Small businesses face a lot of challenges early on. While many entrepreneurs expect hardships, preparing for certain difficulties is a much better plan for success than dealing with them as they come up. Looking to share insights on these challenges, Uplinq, the credit decisioning support platform, has launched Word on the Street.
Word on the Street is a video series highlighting the authentic voices of small business owners around the world as they share their passion, struggles and day-to-day realities of entrepreneurship.
Accessing working capital is challenging across the globe. Highlighting this, Word on the Street includes small business owners from India, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, the UK and more. In addition to its geographic diversity, Word on the Street captures insights from a wide range of industries, with interviewees that include barbers, retailers, restaurateurs, manufacturing and more.
Throughout the discussions in Word on the Street, entrepreneurs across the globe detail the issues they face when running their businesses, particularly securing the affordable credit they need to stay afloat. Word on the Street will kick off with several interviews spotlighting Sunan Spriggs, founder of CityLux Boutique, and continue on an ongoing basis, giving small business owners worldwide a chance to tell their story.
Spriggs commented: “[Banks] should be looking at how is the business doing, not just the personal credit [of the small business owner]… I think what’s more meaningful is, what if [the bank] were to look at the actual operations of the business? Not once did the bank ask me, ‘Can I see your cashflow?’ or ‘Can I see how much revenue you’re doing?’ but that’s a better indication of whether or not I can pay back one of these loans.”
“When it comes to small and medium-sized companies like us, we are scrutinized, put under microscopes, and the majority of the time, we get a negative answer [in response to a loan application] and then we have to change our outlook,” added Saurabh Shourie, owner of Start Smart LED in Jaipur, India.
Uplinq’s role
Uplinq’s AI-powered credit decisioning technology is built to solve the problems these small business owners describe by empowering lenders to approve and manage risks on loans they would have otherwise declined based on traditional loan underwriting criteria.
By giving lenders access to broad sets of environmental, community, and market data, Uplinq helps paint a clearer picture of small business loan applicants, working within banks’ existing risk parameters to approve more loans and expand access to capital for small businesses across the globe.
“Uplinq was ultimately founded to help small businesses around the world, and we’re thrilled to unveil our Word on the Street series to further this mission,” said Ron Benegbi, founder and CEO of Uplinq. “These groundbreaking video interviews are unlike any other content in the market today, connecting our team and audience directly with the small business owners the Uplinq solution aims to benefit.
“By using our platform to share these conversations, we hope to illuminate the challenges small business owners face and, in the process, encourage financial institutions to consider broadening their small business lending operations.”
