- What's at stake: TD Bank is providing Lendistry with a much needed $25 million equity injection that the CDFI can use to support its breakneck SBA lending expansion.
- Key insight: Lendistry's SBA 7(a) origination volume has more than doubled in the current 2025 fiscal year, and CEO Everett Sands says he sees no signs of a slowdown.
- Expert quote: "Banks being partners … fits us very well. We want to keep growing those partnerships, we don't want to become competitors."
Lendistry, a community development financial institution that has emerged over the past two years as a leading Small Business Administration 7(a) lender, is getting a $25 million boost from TD Bank.
TD announced Wednesday that its TD Community Development Corp. subsidiary will invest $25 million in Lendistry over the next five years — enough to fund up to $250 million in small-business lending. According to a bank spokesperson, the investment is the largest TD has made so far under a $310 million commitment to CDFIs and minority depository institutions unveiled in January 2024, part of a wider $20 billion community investment plan.
"We are pleased to invest with Lendistry to make loans starting at $25,000 available to small business owners, which aligns with the goals of TD's Community Impact Plan," TD Community Development Corp. President Michael Cooper said Wednesday in a press release.
TD's investment is the latest instance of support that Los Angeles-based Lendistry has received from banks.
City National Bank, a $94 billion-asset unit of Royal Bank Canada that's headquartered in Los Angeles, provided Lendistry with $5 million last year to promote its small-dollar, small-business lending in California. A year earlier, the $189.5 billion-asset Detroit-based Ally Financial made a $35 million loan.
Backing from banks and other corporations — Chicago-based utility Exelon announced a $5 million investment earlier this month — has helped underwrite Lendistry's
The company's involvement in the 7(a) program, which offers guarantees up to 85% of small-business loans made by participating lenders, increased from six loans for $6.7 million in the agency's 2022 fiscal year to more than 1,800 loans for $376 million in fiscal 2025.
"We've definitely had to retool and re-engineer some of our capital markets strategies because the [SBA] growth caught us by surprise," Lendistry CEO Everett Sands told American Banker on Thursday. "That being said, I think we're catching up, especially in the second half of the year, with investments like TD Bank's."
Much of the corporate funding is structured as investment capital, with Lendistry promising a return backed by its burgeoning lending operation. TD structured its outlay as an investment in Lendistry's Warehouse Capital Access Fund, according to the bank spokesperson.
Beyond loans and investments, banks have helped Lendistry by referring their clients and by buying the company's loans on the secondary market. The engagement has led to deeper levels of cooperation between the industry and the 10-year-old CDFI. "The benefit is [banks] get to see the performance of the loans," Sands said. "They get to do due diligence on us. Then they start to realize, `OK, there is a real good partnership here.'"
In a
As Lendistry's balance sheet and its funding needs have grown, Sands has flirted with the idea of obtaining a bank charter, which would provide the opportunity to raise low-cost deposits.
Sands said Thursday that Lendistry is seeing "a lot of tailwinds" in its 7(a) lending operation, so he's not expecting any slowdown in originations. "We have a lot of room to grow," he said.
Now, though, with the company's partnership model functioning so effectively, Sands has put charter consideration to the side.
"We feel very comfortable with where we are today," Sands said. "Banks being partners … fits us very well. We want to keep growing those partnerships, we don't want to become competitors."
