Forbes: What Owners Should Know About Coming Changes To Business Credit

(As appeared in Forbes.)

Founders may be intimately familiar with their personal credit but less aware of their business credit. Small things have a big impact on their business financial picture and an owner’s ability to raise capital.

Levi King, the founder and CEO of Nav, is excited about helping business owners. Nav, founded in 2012, is a San Mateo-based online financing marketplace that works with more than 200,000 small businesses and 50 of the top business lenders and credit cards. Kleiner Perkins led Nav’s Series A Round and their Series B round was led by Experian.

Personal experience—moving from borrower to loan broker

King dropped out of college to start a sign manufacturing business, the first of several small businesses he owned in his 20s. He had a good accountant, paid his taxes and had healthy financials, but business credit was still hard. It was difficult to get credit and, even worse, it was difficult to figure out how credit worked.

In 2006, King co-founded Lendio, a high-growth loan brokerage. They scaled rapidly, but King was troubled for the business owners they couldn’t help. Thousands of customers every month, seeking and failing to secure financing, begged for insight.

Owner’s felt their businesses did not present a credit risk, but, on paper, the lending decision was still ‘no.’ Banks won’t unveil their underwriting model and owners are left mystified about what the ‘problem’ with their business credit was.

Is your business credit ‘a little bit off’?

King says businesses were often just a little bit off from securing good financing. This can mean the difference between an expensive merchant cash advance and a mid-prime or prime loan, like an SBA loan or a bank line of credit.

Many derogatory items appear on a business credit report that owners are never aware of. These include:

• Tax liens – These are very common and often small. There may be a county or city tax the owner doesn’t know he should be paying. A tax lien on your business credit file gets you kicked out of automatic underwriting with a lender.
• UCC filings – If an SBA Lender or equipment lender extends credit, they record a UCC filing as a lien on the collateral. This has nothing to do with whether the business is in arrears. There is no legal requirement for the lender to remove these liens if the debt has been paid. If liens like this appear on your business credit file and you do not disclose them, you may be seen as a fraud risk for failure to disclose.
• Collections on business credit reports – Often errors appear if a similarly named business had a collections issue and derogatory comments were inappropriately applied to your file. FCRA, the Fair Credit Reporting Act doesn’t apply to businesses, and therefore there is no standard for correcting business credit.
• Personal credit of the business owner – Owners often use personal credit cards and then pay them down. With the lag in credit reporting, if you don’t pay the cards down up to 5 days before the due date, the new balance may not be reflected before it is reported. This can create an up to 100-point difference on your credit score from say a 770 on the 25th of the month to a 670 on the 1^st of the month.

Upcoming regulatory shifts may make a big difference

King says coming changes on the consumer side of credit will have a positive effect on business credit. Starting July 1, 2017, the three major credit agencies—Equifax, Experian & TransUnion—are dropping certain negative information from credit reports, including tax liens and civil judgments.

The Consumer Data Industry Association estimates that these changes could result in the removal of 96 percent of civil judgments and 50 percent of tax liens due to insufficient personal identifying information.

Improving your credit file with positive items

While most individuals focus on getting negative items off their credit files, I asked about getting positive information reflected.