A steady signal helps in choosing a lender, but it raises a second question of capital readiness: is the business prepared to borrow?

Why look at a Credit Union?

In the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Small Business Credit Survey, 76% of credit union borrowers approved for financing were satisfied with their lender, the highest rating, compared with 35% at online lenders, though the credit union sample is modest.

Credit unions are member-owned and community-focused, which affords the opportunity to build a lender relationship before a loan is needed. Small banks had a higher loan approval rate in the same survey and credit unions require membership, so treat a credit union as one option to evaluate.

Access is only half the equation

Every lender is judging whether a business can repay what it borrows. As we discussed this past March, the same Fed survey found that among applicants turned down for some or all of the financing they sought, more than a third cited too much existing debt and nearly a third cited a low credit score. Both show up early in a lender’s review.

A lender willing to lend does not automatically make a business ready to borrow.

Relationship and Credit Readiness

A strong relationship helps a lender understand a business, but it cannot make up for inadequate cash flow, heavy debt or unreliable financial statements. Relationship and readiness work together: the lender brings capital and an understanding of credit, and the owner brings credible information and a viable plan to repay.

The questions to ask

In July we asked whether your business could act when an opportunity arrives without warning.

If the right financing opportunity were available today, would your business be ready for it?

What story do your business documents tell about the state and health of your business?

Access to capital creates opportunity, and capital readiness puts a business in a position to take advantage of it.

Close the Capital Readiness Gap

Our Becoming Bankable® program bridges the capital readiness gap, preparing businesses for funding and helping financial institutions build stronger borrower pipelines.

The post A Steady Signal Still Needs a Ready Borrower appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 directs the agency to review all of its small business size standards every five years and adjust them to market conditions. The first closed in 2016, the second in 2023, the third is underway. The proposed rule the SBA published on August 20, 2026 is a major and significant adjustment. The statute requires a review. It does not direct redesign.

How Small Business Size Standards Actually Work

Two measures exist, a five-year average of your revenue or a 24-month average of your headcount. Congress fixed the measure for two sectors: manufacturers are counted in employees, service firms in revenue. Everywhere else the SBA decides, and today defaults to revenue.

What the Proposal Would Change

The SBA claims its proposal replaces roughly 1,000 standards with 338, set at broader industry groupings. In addition, the agency estimates over 110,000 employer firms would be newly added to the ranks of small business.

It also reverses the default, proposing to count employees wherever Congress has not required otherwise, which the agency claims would reduce how often a firm crosses between small and large. Today 88.8% of employer firms are classified under the revenue test. Under the proposal, this would drop to 58.2%.

What This Means for Your Business

More companies qualifying means more competition for the federal contracts reserved for small businesses. The SBA states the change would hit hardest at “businesses most similar in size” to the firms that newly qualify, and may cut their odds of winning those contracts.

Four things to do before November 20, when the period to submit comments closes.

1. Start with the SBA’s size standards tool, which tells you where you stand under the current rules. Then look up the proposed standard for your grouping, now generally classified as the first 4 digits of your current 6 digit NAICS number, and which measure it uses. It may not be the one you track.
2. Find out where your industry association stands, and whether it filed. Comments on Docket SBA-2026-0199 are public, so you can read what was filed on your behalf.
3. Decide whether to comment either directly or to your industry association.
4. Start planning against the classification you would be in, not the one you are. If your measure switches to headcount, hiring decisions start to affect eligibility.

The post Small Business Size Standards: The SBA Is Redefining Who Counts appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

Global AI Adoption Is Still Low

Combining 11 national surveys, Goldman found that even in the leading economies, France, the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, only 15% to 20% of businesses use AI. Major emerging markets sit at 10% to 15%.

If you feel behind, you are in the majority. And adoption here means using AI at all, not deploying it at scale.

Employees Report More Use Than Employers

Federal Reserve researchers report that 18% of US firms say they use AI, while 41% of US workers say they use generative AI in their jobs. The surveys measure different things, and most workers are employed by larger firms, which adopt faster. Your business may not have adopted AI, but some of your employees may already be using it, with or without your guidance.

The Hiring Cuts Came First

Job openings in AI-exposed industries began slowing in the second half of 2022, when few companies used the technology. Goldman’s economists suggest employers re-evaluated hiring plans based on what AI might do, not what it was doing.

