Fintech for Small Business: Former SBA Administrator & Harvard Business School Senior Fellow Karen Mills

Today we’re expanding beyond our usual Barefoot Innovation focus on consumer financial innovation, to explore the parallel issues arising for small businesses. We’ve touched on this before, but are so fortunate, today, to have a guest who deeply understands the whole range of these issues. She is Karen Mills, former head of the Small Business Administration and now senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, where she has just released a comprehensive paper on fintech and small business.

We recorded today’s show in her office on the business school campus, which is just across the Charles River from my fellowship’s home base in the Harvard Kennedy School. She and I first met in Washington a few years back, when she issued a research paper on the state of small business lending. That was in conjunction with the group that issued the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights (which we covered in our episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. In 2016, much to my delight, Karen and her co-author Brayden McCarthy put out an update on her paper, and this time it’s mostly about fintech.

Technology is changing small business lending in the same ways it’s transforming consumer finance, but with different twists. On the positive side, innovators are using technology to do better for SME’s -- small and medium-sized enterprises -- by adopting low-cost online platforms, becoming much smarter about getting and using data, speeding up service, and creating a vastly better user experience than was possible in the past. The data issue is crucial. Thanks to new technology (including Square), small businesses increasingly can give lenders solid, up to date information on their financial positions and cash flows. Innovative lenders can analyze this, determine with precision what the borrower can afford, and often can create a flexible repayment schedule that works with the rhythm of the business, including seasonal ones.

These innovators are filling an enormous gap -- which Karen clearly demonstrates -- because banks just cannot profitably make the smaller loans that so many businesses need.

There are  downsides, though. One is that whereas local banks interact with their business customers face to face,  these new relationships are online. For lenders, this creates higher risk of fraud. And for borrowers, there is rising danger that these entrepreneurs will be harmed by confusing terms and, sometimes, by downright predatory practices online.

And here’s a little-known fact:  small business borrowers have almost no regulatory protections, at least at the federal level. There is no federal regulator for small business lending, as there is for consumers, and even if there were, there are very few regulations that apply. Generally speaking, there are no requirements for standard disclosures to small business borrowers, and no rules against unfair and deceptive practices, beyond those that cover commerce in general.

This is significant, because today’s small businesses are more similar to consumers than ever before. The “1099” or “gig” economy has led to more and more people starting small businesses as their main work, or to supplement tight household budgets, or to tide them over after losing a job. It’s a mistake to assume that, simply because they’re business people, they are therefore financially sophisticated.

Listeners to Barefoot Innovation have probably figured out by now that I’m not a fan of the current regulatory apparatus for protecting financial consumers (even though I myself have been involved in developing some of it). Broadly speaking, disclosures are failing, and regulations are choking desirable innovation. The last thing I think we should do is to transplant our whole system of consumer protection laws into the fresh, green field of small business lending, and have it put down roots there -- like crabgrass. I think we should be deeply rethinking our consumer laws. In the process, though, we should also be thinking about whether and how to create protections and tools for small businesses to use, too.

Karen does recommend extending some consumer-type protections to these firms, including APR’s (we had a good exchange on the pros and cons of that). She also has tremendous insights into the structure and nature of the market, and on what to do about what she calls the “spaghetti soup” of regulatory agencies and rules, which now make it so hard to move toward a smarter system.

She focuses, too, on the critical need for clearer, updated regulatory guidance for banks that want to work with fintechs on small business lending. A wide spectrum of new models are emerging, partly because these two industries need each other -- they complement each other. Both sides will suffer, and so will business borrowers, if banks can’t navigate the third-party risk rules of their prudential regulators. (As I often say, the regulators have the hardest job in all this.)

More information on Karen:

Karen Gordon Mills served as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 until August 2013.  She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School focusing on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation.

As SBA Administrator and a Cabinet member, Mills served on the President’s National Economic Council and was a key member of the White House economic team.  At the SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion.  Mills is credited with turning around the agency during the financial crisis and with streamlining loan programs, shortening turnaround times, and reducing paperwork.  In addition, Mills helped small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early stage capital, hire skilled workers, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains.  

Prior to the SBA, Mills held leadership positions in the private sector, including as a partner in several private equity firms, and served on the boards of Scotts Miracle-Gro and Arrow Electronics.  Most recently, she was president of MMP Group, which invested in businesses in consumer products, food, textiles, and industrial components.  In 2007, Maine Governor John Baldacci appointed Mills to chair Maine’s Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, where she focused on regional development initiatives, including a regional economic cluster with Maine’s boatbuilding industry.   

Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. Additionally, she is a past vice chair of the Harvard Overseers, and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Harvard Corporation.

And listen, too, to our episode from last year with Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, a leading example of platform lending to small businesses.

More for our listeners

We have some amazing shows coming up, including one with Chase’s Colleen Briggs, several focused on global trends, at least one with a CEO of a community bank, and one that I will call a barn-burner with the former CEO of PayPal and Inuit, Bill Harris. Don’t miss them!

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Innovation in Small Business Lending: Sam Hodges of Funding Circle

Welcome to our first conversation with an innovator in small business lending – my guest is Sam Hodges, Co-founder and U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle.

