Online lender Kabbage has been providing working capital to small businesses since 2009. This week, the startup’s President, Kathryn Petralia, disclosed plans to enter into payment processing by year end.

The company hopes the move will diversify its offerings, which have largely stayed in the same sector since 2009. Kabbage also anticipates the launch will help it compete with ever-rising fintech giants such as PayPal and Square, both of which started as payment processing solutions and have since added small business lending services. The payment processing offering will leverage Kabbage’s existing small business client base, providing merchants solutions for in-store and online payments.

In an interview with Reuters, who broke the news on Monday, Petralia said, “The monoline businesses have a hard time succeeding long term.” She added, “We have seen a huge pain point around cash flow management,” noting that payment service providers’ lengthy contracts and high fees contribute to the issue.

As with many fintech developments these days, this one comes down to data. When Kabbage gains insight into transaction data from small business clients, it can more accurately underwrite loans for those clients. Additionally, access to client data will offer Kabbage an advantage when serving its existing client base. The company can speed up traditionally slow onboarding and application processes by leveraging data it already has on existing clients.

Kabbage demoed at FinovateSpring 2015, where it debuted the Kabbage Card, which allows users to withdraw from their line of credit at any point-of-sale where VISA is accepted. Earlier this year, the company expanded its line of credit to $250k and most recently announced the acquisition of online lending competitor Orchard.

Update 4/26: Kabbage today confirmed previous reporting that the financial services, technology and data platform for small businesses will acquire “substantially all of the assets” of online lending pioneer Orchard. The company said the acquisition will bring enhanced data capabilities to its platform, as well as spur further development of new products and services.

“At Orchard they accomplished extraordinary feats in the financial services industry, championing a segment of the market unmatched by any other,” Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein said. “Applying their skillset to a common purpose at Kabbage will more rapidly accelerate our growth and continue our leadership in data-first products for small businesses.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Kabbage has been a strategic customer of Orchard, which provided insight into the company’s expertise in predictive analytics and advanced automation, Frohwein explained. Kabbage will apply Orchard’s technology in a variety of ways, such as enhancing its internal operations and automated underwriting platform, as well as helping “guide future products” and provide data-driven insights to customers about their businesses.

As part of the acquisition, Orchard co-founders Matt Burton (CEO) and David Snitkof (Chief Analytics Officer) will join Kabbage in leadership roles. The company says more than 20 Orchard employees in advanced analytics, data science and engineering will also join the Kabbage team.

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Original post: Bloomberg and other sources are reporting that small business lender Kabbage will acquire lending platform Orchard. The firm, which boasts the support of former Citigroup and Morgan Stanley bosses Vikram Pandit and John Mack, provides information on the marketplace lending industry to Wall Street companies. No terms have been made available and neither Kabbage nor Orchard Platform Markets have commented on the potential acquisition.

Orchard, which launched in 2013, recently attempted to change its business model to serve as a platform for trading loan securities. The failure of this initiative to gain traction, according to Bloomberg, led to the company’s desire to find a buyer of late. The firm had raised $40 million in funding from investors including Spark Capital and Thrive Capital.

Kabbage and Orchard have a history. The two announced a partnership back in the spring of 2015 that gave institutional investment managers on the Orchard platform the ability to access Kabbage’s consumer loan product, Karrot. The partnership also helped Kabbage add to its consumer lending business thanks to new access to Orchard’s constituency of sophisticated investors.

Kabbage made headlines last year when rumors surfaced that the company was raising money for the specific purpose of acquisitions. At the time, marketplace lender OnDeck was widely believed to be the primary target.

Earlier this month, Kabbage announced a partnership with Ingo Money to accelerate loan payments to small and medium-sized businesses. After finishing 2017 with a new chief operating officer and having reached a new milestone in extending more than $4 billion to more than 130,000 small businesses, Kabbage began 2018 by expanding its line of credit to $250,000 in a bid to serve larger business customers as well as its small business base.

“Giving small businesses the peace of mind and security to focus less on their finances and more on their passions is a key tenet at Kabbage,” the company’s COO Bob Sharpe said when the news was announced. “Increasing our lines of credit to $250,000 significantly enhances our ability to solve financial hurdles for larger and more specialized businesses that may otherwise be unachievable, which we see in the market today.”

Founded in 2009, the Atlanta, Georgia-based fintech has raised $1.6 billion in funding. Kabbage demonstrated its Kabbage Card, part of the company’s broader Kabbage Everywhere product expansion, at FinovateSpring 2015. The Kabbage Card gives business cardholders the ability to take their Kabbage credit line with them wherever they go, immediately deducting transactions amounts from available funds and providing the user with a confirmation by SMS text.

Online alternative lender Kabbage has teamed up with push payments innovator Ingo Money to get commercial loan proceeds to small and medium sized businesses that much faster. Kabbage will use Ingo’s Push Platform, with its push-payments-in-a-box technology, to disburse loan payouts to customer accounts securely and in real time.

The partnership between Kabbage and Ingo Money helps close the gap between business loan approval – which can be completed in minutes – and delivery of funds – which can take a day more more. Kabbage sees faster fund delivery as key to helping SMEs have better cash flow management and a compelling opportunity for small business owners. In its statement, the company pointed to a Visa survey that showed that small business owners, 70% of which own a small business debit card, would get a new card if real-time transfers were available.

Ingo Push Platform provides modular components and customer workflows and rules that enable companies to manage their own payment process (or outsource it). The platform allows users to originate disbursements using an API, batch file, or web interface; send branded email and text notifications; securely capture and manage payment preferences and account details, and monitor payment status and access custom reports. Ingo’s technology can push money to more than 4.5 billion customer accounts, including credit and debit cards, online wallets, as well as cash from distribution locations. Ingo Money’s chief product officer Lisa McFarland told PYMNTS.com that bringing push payments to SME lending makes the payout process as seamless as the rest of the digitized, online loan process pioneered by companies like Kabbage.

Also discussing the partnership with PYMNTS, Kabbage president Kathryn Petralia pointed out that the company, which has made its name as an online alternative lender, is at heart a payments company “since we’re constantly moving money to and from our customers as they use our service.” She added that accelerating delivery of funds was also a positive because it brought transparency to the lending process.

Kabbage began the year by expanding its line of credit offering to $250,000. The new product is the largest credit line offering by an online lender and gives Kabbage the ability to serve larger businesses. Last month, the company announced a strategic alliance with New Media to improve outreach to small and medium-sized businesses. Also in March, Kabbage joined with Citigroup and others to form a cybersecurity consortium for fintech. The company earned a spot on Forbes Fintech 50 for a second time in a row this year,

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Kabbage demonstrated its Kabbage Card at FinovateSpring 2015. With more than $1.6 billion in funding, Kabbage powers small business lending for a number of major FIs including ING, Santander, and Scotia Bank, and includes SoftBank Group Corp., BlueRun Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures among its investors.

We interviewed Kabbage’s Petralia during FinovateFall 2017 last September. Check out her conversation with Senior Research Analyst Julie Muhn on How to Make it as a Small Business in Fintech.