcast helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) gain access to capital. The company leverages its patented machine learning methodologies to create high-performing predictive models for financial institutions that assess risk and enable lenders to automatically optimize credit offerings. Flowcast's technology has been deployed in partnership with some of the world's top financial institutions. Tillful leverages this technology and expertise to give SMEs free, real-time access to credit scores, financial assessments, and actionable data to guide decisions about credit and cash flow. Flowcast is backed by firms such as ING Ventures, BitRock Capital, and Katalyst Ventures. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with an Asia Pacific office in Singapore. Learn more at www.flowcast.ai and www.tillful.com.
SOURCE Flowcast
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