Next time you feel like picking up the phone to yell at Comcast for yet another service outage, you might want to think first, if you're a small business owner. That's because the firm has partnered with the fintech Lendio to offer business loans to their small- and medium-sized business customers, and might just be a lender for you instead. Comcast has to be innovative because their original cable product is getting steadily compressed by streaming offerings that cost far less to subscribe to. In fact, they've recently added FREE mobile to their offerings for cable customers. It makes perfect sense that they are doing cross-collaborations with firms such as Lendio to generate new revenue streams for the firm as well.
(Cindy Taylor/Publisher)
"There are over 28 million small business in America — a diverse group of offerings that, taken collectively, are often referred to as the “backbone of the American economy.” And, given that SMBs of various stripe employ 48 percent of the American workforce, that seems to be a fairly reasonable description.
And while those small business are a very diverse group, in the years since the Great Recession (and the less-than-great recovery that followed), those SMBs have been united by a common problem — lack of easy access to capital.
“If you put yourself in the shoes of an owner running a small business, they have a lot to manage with sales, marketing, payroll, inventory — and what they don’t have time to do is become an expert on small business lending. So what most business owners do when they need a loan is go to their bank, fill out a lot of long forms of paperwork and then wait a long time on a bank loan that 80 to 90 percent of the time they then get turned down for,” Lendio CEO and co-founder Brock Blake told PYMNTS about the somewhat troubled state of SMB lending today.
The obvious problem in this situation, Blake noted, is that businesses aren’t getting the access to capital they need to expand. The less obvious issue is that business are going without funding when they don’t have to...
...“We help restaurant owners, landscapers, dry cleaners, gas stations and small manufacturers — really the firms that are literally the backbone of the economy. Our average loan size is between $30 thousand and $50 thousand, though we do loans up to a few million. But the majority of our customers are looking for an infusion of capital because they are trying to expand, buy equipment, hire and expand their worker base, or go more digital and launch a new website.
And this week, Blake noted, Lendio is announcing a partnership that will allow them to bring the more customized loan access to a much larger audience of SMBs. Going forward, Lendio will be working with Comcast Business to provide streamlined and enhanced access to the Lendio marketplace for Comcast Business customers...:
Source: Pymnts.com