This interview is with Harrison Greenberg, Founder/CEO, QuicLoans.
What key experiences or decisions shaped your path into building fast, no-collateral credit products?
We launched QuicLoans in 2009, right in the heart of the financial crisis when banks were nearly frozen. Businesses that had access to credit for years were suddenly cut off. These weren’t bad operators; the whole system was stuck.
Those times shaped everything about how we built QuicLoans. We kept seeing business owners who needed capital for something urgent, and the traditional processes just couldn’t move fast enough or simply didn’t exist at all.
The collateral piece is the same. Plenty of strong businesses out there don’t have real estate or major equipment to pledge. That doesn’t necessarily make them risky.
Speed and unsecured access aren’t just product features; they exist because we’ve seen firsthand, starting from day one in 2009, what happens when business owners can’t access capital when they need it.
You’ve said you default to building in-house—within your fast-loans stack, which component that you built internally had the biggest impact on time-to-approval?
The loan origination system. We built the entire workflow in-house, from application intake through digital signatures. We don’t hand off to third-party platforms, and we don’t have to wait on outside integrations to sync up.
When a business owner submits an application, it drops straight into our processing queue. Every step lives in one place, so there’s no lag time.
A lot of companies stitch together five or six different tools and hope they work with each other. We wanted full control over the pipeline from top to bottom so we could streamline the entire process. That’s how you achieve funding in hours.
Staying with speed, what underwriting signal has proven most predictive for you when approving unsecured working-capital loans?
Bank balances and bank deposits. Those two tell you more about how a business actually operates than almost anything else on paper.
Credit scores get all the attention, but they look backward. A business owner might have a 750 credit score but be bleeding cash. Likewise, they could have a 620 because of a personal matter three years ago, but their business is thriving.
When I look at bank statements, I see cash flow in real time. How much is coming in, how often, and how consistent? What do the average daily balances look like? Are they running close to zero regularly or maintaining a cushion? That pattern tells you whether they can comfortably handle a payment, which is ultimately what we’re trying to figure out.
Bank balances and deposits are the signals I look at first.
From a product perspective, what specific UX change most improved completed applications that actually funded?
Being completely transparent about our minimums before someone even starts the application is crucial. We clearly list them: 3 months in business, $10k monthly revenue, and being US-based.
Many companies hide those details because they want a lead. They hope that once someone fills out an application, they can potentially make something work. However, that just wastes everyone’s time.
We would rather have someone see the requirements, realize they are not there yet, and come back in three months when they are. The applications we do receive are from businesses that already know they are in the ballpark. This results in higher completion rates, faster processing, and fewer dead ends for everyone.
For business owners applying, what one preparation step consistently leads to quicker approvals and better terms?
Our application is pretty straightforward, so there’s not much to stress about. However, if you want to move as fast as possible, have your last four months of bank statements ready to go and know what’s in them.
That sounds basic, but so many business owners apply without having looked at their own statements recently. They’re often not sure what their average monthly deposits are, or they may forget that three months ago they deposited nothing.
When you know your numbers, the whole process moves faster. You can answer questions without digging around. If there’s something that needs explaining or if you have a question about it, you can address it and ask us before applying, rather than responding to questions during underwriting and slowing down funding.
It’s not about being perfect; it’s about understanding your own financial picture so there are no surprises on either side.