Lenderfit: A New Small Business Lending Software Solution

Entrepreneurship is part and parcel to the American dream, yet in many communities finding the necessary capital to launch and grow a small business is harder than it should be. Unfortunately, our current financial system is optimized to provide larger amounts of capital to businesses with the most collateral and years in experience.

The wealth inequality many minority entrepreneurs face is staggering and a major hurdle in starting a new business. Whether it’s an underrepresented, underserved, or underestimated entrepreneur, the gap is quite large (and growing) between the desire to start or grow a business and being able to fully participate in the traditional financial systems.

“Lenderfit simplifies small business lending and brings transparency, guidance, and automation to the lender.”

As a part of our Access to Capital initiative, we believe truly innovative and inclusive financial solutions emerge when the constraints of existing systems and institutions are temporarily ignored. And so, at Access Ventures, we are excited to share that the Lenderfit product is now available for lenders in the United States to sign up for early access. Lenderfit is a SAAS platform created internally off of our experiences in deploying a character-based loan product, the Growth Loan, in Louisville, Kentucky. Over the course of the past 4 years, we have supported traditionally under-estimated entrepreneurs in their pursuit of critical growth capital as they work tirelessly to realize their dreams. We also see the importance of completely changing the system itself by creating new funding strategies that by their very design and purpose, close the gap for many of these amazing entrepreneurs.

In our experiences working with technical assistance providers like the Kentucky Small Business Development Corporation and in talking with countless others community lenders across the country, we realized that community-based lenders (who routinely have better and more equitable rates) are not visible to prospective borrowers; spend way too much time in back-n-forth communication on documents; and don’t have a system to connect their clients with other sources of capital (which is a critical component missing because many of these entrepreneurs will need to stack multiple sources of capital to reach their financing target).

Lenderfit simplifies small business lending and brings transparency, guidance, and automation to the lender! Any lender in the US is able to utilize Lenderfit for any loan product. If you are a loan officer or lender, consider signing up for early access to Lenderfit to try out the product and learn how it might improve your work in your community.

As a part of this exciting launch of Lenderfit, we are also working with partners from around the country to deploy a similar character-based lending model (like our Growth Loan) that leverages this amazing new technology platform. Over the next three months, Access Ventures will be working to both deploy Lenderfit in these three markets: Louisville, KY in April in partnership with our existing Growth Loan; Kansas City, MO in May in partnership with Alt Cap; and in a third city – yet to be finalized, in June.

We are excited about both of these amazing products and exceedingly thankful for the leadership of David Taliaferro, CEO and Co-founder of Lenderfit, as we work to improve opportunities for prospective borrowers everywhere.

If you would like to discuss your community being a contender, please email derek@accessventures.org to learn more!