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Credibly

Lender or loan platform

PPP
Type
Company or group
Role
Lender or loan platform
Programs
PPP
Updated
  • Type: Non-bank small-business finance platform (merchant cash advances, working-capital loans, lines of credit).
  • Legal entities: Credibly (founded as RetailCapital, corporate history cited to company statements); Retail Capital LLC d/b/a Credibly (SEC CIK 0001756073), securitizer of Credibly Asset Securitization II LLC.
  • Founded: 2010, Southfield, Michigan, by Ryan Rosett (Founder & Co-CEO).
  • HQ: Southfield, Michigan.
  • CEO: Ryan Rosett, Co-CEO (continuous).
  • Role in PPP: Platform/agent, not lender of record. Credibly announced itself as an "approved" PPP lender and reported facilitating applications, but its own CIO described delivering applications from the April 2020 second round to a network of partner PPP lenders. SBA loan-level data list neither "Credibly" nor "Retail Capital" as an originating or servicing lender.

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: the Tier 2 facilitator whose loans all sit on other lenders' rows.
  • What Credibly did for borrowers: ran a PPP application front end and routed applications to partner lenders, at scale in April–May 2020, then through an unnamed "lending partnership" in 2021.
  • Where responsibility sat: with the partner lenders of record; Credibly's role was intake, processing, and routing.
  • The claim-versus-data gap: an April 2020 press release announced Credibly's "designation as an Approved Lender" for PPP; the SBA loan-level record contains no Credibly lender-of-record rows. The routing model the company itself described reconciles the two.

Before the pandemic (2010–early 2020)

Credibly built a non-bank finance business for small businesses: merchant cash advances, short-term working-capital loans and lines of credit (company statements). Ryan Rosett signed the March 24, 2020 fintech coalition letter as Founder & Co-CEO — part of the cohort that asked Congress to route emergency relief through non-bank channels.

During the pandemic (2020–2022)

PPP: 50,000 applications, delivered to other lenders

On April 24, 2020, Credibly announced "its designation as an Approved Lender for the SBA Paycheck Protection Program" and said it was "one of a handful of fintech companies that was selected as a non-bank lender," naming Intuit, Square and PayPal among the others (Credibly Announces Designation as Approved Lender for SBA Paycheck Protection Program, Business Wire). The SBA's loan-level PPP data, in the September 30, 2024 release, contain no loan with Credibly or its legal entity, Retail Capital LLC, as originating lender, servicing lender or borrower (SBA PPP FOIA loan-level data).

Credibly's own pages describe intake work. A partner page archived on August 15, 2020 invited institutions to "leverage Credibly's platform to offer emergency Paycheck Protection Program loans on behalf of your institution," calling it a "plug and play solution." Credibly would "screen for fraud and eligibility, verify ownership and application completeness, and submit your customer's file," and borrowers would receive funds "upon approval from the Small Business Administration" (Offer Your Customers Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans).

In a guest post on the AWS Startups blog on March 15, 2021, chief information officer Jerome Pender described the second round of PPP funds. Within a few days of its release, he wrote, "Credibly received over 50,000 applications and delivered them to Credibly's network of PPP lenders" (Credibly: Supporting SMBs During the Pandemic while Preserving Asset-Backed Securitization). The post places that second round in the weeks after the first PPP funds "were depleted within a few days" in April 2020, and says demand for it "began winding down in May." Credibly's borrower page said "As of 5/7/2020 we are no longer accepting new applications" in May 2020, and said the same in March 2021 (SBA Coronavirus Relief Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans; Paycheck Protection Program Loans (PPP Loans), Mar. 1, 2021).

The March 2021 page also said "Credibly is offering the new PPP loans through a lending partnership," without naming the partner. By May 17, 2021 that sentence was gone, and the page said that as of May 4, 2021 the SBA would accept new PPP applications only through Community Financial Institutions (Paycheck Protection Program Loans (PPP Loans), May 17, 2021). A U.S. Chamber of Commerce list of fintech PPP providers, updated June 1, 2021, reported that Credibly "said it has facilitated more than $500 million in PPP loans to date" (8 Fintech Companies Offering Paycheck Protection Loans). That figure is Credibly's own. The SBA data cannot test it, because each loan row names only an originating and a servicing lender. None of these documents names the partner lenders or what Credibly was paid for the applications it delivered.

On October 6, 2020, Credibly said it had "immediately offered tailored relief to its affected customers" and had moved "approximately one third of its staff" to its portfolio management team to handle account modifications for "thousands of small businesses" (FinTech Lender Credibly Supports Small Businesses During the COVID-19 Pandemic, while Preserving their Asset Backed Securitization). The release gives no terms, account count or cost. The modifications needed the financiers' consent: "bondholders and warehouse lenders overwhelmingly approved the necessary amendments." Co-CEO Ryan Rosett said that "Credibly did not have a contractual obligation to assist our merchants and modify their obligations during this period." The company said Kroll Bond Rating Agency removed its Watch status on the securitization on September 23, 2020 and affirmed the ratings on its bonds.

In 2021 Credibly went back to the bond market. Retail Capital LLC, "d/b/a Credibly," filed with the SEC a KPMG report on a data file of 2,055 receivables secured by small-business loans and merchant cash advances as of January 31, 2021, intended as collateral for Credibly Asset Securitization II, Series 2021-1 (Independent Accountants' Report on Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures; Form ABS-15G, Mar. 23, 2021). At the company's instruction, KPMG checked a random sample of 200 of them. Retail Capital's Form ABS-15G for calendar 2020, filed February 12, 2021 under Rule 15Ga-1 for all asset-backed securities it sponsored, checked the box for "no activity to report" for the annual period (Form ABS-15G, Feb. 12, 2021).

On April 20, 2021, Credibly announced three classes of notes totaling $65.77 million, expandable to $200 million, that refinanced its Series 2018-1 securitization. It called the deal "the first ABS within the SMB lending space since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic." It said "creative, merchant-focused servicing and recovery strategies" had contributed to "significantly lower losses than what was modeled" (Credibly Announces Second Offering Of Asset-Backed Securities, Benzinga sponsored-content copy).

Michigan's 2020 WARN list, 216 notices through November 24, has none from Credibly or Retail Capital (Warn Notices, Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, 2020). Credibly's October 2020 release said it had provided financing to "over 27,000 SMBs"; the CIO's March 2021 post said "more than 19,000." Announcing in May 2022 that it had refinanced a maturing $10 million corporate note in March, chief financial officer Michael Seneski said, "We are proud of Credibly's pandemic response and the profitable growth that we continue to exhibit." The same release put lifetime funding at "more than $1.5 billion," against "over $1B" in April 2020 (Credibly Announces Corporate Note Refinancing and New Asset-Backed Financing Facility with Investment Grade Rating).

After the pandemic (2022 – present)

No government enforcement action related to PPP has been located against Credibly; it is not named in the House Select Subcommittee's fintech-PPP report.

The company remained private and kept operating in its pre-pandemic lane (company statements). Its PPP activity appears nowhere in the SBA lender data because the lender-of-record rows and the SBA fees belong to the partners; any agent or referral compensation is not in the public record.

  • Ryan Rosett — founder/co-CEO and letter signatory
  • Lendio — the marketplace variant of the same tier
  • Fundbox — the letter peer that lent directly instead

Sources

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External references

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