Top Stories
Biden administration announces record $3 billion in loans for Latino-owned small businesses
On October 30, U.S. Small Business Administrator Isabel Guzman, President Biden’s representative for America’s more than 33 million small businesses, announced new data showing that the rate of SBA-backed loans to Latino-owned small businesses has more than doubled and surpassed $3 billion in lending. Affordable loans backed by the federal government are a vital funding option that the SBA’s lending programs provide small businesses in a tightening credit environment. In Fiscal Year 2023, the SBA’s flagship 7(a) and 504 loan programs provided over 7,700 SBA loans to Latino-owned small businesses, twice as many as it did in Fiscal Year 2020. Read More
Goldman Sachs challenges lending reform, cites risks to small businesses
Investment bank Goldman Sachs is pressuring the government to abandon a rule it says could tighten access to capital among small business owners, according to an exclusive report by Axios. The proposed regulation, a Basel III reform nicknamed “Endgame,” would alter the way risk-weighted assets are calculated, forcing lending institutions to weigh a multitude of new factors when managing their finances and keep larger sums of cash on hand before allocating any capital. Basel III policies are developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), an international panel whose recommendations are followed globally, including in the U.S. This summer, American federal regulators announced plans to adopt the Endgame proposal, several months after a sudden wave of U.S. bank collapses starting with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March. Read More
Square launches new artificial intelligence tools for businesses
E-commerce and point-of-sale platform Square has unveiled 10 new artificial intelligence tools to help small businesses in various industries improve efficiency and focus on growth. Square incorporated a variety of artificial intelligence technologies to create its new features, the first six of which focus on content creation. Two tools, Menu Generator and Photo Environments, rely on image generation to create food menu designs or replace photo backgrounds with realistic alternatives. The next four features, Personalized Email Copy, Team Announcements, Website Copy Generator and Suggested Replies, use LLM algorithms à la Chat-GPT to create a variety of texts for different mediums and purposes. Read More
Cyberattacks targeting small business owners break record
Small business owners faced a record-breaking number of cyberattacks in 2023 but continued to report high levels of confidence in their ability to defend themselves against scammers, hackers and other bad actors. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s (ITRC) recently published Business Impact Report, 73% of 551 surveyed small business owners encountered a cyberattack this year, the highest percentage in the report’s three-year lifespan and a 3% increase from 2022. These incidents resulted in a variety of consequences for respondents, including revenue losses (42%), erosion of trust among customers (32%) and more employee turnover (32%). However, 85% of the survey’s participants still said they were prepared to react to a cybercrime. Read More
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