Many small businesses who tried to apply for a Paycheck Protection Program loan during the early days of the pandemic can tell you what a nightmare it was. I know, because it happened to my mother.
In addition to my family’s tea company, which I wrote about here, my mother operates her own small business supplying corporate snack rooms. When people stopped going to the office, her business hit a wall. She needed a PPP loan to pay employees while waiting for the stay-at-home orders to lift.
She initially applied for a loan from a bank my family has done business with for decades, one of the country’s five largest. Then she waited. And waited. And waited. After it was clear her application was going nowhere, I polled my Twitter followers to learn more about FinTech companies helping small businesses with PPP loans. A few folks mentioned Cross River Bank, a FinTech startup. I recommended my mom apply for a PPP loan through Cross River, and roughly a week later, they disbursed the funds to her account.
See also: The Future of B2B FinTech: Enabling the Merchant
One reason why my mother had such a hard time getting a loan from the traditional bank was that they gave priority to larger customers that were well established.…
