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Small business lending (SBL) plays an important role in funding productive investment and fostering local economic growth. Recently, nonbank lenders have gained market share in the SBL market in the United States, especially relative to community banks. Among nonbanks, fintech lenders have become particularly active, leveraging alternative data and complex modeling for their own internal credit scoring. We use proprietary loan-level data from two fintech SBL platforms (Funding Circle and LendingClub) to explore the characteristics of loans originated pre-pandemic (2016single bond2019). Our results show that these fintech SBL platforms lent relatively more in zip codes with higher unemployment rates and higher business bankruptcy filings. Moreover, fintech platforms’ internal credit scores were able to predict future loan performance more accurately than traditional credit scores, particularly in areas with …