Interview with Rohit Arora, CEO of Biz2Credit

by: Theresa Witham

In 2007, Rohit Arora, CEO, and brother Ramit Arora, president, co-founded Biz2Credit.com as a marketplace to connect small businesses with lenders.

Biz2Credit acts like the CFO for the small businesses, says Arora, analyzing the business, offering free financial health checkups and ultimately matching the business with a lender.
In addition, the site publishes the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index http://www.biz2credit.com/small-business-lending-index to showcase trends. For example, in the January 2015 issue, the index reports that “big banks ($10 billion+ in assets) approved 21.3 percent of small business loan requests in January 2015, up from 21.1 percent in December 2014.” In January 2014, the big bank approval rate was 17.4 percent so it’s been steadily improving all year.

But small bank approvals are down. “For the third consecutive month, small banks are denying more than half of their loan requests. Further, lending approval rates by small banks dropped for the eighth month in a row as they approved 49.6 percent of loan requests from small business owners in January, which is slightly below December’s mark of 49.7 percent.” The highest approval level for small banks in the past year was 51.6 percent in May 2014.

As for credit unions, approvals are stagnant at 43.2 percent in January, a slight drop from 43.3 percent the previous month. Credit unions have been in the 43 percent range for approvals in the past 12 months, with their highest rate of approval coming in at 43.7 in June 2014.

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