Small business banking platform Rapid Finance has introduced updates to its fraud detection platform Lynx.
The platform now has a cloud-based rules engine that lets the company’s enterprise customers create customized risk management rules and outcomes, letting them make informed lending decisions tailored to specific criteria for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
“The cloud-based rules engine gives small business lenders the ability to more easily tailor their lending criteria and risk management strategies,” said Will Tumulty, CEO of Rapid Finance. “Enhancing Lynx with rules-based customization helps solidify our commitment to providing the most robust, flexible small business financing solutions designed to meet the specific business needs of both lenders and SMB owners.”
The announcement comes a little less than two months after Rapid Finance teamed with Galileo Financial Technologies on a small business financing solution.
This collaboration has led to the Rapid Access Mastercard program, a prepaid commercial card program that allows Rapid Finance’s SMB customers with a line of credit (LOC) in good standing to seamlessly and instantly access their funds.
The rollout of these products comes as America’s SMBs continue to struggle to find funding. PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that just 8.5% of SMBs said they’d found working capital loans from banks were readily available.
And 11% of these SMBs said loans were available from online vendors, while more than half of responding businesses said coming into this year that they would consider searching for new sources of financing.
Of the companies considering new financing, the data show that more than a quarter would consider using an online lender, while roughly a third would work with a large national bank.
“It’s not simple for small businesses to get a loan, even if it’s a small loan,” Galileo Financial Technologies Chief Product Officer David Feuer told PYMNTS in an interview posted in October. “Banks are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of data … to make intelligent decisions about who to make their offers to.”
Of the main takeaways in PYMNTS Intelligence’s “SMB Borrowing Dynamics: Trends, Tools and Decision Drivers,” a report put together in collaboration with U.S. Bank, one of the more prominent was that the smaller the business, the less interest it seemed to have in using credit, with borrowing costs mentioned as a concern for 34% of all SMB executives surveyed.
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