American employers appear to have reacted most strongly.

The pullback is global, but Goldman finds the outright negative impact clearest in the US, where employment in information and communication services, which include software publishing, telecommunications and data processing, has fallen below its long-run trend. Other developed countries with similar AI adoption have held near trend.

Some Are Now Hiring Back

Separately, a Gartner survey of 321 customer service leaders found only 20% had reduced staff because of AI. Gartner forecasts that half of the companies making those cuts will rehire for similar roles by 2027. Companies that cut and then rehire pay twice: once to let people go, and again to refill the roles.

What This Means for Your Business

Small US firms largely sat this cycle out, with adoption under 20% among those with fewer than 20 employees.

That slower start gives you the chance to adopt AI in the right order: start with how your team already uses AI, define the problem, build your AI stack around it, measure the capacity you gain, then decide what changes.

The post AI Adoption Trails the Hiring Cuts Made in Its Name appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

NFIB asks owners whether the next three months are a good time to expand, and why. Only 12% said yes.

What Is Actually Blocking Small Business Expansion

Among owners who said it was not a good time, 25% cited general economic conditions. The cost of the project itself followed at 8%, the political climate at 6%, and their own sales prospects at 4%. Financing and interest rates ranked second from last at 3%.

The cost of capital has fallen. The average rate a small business borrower paid on a short-term loan was 7.5% in August, down from 9.5% two years ago. Borrowing activity picked up this past July, with owners borrowing mostly on lines of credit, which typically fund operating gaps rather than growth. Credit, when secured, is supporting day-to-day operations, not expansion.

Why This Is Happening Now

Owners are describing the national mood, not conditions inside their own business. Only 4% named their own sales prospects, even though sales across the survey were the weakest since November 2025. The most common answer, general economic conditions, is not a specific obstacle.

That mood is not a passing phase. NFIB’s uncertainty reading has averaged 92 over the past twenty months against a long-run average of 68, and has not returned to that baseline since November 2023. We covered this shift in January, when policy and cost uncertainty replaced inflation as the planning challenge.

What This Means for Your Business

Owners appear to be delaying capital expenditures based on that mood, which shows no near-term signs of improvement. The stronger strategy is to make the decision on your own evidence: what your pipeline holds, what capacity sits idle, what your margins can absorb. Capital readiness is a strategic question, and owners who resolve it early move first.

Our team works with business owners to strengthen strategy, improve financial readiness, and stay lender-ready through shifting conditions.

Whether you’re refining capital allocation priorities, stress-testing scenarios, or preparing your business for the opportunities ahead, we can help develop and implement clear next steps. Schedule a free discovery session.

The post Small Business Expansion: Interest Rates Aren’t What’s Holding You Back appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

How Embedded Credit Is Priced

Most of these products skip the interest rate. They charge a flat fee instead. Borrow $10,000 at a 15% fee, and you owe $11,500, no matter how fast or slow you repay it. Simple enough, until the timing changes the math. The faster you repay, the higher your annualized cost climbs, since that fixed fee gets compressed into a shorter window. A “15% fee” can work out to an effective yearly rate several times that, depending on repayment speed.

This pricing approach isn’t unique to any one platform; it’s an industry-wide standard for this type of financing. It’s simply priced differently than what most owners are used to comparing, and regulators have taken notice. California and New York now require these providers to disclose an estimated annualized rate before you sign. Texas and several other states require similar cost disclosures, though not always an APR specifically. If your state isn’t one of them yet, the math above is the version you’ll have to do yourself.

What to Check Before You Accept

Ask for the total repayment amount, not just the fee. Ask how repayment is calculated; if it’s a share of daily sales, model what that looks like on a slow week versus a strong one. And match the financing to the need. These offers are built for short-term cash flow, not major investments like equipment or expansion. For growth-sized needs, expect to pair it with another source of capital.

There’s another cost to weigh, one that shows up later. Square has confirmed directly that its financing doesn’t get reported to the major business credit bureaus, and other embedded lenders are widely reported to follow the same practice. That means repaying it on time, in full, builds you nothing toward the credit profile a future traditional lender will actually look at.

Preparing Before You Need It

Businesses that understand the full cost of their options, not just the fastest one, are in a stronger position no matter which lender they choose. Our Becoming Bankable® program was built to give owners that clarity before they need capital, so a fast offer never has to be an uninformed one.

