To America’s Financial Institutions: It’s Time to Re-Engage with Small Business

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the heartbeat of the American economy. More than 34.8 million SMBs make up 99.9% of all U.S. businesses, employ 45.9% of the private workforce, and generate 43.5% of U.S. GDP each year.

Yet despite their importance, the relationship between banks and small businesses has frayed. Over time, serving this segment became more costly, more complex, and less scalable. Acquiring SMB customers is expensive. Underwriting them is complex. Legacy systems make it hard for banks to serve this segment profitably.

But technology has changed. New data sources, embedded platforms, and advanced underwriting models now give banks unprecedented visibility into SMB performance - turning what was once a high-cost segment into a scalable, data-driven opportunity.

It’s time for banks to re-engage with small business - and to do it differently.

Prime: Rebuilding the Foundation of Fair Credit

At Prime Financial Technologies, we started with a simple mission: to fix what’s broken in SMB credit.

Too many platforms offer high-cost cash advances to every customer. We’re not that. We focus on the “invisible middle” - creditworthy small businesses overlooked by banks and underserved by MCA providers.

Prime enables platforms to offer real loans, at real rates, to the SMBs that have earned it.

Our vision is to build a fairer credit system - one where every qualified business can access bank-rate capital, and every aspiring business has a clear, data-driven path to get there.

We’re not a lender. We’re not trying to disrupt - we enable. Our model is built on deep partnerships with banks, capital providers, and SMB-facing platforms. We bring together trusted distribution, rich data, and institutional credit know-how to power lending programs that are contextual, sustainable, and built to scale.

A New Model for SMB Lending

Prime’s embedded infrastructure helps banks re-enter the small-business market by solving the two biggest barriers: acquisition and underwriting.

Lowering Acquisition Costs: By meeting SMBs where they already work - inside the software and payments platforms they use daily - banks can reach pre-qualified, high-intent customers without costly outreach. It’s targeted distribution built into the workflows of the real economy.

Revolutionizing Underwriting with Real Data: Prime’s platform provides real-time visibility into revenue, invoices, payments, and cash flow. That transforms underwriting from a backward-looking process into a forward-looking science. When decisions reflect data - not proxies - fairness becomes programmable and risk becomes measurable.

Our value lies in differentiated data access, predictive modeling, and embedded delivery - helping banks launch lending programs that scale with confidence and integrity.

The Opportunity: Restoring Fairness and Growth

The opportunity is enormous. SMBs remain America’s greatest engine of growth and innovation, but they continue to be underserved.

With Prime, banks can profitably re-engage this sector and restore fairness to the system:

• Access to high-quality SMBs: Reach transparent, high-performing businesses inside trusted ecosystems.

• Risk-adjusted lending: Make smarter, faster credit decisions with richer data and ensemble modeling.

• Community impact: Each loan becomes an investment in entrepreneurship, jobs, and local economic strength.

But credit is only the start. SMBs increasingly want holistic partners - offering deposits, treasury tools, cards, and payments.

By re-engaging now, banks can reclaim their role as the operating system for SMB financial health - helping platforms serve, support, and scale the businesses that power the real economy.

Why Now

Small-business lending stands at a crossroads. Fintechs brought speed and automation, but often at the expense of transparency and affordability.

The next era belongs to those who can combine bank-rate trust with fintech agility.

Banks already have the capital, brand, and regulatory foundation to serve SMBs sustainably. What they’ve lacked - until now - is the infrastructure.

That’s where Prime comes in. We’re building the rails that align technology with trust.

Our goal: 80% of American businesses should have access to affordable, bank-quality credit, and the rest should have a clear path to get there.

With Prime, the barriers of cost and complexity are falling away. Banks can once again become the cornerstone of small-business growth, and bring transparency and fairness back to the heart of lending.