A small business can have a warehouse full of merchandise, a growing order book and packages moving toward customers, and still struggle to qualify for financing.
The problem isn’t that the business lacks money-making potential. It’s that traditional underwriting can struggle to distinguish between the activity of a small and medium-sized business (SMB) experiencing a temporary cash crunch from one headed toward financial trouble.
Now, a growing class of lenders and technology platforms is betting the answer may be hiding in the shipping label. FedEx and Stripe, for example, last week announced the launch of a 2027 solution designed to use operational intelligence from FedEx Dataworks to inform underwriting through Stripe Capital.
The combination of underwriting and operational data is only becoming more attractive as logistics, commerce and payments data themselves become more connected in real time. As a result, the information generated by a company’s everyday operations could begin to determine how much credit that business deserves.
For small businesses, that could make growth itself an immediate source of financing. For banks, payments providers and logistics platforms, it raises a competitive question: Who owns the information that determines whether a business gets funded?
Read more: How B2B Invoices Became Payment Infrastructure
Financial Statements Come Too Late for SMBs to Get Credit They Need
Traditional business lending is largely backward-looking. Credit scores, bank statements, tax returns and financial statements help lenders establish whether borrowers have historically generated enough cash to repay their obligations. Those records remain essential, but they can offer an incomplete picture of businesses whose working capital is tied up in physical goods.
A recent report by PYMNTS Intelligence found that half of SMBs depend on day-to-day sales proceeds or cash already in the bank to remain in operation, with hotels, restaurants and entertainment businesses the most likely to rely on those limited cash resources. Only 44% reported access to financing and working-capital solutions, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research on how small businesses finance themselves during periods of uncertainty.
Among the reasons for that lack of working capital access is the fact that PYMNTS Intelligence found that 57% of financial institutions cite inaccurate or incomplete SMB records as an underwriting obstacle. Outdated information was cited by 52%, inconsistent information by 52% and limited financial histories by 48%. The findings come from a survey of 350 financial institution executives in the United States and United Kingdom, detailed in the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Keeping Score: Why Data Quality Determines Lending Decisions for the Smallest Firms.”
Operational data can potentially narrow that information gap.
“Payment data is interesting because it really is the digital footprint of a business,” Ryan Taylor, SVP Product Management – Mobility & Payments at WEX, told PYMNTS. “It tells you more than just what was spent. It can tell you about what was happening in the business at that exact moment that a payment occurred.”
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That doesn’t make shipping data a substitute for cash flow. A dispatched package isn’t a completed sale, and a completed sale isn’t necessarily a profitable one. But it could help lenders distinguish between a company experiencing financial deterioration and one experiencing the cash demands of expansion.
The Next Credit Signal Could Come From the Supply Chain
The FedEx-Stripe collaboration is particularly revealing because neither company is approaching lending primarily through a conventional bank branch. The innovation isn’t simply collecting more data. It’s connecting information that historically lived in separate commercial systems.
Rather than waiting for operational activity to appear in accounting statements, lenders could evaluate selected indicators as they are generated. A merchant’s inventory movements, shipping velocity, payment receipts and customer returns could collectively help determine whether the company qualifies for additional working capital.
After all, digital channels generated 57% of SMB sales on average last year, according to the July PYMNTS Intelligence report “The SMB Growth Engine: How Digital Sales and Customer Tracking Drive Revenue.”
Inventory financing already exists. So do purchase-order financing, factoring and revenue-based advances. What’s changing is the potential frequency and granularity with which lenders can evaluate the risks underlying those arrangements. Ultimately, rather than requiring a merchant to approach a lender, assemble documentation and wait for a decision, financing could increasingly appear inside the software and services the merchant already uses.
For CFOs and small business owners, that changes the value of operational infrastructure. Accurate inventory records, integrated payments systems and reliable fulfillment information could become important not just for efficiency, but for access to capital.
But convenience has a competitive price.
If a company’s financing options depend on data controlled by its logistics or payments provider, switching platforms could become more consequential. A merchant might discover that its operational history is valuable for borrowing but difficult to transfer to a competing lender. That raises questions about data portability, underwriting transparency and whether businesses can obtain comparable financing offers without remaining inside a particular commercial ecosystem.
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