The post Embedded Credit Is a Real Option. Know What You’re Trading. appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

Increasingly, that’s because the credit relationship already happened elsewhere: inside the point-of-sale system, accounting software, or payment processor the member uses every day.

This is embedded small business lending, changing who originates the relationship before a credit union ever enters the picture.

How the Model Works

Companies such as Toast (restaurant POS), Shopify (e-commerce), QuickBooks (accounting), Square (POS and payments), PayPal (payments), Stripe (payments infrastructure), Gusto (HR and payroll), and ServiceTitan (contractor and field service) all sit on transaction data most lenders never see, and several have added credit on top of it.

Toast Capital and QuickBooks Capital loans, for example, are issued by WebBank, not Toast or Intuit. The platform owns the application flow. A chartered bank owns the balance sheet. Some, like Stripe, white-label the infrastructure entirely, which is how Parafin ends up behind Gusto’s credit line and Amazon’s seller financing. Others, like ServiceTitan, underwrite nothing and simply route members to outside lenders.

What This Means for Your Portfolio

The scale is no longer marginal. Square has originated more than $32 billion in U.S. small business loans since 2014, with an average loan size near $10,000. PayPal has surpassed $30 billion in cumulative global small business loan originations since 2013. Intuit reported U.S. QuickBooks Capital loan volume grew 54% to $1.9 billion in a single quarter of fiscal 2026. Shopify’s own SEC filings show it purchased $4.2 billion in merchant cash advances and loans across its eight-country footprint in 2025, up from $3 billion the year before.

Many of these borrowers likely never applied at a credit union, and that borrowing leaves no trace in your portfolio data.

Shopify’s newer Capital Flex product ties borrowing capacity to ongoing performance, a structure built to expand credit for proven merchants over time. Borrowing capacity here isn’t capped; it’s designed to climb.

This shift is reshaping how small business owners think about their own capital options too, a theme we track closely in our Becoming Bankable research.

What Strategic Credit Unions Should Be Doing

The vulnerability sits in a specific range. Square’s average loan is near $10,000; most Shopify offers reportedly land between $5,000 and $200,000, funded in days with no traditional underwriting. Whether members would turn to their credit union first for financing in that range, or already assume it’s not worth the wait, is exactly the kind of question the renewal conversation below is meant to answer.

Two paths follow, on different timelines.

Short term, start asking directly during renewals whether a member has used embedded financing, a data point your portfolio can’t surface on its own, and it costs nothing to begin.

Long term, consider building the capacity to compete on speed, and that doesn’t mean building alone. Multi-investor commercial lending CUSOs already exist to pool underwriting expertise and compliance infrastructure, the same model behind a reported 35% rise in credit union commercial lending over the past year, according to Callahan & Associates. That shared infrastructure is where the capability to compete on speed would be built, not from scratch inside any one credit union.

Ask first, and a visibility gap becomes a membership and portfolio pipeline.

The post Embedded Small Business Lending Is Rewriting Who Originates the Relationship appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

Why Tariff Refunds Are Showing Up Now

The timing tracks. The refund window opened April 20, and ACE Portal accounts take three to four weeks to activate once registered. Businesses that moved quickly after the ruling would have started seeing deposits by late spring, right in line with what BofA’s July data captures.

Separately, BofA also found small-business profitability, measured by the inflow-to-outflow ratio on business accounts, hit its highest level in over a year in July. Refunds are likely one contributing factor among several, not the whole story, but they are part of the picture.

What This Means for Your Business

If 42.6% of businesses that paid tariffs directly have already gotten money back, that also means well over half have not, at least not yet. If you fall into that group and have not checked your status, this is a good week to do it. And if you have already received a deposit, do not assume it is the full amount owed. Some money back is not the same as a full refund.

Revisit the four steps from our original post: confirm your contact information is current with CBP, activate your ACE Portal account, enroll in direct deposit, and have your broker verify which duties actually qualify. Section 232, 301, 201, and anti-dumping duties are still excluded. This is also a good moment to engage with your accountant or trade counsel if you are unsure whether your entries qualify.

The window is open, and the money is moving. Whether it reaches you depends on whether you have followed through.

