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Online Small Business Loans

Shopping on the internet has never been easier. Key in your search term “online small business loans” into any search engine and you become inundated with results. Before we go further, lets think about the ideal scenario.

For me, this would be something along the lines of arriving at a site where I key in the kind of business finance I need, and then obtain a shortlist of suitable offers. Finding such a site that does this in a transparent way is not easy.

When I was researching this page, first thing I noticed is that a lot of sites coming up on search engines are really just directories acting as shop windows for lots of different banks or specialist loan companies. This means that I’d have to visit and apply at a lot of sites just to find those that are interested in me. Definitely time consuming.

Second is that some sites were quite ready to take my details and information including private address and details of income and house ownership etc, but were expecting this information to be input without being on a secure server.

In these days of increasing fraud and personality theft you must protect yourself.

The way to do this is to make sure you don’t’ put any information about your financial circumstances without it being on a secure server. You can tell you are on a secure server by looking at the web address line in your browser. If your address has an ‘s’ in it (signalled here at the underlined) https://www.thesamplewebaddress.com

In some browsers, a padlock will appear in the bottom right hand side of the screen. This also confirms that the data is being encrypted (scrambled) to prevent snoopers from reading it.

Next thing to do to protect yourself against possible fraud is to ascertain that the finance company you are obtaining a quote from is registered with an appropriate regulatory body. Most countries as part of their drive to protect consumers have consumer protection legislation which often involves licensing. Look for the license number on the website. Obviously anyone can make up any number, but you can always check a genuine one with the appropriate government department.

For example, in the United Kingdom, any finance company wishing to undertake licensed business (selling credit to consumers or Sole traders etc) must apply for and have a consumer credit license. Look for this number.

Also, any company keeping your data on its records must now comply with regulations about how they secure it, who has access to it, and must seek your permission before they pass it on. In the UK this is called the Data Protection Act, Look for confirmation of compliance with this.

Now I've made sure of my security and privacy, I'm back to my ideal scenario of having a company present me with a number of interesting small business finance offers. One way to achieve this is to use the services of a Commercial Finance Broker. The other is to seek out companies such as Loanspage who (complying with all our security points above) have written their programme to seek out offers across the web. I’m still looking for other lenders who have automated the search, and comply with the criteria above, and when I do, I’ll add them to this page here. If you know of any who you think should be included, drop me a line in the Feedback form.