Funding Circle was founded in 2012 and is the world’s leading marketplace lender that’s exclusively focused on small businesses. It has made more than $2.5 billion in loans to 20,000 businesses in the U.S., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK (where it is based). It customers borrow directly from a wide range of investors, including more than 50,000 people, the UK Government, and divers entities like local councils, a university and various financial organizations.

Funding Circle was created because the founders were small business owners themselves and learned how hard it is to access finance, even for a successful business. Even when a loan was approved, they found the process difficult, or the terms unattractive. Sometimes they even felt misled. After opening their 96th loan rejection letter, they decided this was a systemic failure – that the traditional bank loan system was broken – and they set out to build a new solution. The financial crisis created fertile ground for them, as so many business suddenly had trouble accessing capital (the number of small businesses has dropped every year for the past 8-10 years). And their timing fit with the emergence of marketplace lending as a new model.

As Funding Circle’s Co–Founder and U.S. Managing Director, Sam oversees the company’s overall strategic direction and its day–to–day operation in the U.S. He was previously Vice President of Business Development at SecondMarket, the leading marketplace for alternative investments, where he was responsible for corporate and business development and the company’s geographic expansion efforts. Sam was also part of the investment team at Pequot Capital, an $8 billion global fund manager, covering investments in financial technology and information services. He started  his career as a strategy consultant at Katzenbach Partners, advising financial services and technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of two private companies. He received his MBA and MS from Stanford University and graduated magna cum laude from Brown University.

Sam points to three key Funding Circle innovations:

• One is delivering a superior borrower experience. They can on-board and evaluate customers sometimes in minutes, or a few days, for situations where a bank might need 30 man-hours to reach a decision.
• Second, they’ve re-architected how they do credit evaluation. Sam says it’s not a silver bullet, but they’ve have created their own rigorous data-driven approach to understanding risk, and they’re using new data, in new ways, to serve more borrowers.
• And third, he argues that the marketplace model can be more scalable and profitable than the traditional bank approach, enabling them to grow a global business.

In our conversation, Sam expresses his continued confidence in the marketplace model. He discusses Funding Circle’s risk analytics (he says they hire world class risk officers from world-class institutions). He explains the role of alternative data in driving more sound and inclusive lending.

I was especially interested in how Sam contrasts the U.S. regulatory model with the U.K.’s efforts, especially on P2P lending. He thinks the fragmented American structure makes innovation here difficult. He also has suggestions for regulatory innovation, including sandboxes and a graduated scale of coverage that would allow small innovators to get up and running more easily.  He emphasizes the need for interagency coordination and consistency. He says transparency needs to undergird the whole industry, and that requires smart, sound regulation that everyone understands. (To listen to our previous episode about the “Regulatory Sandbox” with Nitish Pandey of BMO, click here.)

Sam welcomes smart customer protection regulation – he discusses his involvement in creating the Small Business Borrower’s Bill of Rights we discussed in an earlier episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance.  See also this Harvard research paper by former Small Business Administration head Karen Mills on small business lending.

I hear increasing discussion about more regulation of small business lending. It’s partly because the online lenders are transforming the market, and partly because the “1099 economy” is producing more little businesses that arguably are functionally-equivalent to consumer borrowers.  The sector is covered by some of the federal laws on consumer protection, but not by most of them.  My own view is that regulation will probably need to come, but that we should NOT transplant the existing consumer protection rules into it without first updating them for the digital age. Speaking as someone who helped develop some of these rules, I will say they have a mixed record, at best, of protecting consumers. And complying with them costs a fortune. If we’re going to bring new regulation into the small business sector, let’s use the chance to take a fresh look, and apply some RegTech thinking.

Other notes:

Newsletter:

I also want to share an announcement -- this month we’re launching a newsletter. It will be pithy and punchy and useful, highlighting the most interesting things that have happened, the most exciting things coming up. It will be a way to share some of the fascinating things I’ve been getting involved with. One example is that, this summer, I joined the Netherlands’ Queen Maxima (who leads the UN’s work on global financial inclusion) on her trip to Silicon Valley. Another is that I just returned from a week in Fiji at the global policy forum of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which represents the financial regulators of more than 90 countries in the developing world. I’m also working on ideas for promoting regulatory sandboxes in the United States. And in November, I’ll be speaking in Singapore at Asia’s first RegTech conference. And I’m doing a lot of work on RegTech. In fact, in Fiji I heard a new term – “SuperTech.” It’s a branch of RegTech that means technology-driven solutions for bank supervision.

The newsletter will share some of the intriguing things that are going on, outside our poccasts.

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Coming guests:

And look for some amazing guests coming up. We have none other than the leaders of Varo, Ripple, LendUp, and Loot (from London)!

We have two amazing, mold-breaking innovators from the developing world – eCurrency and OneDollarCellPhone, as well as the head of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion.

And back in the US, we’ll have the community bank perspective on innovation.

But first, next up, we have Harvard professor and behavioral economics expert, Brigitte Madrian.

So, enjoy my conversation with Funding Circle’s Sam Hodges … and come back soon!

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