Senior Product Manager - Business Lending

In the days after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed most of San Francisco, the city's banks stayed shut, their vaults too hot to open for weeks. Amadeo Giannini, who ran the small Bank of Italy, did the opposite. He set up a makeshift desk on the wharf, a plank laid across two barrels, and began lending. Most of his customers were shopkeepers, fishermen, and tradespeople who had lost everything, including any papers proving who they were. So Giannini lent on a signature and a handshake, betting on the people in front of him. Those loans helped rebuild the city block by block, and, the story goes, every one of them was paid back.

That's the promise of a business loan: capital, offered fairly and fast, to people with the will and the plan to build something. More than a century later, too many growing businesses still hit a version of the closed vault: slow processes, opaque decisions, and paperwork that arrives too late to matter.