Small Business Lending

A High-Impact Place to Start

starting point for Ascent Journey

Start your Ascent journey here

Small business lending is often the moment a relationship is truly formed. It is one of the few times a business owner is willing to change institutions, move deposits, and reconsider how they bank day to day.

That makes lending a powerful starting point, and a risky one if the experience falls flat.

Ascent delivers a best-in-class small business lending experience while laying the foundation for deeper, longer-term relationships.

Business deposits are highly sought after because of their size and stickiness. They are also difficult to win. Business owners will only make a change when the experience feels clearly better, more thoughtful, and easier than what they are used to.

With Ascent, institutions can design fast, flexible lending workflows that adapt to each borrower. Using an intuitive no-code builder, teams create customized applications aligned to their strategy, not a rigid template. Applications dynamically reduce unnecessary questions as information is gathered, helping borrowers move through the process quickly and confidently.

Borrowers can connect to trusted third-party data sources such as QuickBooks, Plaid, and the IRS to reduce manual entry and improve accuracy. This leads to lower abandonment, higher engagement, and better conversion rates, without increasing operational burden.

Ascent also streamlines internal work. Configurable prescreening rules and automatic validation reduce manual review. Lending workflows can intelligently present related products, such as overdraft protection, business credit cards, or combined loan and deposit onboarding, without forcing separate processes. All information flows directly into your LOS, core, and other systems of record, preserving context beyond the loan itself.

Lending becomes collaborative rather than transactional. Built-in messaging, proxy applications, and shared document collection allow borrowers and bankers to work together in real time, accelerating decisions and improving the quality of conversations.

Many tools can help you originate a loan. The difference shows after the loan closes.

For many institutions, small business lending is a natural place to begin with Ascent. It delivers immediate improvements in speed and experience, while establishing unified data that supports deposit growth, treasury adoption, reviews, renewals, and ongoing relationship management.

Secure, permissioned data from sources like QuickBooks, Experian, IRS, and Plaid - combined with your core systems to reduce manual entry and start applications with real context.

A consistent, on-brand experience across every application. Adaptive interfaces guide customers through complex steps without confusion or repetition.

Continuously checks customers against internal and external data - alerting your team when attention or action is needed.

From day one, Ascent builds a clean, connected data foundation - enabling automation, insight, and AI that actually works.

Define how work moves based on real criteria. Route applications automatically, surface early decisions, and avoid wasted effort on poor-fit submissions.

Customers and teams work from the same record - sharing documents, messages, and progress without back-and-forth or lost context.

Connects with your core, LOS, card issuing, treasury, document management, and more - keeping data aligned without replacing your stack.

Every interaction adds context. Ascent builds a clearer picture of each customer, improving every future decision and experience.

Collect information at any point in the journey — and automatically apply it wherever it’s needed, without asking again.

Why this is a powerful starting point

Lending is often the moment a business is willing to move deposits and deepen the relationship. Starting here allows institutions to capture that momentum and carry context forward.

Explore a better way to lend to small businesses