Matching a deal to the right three to five lenders

Sending a deal to fifteen lenders at once feels like it raises the odds. In practice it lowers them. Each lender that sees the file pulls or checks the merchant, and funders notice when the same deal lands on every desk in town on the same morning. It looks shopped, and shopped deals get worse pricing or a quick decline. You also burn credibility with reps who read your files and find them nowhere near their box.

A tight list of three to five lenders, each chosen for a reason, gets faster answers, better offers and a reputation for clean submissions. If those all decline, you have their reasons and can choose the next round with better information.

1. Build the deal profile first. True monthly revenue, time in business, guarantor credit, existing positions and their payments, NSFs and negative days, industry, state and the amount requested. The bank statements track covers how to get each number.
2. Cut on hard criteria. Remove every lender whose hard lines the deal fails: state, industry, a revenue floor well above the deal, a position cap it exceeds.
3. Score on soft criteria. Among the lenders left, prefer those the deal clears with room to spare. A deal that just meets a soft minimum is a weaker fit than one that clears it easily.
4. Rank by what the merchant needs. Speed, amount, cost and payment size. A merchant with an equipment repair due Friday needs a lender that funds in a day.
5. Add your own history. Prefer lenders that have funded similar deals for you recently.

The deal: a Florida restaurant with $48,000 a month in true revenue (average of four months), 18 months in business, a guarantor score of 610, two open positions, two NSFs last month, asking for $40,000. The average daily balance has not been calculated yet.

Lender A is an A-paper program and the deal misses on revenue, time and positions. Lender C would take almost anything, but it does not fund restaurants, a hard line. Lender B is a clean fit with room on every criterion. Lender D is a likely fit, but its credit minimum is close and its balance rule cannot be checked yet. Work out the average daily balance first; if it clears $2,000, Lender D goes on the list.

In a real shop you would run the same screen across your whole active list and end with three to five names like Lender B and Lender D. If only two survive, send to two. A short list is better than padding it with lenders that will decline.

Sometimes the best lender for a deal misses one soft criterion by a little: a score ten points short, revenue a few hundred dollars under. It is fine to send these, as long as you say so in the email and give the reason the lender should look anyway (rising revenue, a clean bank, a strong history with you). What you should not do is send a deal that fails a hard line and hope nobody notices.

On a deal's Lenders tab, Lender matches checks the deal against every active lender's criteria and shows each lender as eligible, eligible with warnings or ineligible, with a pass, fail or no-data result per rule and the reason in plain words. It re-runs when the deal's data changes. To send to a lender the deal does not match, tick Submit anyway and give a reason, which is saved to the audit log. See lender matching and How lender matching works.