The post Tariff refunds are landing. Here is what the data shows three months in. appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

Relationship Still Comes First

In a market where online lenders have spent years messaging speed and easy approval, and where borrowing costs and credit standards have both tightened over the past year, small businesses are still applying first where they already have a relationship. Trust hasn’t eroded. What’s changed is how much that trust is worth once an application is filed, since a warm relationship doesn’t guarantee a full approval or the full amount requested.

The Opportunity for Financial Institutions

Financial institutions don’t need to win a business away from a competitor to grow their small-business loan portfolios; in most cases, they already have that business’s attention. What separates the institutions that convert relationships into funded loans from the ones that don’t is whether they helped that client get lender-ready long before the application landed on someone’s desk: clean financials, manageable debt, and documentation in order.

Relationship already gets a small business in the door. Financial institutions that go a step further by helping their existing clients become lender-ready before they apply are the ones positioned to turn that built-in trust into funded growth.

What It Means for Business Owners

The lender you already bank with is very likely where you’ll apply next. Build the relationship before you need the loan, not the week before.

A loan officer who already knows your business can flag what an underwriter will: thin cash reserves, inconsistent revenue reporting, and debt that looks heavier on paper than it is. That conversation, held months ahead of any application, is where credit readiness gets built, not scrambled together after a denial.

The Becoming Bankable® program bridges the capital readiness gap, preparing businesses for funding and helping financial institutions build stronger borrower pipelines.

The post Why Small Businesses Choose A Lender: What The Data Shows appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

This is attributed to a widening field of digital wallets, peer-to-peer apps, and buy-now-pay-later options, most of them run by fintech companies rather than banks. Banks are required to prioritize security. Newer entrants are not held to the same standard, and their focus tends to sit with the product first.

Why Payment Fraud Risk Is Increasing

This is worth flagging now because two trends are converging: digital payment adoption has crossed the majority threshold among U.S. consumers, and AI tools that convincingly fake a voice, a face, or an identity have become cheap and widely available. Together, they are what turns that gap into something businesses need to track.

On the outbound side, AI-generated voice and video can convincingly impersonate a vendor or executive requesting a rushed payment. On the inbound side, AI helps generate invented identities and test faked payment details automatically at volume, until one clears.

58% of U.S. consumers now use digital wallets, a figure that rises to 78% among Millennials and 80% among Gen Z, according to a Federal Reserve Financial Services survey. Adoption at that scale increases the paths available to both approaches.

What This Means for Your Business

Fraud losses of this kind show up as direct revenue leakage, exacerbating an environment of compressed margins and slow revenue growth. An employee, tricked into rushing a payment, sends cash out with nothing in return. A sale completed with faked payment details often ends in a chargeback after the product or service has already gone out the door. Either path removes real money from the business.

What Strategic Operators Are Doing

Operators managing this risk tend to build in a second check before any urgent payment request is approved, and to lean on their payment processor’s fraud tools rather than accepting transactions at face value. Many are also revisiting who holds authority to move money, implementing additional approval levels where necessary. Others are confirming their insurance actually covers fraud and social engineering losses, since general policies typically exclude it.

The post Payment Fraud Risk Is on the Rise for Small Businesses appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..

Why AI adoption starts at the top

A 12-point increase in seven months is fast movement for any workplace habit, and it extends a pattern we’ve tracked before: in Why Most Small Businesses Aren’t Using AI Yet, we noted that cost, skills gaps, and data readiness, not resistance, hold formal AI adoption back. This data suggests personal fluency may be outpacing formal strategy, with leaders becoming comfortable with AI tools before their organizations have a documented approach to using them.

From habit to structure

Personal familiarity is a starting point, not a substitute, for the intentional use we described in Your Small Business AI Stack: a Growth Engine, a Capacity Builder, and Money and Margins working together. A leader who is personally comfortable with AI is better positioned to build that stack with intention, rather than adding tools one at a time.

Where this leaves you

Now that most leaders have tried AI personally, the next step is translating that comfort into a structured approach across the business, not leaving it with one person’s habits.

The businesses where this habit spreads fastest are usually the ones where a leader modeled it first, not the ones waiting on a formal rollout plan.

The post Why AI Adoption Accelerates When Leaders Go First appeared first on Strategic Thinktank, Inc..