The Office of Advocacy’s latest small business lending report is a valuable small business tool because it tells you who is making small business loans in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and most of the territories. Since there are several ways to measure lending, it’s not quite accurate to say any one lender is number one. So the report provides several rankings at the national and state levels.
The report provides useful information to small businesses interested in finding the banks with proven track records of providing loans in smaller amounts. And it is of interest to financial institutions looking for information about their small business lending performance relative to other institutions.
The rankings in Small Business Lending in the United States, 2010-2011, rely on the 2010 and 2011 Call Reports and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reports, the most recent data available. Tables provide rankings of the lenders who made the most small business loans (under $1 million), macro business loans (between $100,000 and $1 million), and micro business loans (under $100,000). The two data sources each have different focuses. Call Reports are generated by all banks, and the CRA reports pertain to banks with more than $1 billion in assets. In addition, Call Report data are keyed to the institution’s headquarters location rather than the location of the lending activity. A significant amount of lending activity by large lending institutions takes place in states other than the one in which the headquarters is located. The CRA reports contain location-specific information as to where loans were made.
This invaluable reference can be found on the Advocacy website.
—Kathryn Tobias, Senior Editor