According to PYMNTS.com, Walmart has partnered with lender Lendistry to embed business financing directly into its marketplace platform. Sellers can now apply for working capital loans and lines of credit right from their Walmart dashboards without leaving the ecosystem. Lendistry CEO Everett K. Sands described the goal as making capital access as seamless as the checkout button itself. The lender has deployed $10 billion over its first decade and aims to more than double that in the next 10 years. While Walmart doesn’t provide the funding, its marketplace infrastructure connects qualified merchants directly to Lendistry’s digital underwriting process. The partnership uses Walmart’s sales and performance data to streamline applications and understand merchant cash flows in real time.
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Why this matters
Here’s the thing – small business lending has been broken for years. Sands paints a vivid picture of the typical entrepreneur: running their business 9-5, managing family from 5-9, then finally getting online at 9 PM to apply for loans when everyone’s asleep. There’s no guidance, no support system. Basically, it’s the exact opposite of how community banking used to work.
But what’s really clever here is the data play. Lendistry uses Walmart’s platform data – sales metrics, performance trends, all that good stuff – to actually understand the business. They’re not just looking at tax returns from two years ago. They can see in near real-time how a business is performing. And that lets them trim down paperwork dramatically. Sands calls risk “a math problem” that gets overcomplicated with paperwork. He’s not wrong.
The community bank revival
What Sands is describing sounds suspiciously like the old community bank model, just digitized. That sense of being part of a community, having rapport with your lender, getting guidance – it’s all there, but now it’s embedded in a massive retail platform. The lender understands your business lifecycle and matches capital accordingly.
Think about it like this: a business is like an organism that needs different financial clothing at different stages. You wouldn’t wear the same clothes at 5, 10, and 50 years old. Same with capital. Short-term working capital for seasonal spikes, longer-term SBA loans for big purchases. Sands even mentions that many businesses don’t realize they can get multiple smaller SBA loans up to $5 million total. That’s the kind of guidance that usually only comes from a relationship lender.
Bigger trend alert
This isn’t just about Lendistry and Walmart – it’s part of a massive shift in how financial services get delivered. The consumer side already figured this out. Now the business side is catching up fast. Platforms that already have merchant relationships and data are becoming the new front door to financial services.
Sands talks about “responsible scale” – finding that balance between margin, profit, and operational expenses. When you know what a business is spending on product, labor, and warehousing, capital becomes a strategic layer rather than just a transaction. And for regions where physical banks have disappeared? Technology-driven partnerships like this can actually bridge those gaps.
So is this the future of small business lending? It certainly looks like one viable path forward. Bringing the lender to where merchants already operate, using real-time data to simplify the process, and building relationships rather than just processing applications. Honestly, it’s about time someone made small business financing feel less like a late-night paperwork nightmare and more like, well, actual business support.
