Small Business Financing … With Wheels

Ours is a mobile world and not just with smartphones and smartwatches. True mobility gathers no moss and travels on two wheels or four. In the B2B space, that means commercial vehicles, which transport goods and equipment from place to place — up and down the supply chain, for example. For smaller players, buying cars and trucks outright may be prohibitively expensive, and financing takes on some attraction.

Small business tech player Biz2Credit — which offers up small business financing technology — said last week that it has finalized a partnership with Advantage Funding, a wholly owned subsidiary of Australia’s Macquarie Group, which provides equipment financing and leasing.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Rohit Arora, cofounder and chief executive officer of Biz2Credit, said that Advantage will be using Biz2Credit analytics (perhaps, most notably, the BizAnalyzer Score, which measures the financial health of companies applying for business loans) and other channels to help provide commercial vehicle financing to enterprises. Advantage will, in turn, back loans that are originated through the new relationship.

Arora told PYMNTS that the movement toward vehicle financing makes sense as larger firms, such as GE Capital and CIT, have exited or curtailed activity in this space, and bank have been small in scope, he said, in developing their own equipment financing arms.

Biz2Credit’s platform, originally geared toward working capital and now extending to vehicle finance, uses the same data across multiple points of information to determine creditworthiness. The added wrinkle, he said, is that it is possible to do digital appraisals on vehicles (and later, after branching out, into equipment for commercial use), and now, added Arora, Biz2Credit is “going where we’ve not been before, which is secured or asset-backed lending.” And there is potential in the wider equipment-based lending space, which pulls in $500 billion annually, said Arora. That potential extends across verticals such as retail, warehousing, smaller health care firms and building companies.

When asked about geographic reach, Arora said that the firm has exposure to the United States and the United Kingdom at present, with the deal with Advantage giving entrée into Australia (with proximity to Asia). Thus far, the firm has brought financing to SMBs tallying more than $1.3 billion.