About The Mercantile Record
An independent publication that measures what small-business financing really costs, using records anyone can check.
What this is
Most of what is written about business loans is written by people who earn money when you take one. Lender websites quote their best rate. Comparison sites are paid for each application they send on.
The Mercantile Record does something narrower. We take public records, mostly the federal government's file of every SBA-guaranteed loan, and work out what borrowers were actually charged, by whom, and how the loans turned out. Then we publish the result with the method attached, so that anyone can check it.
We are not a lender, a broker or a referral service. We do not take applications and we will not recommend a lender to you.
Who is responsible for it
The Mercantile Record is independently owned. It is not part of a lender, a broker, a bank or a media group, and nobody in those businesses has a stake in it.
We publish under the publication's name and not under personal bylines. That asks you to rely on work you cannot attach to a person, so we do not ask you to take it on trust. Every figure can be traced to a public record we link to, the method and its weak points are set out on the data page, the tables can be downloaded and recalculated, and every change to an article is logged on the page.
The publication answers for what it publishes. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it in the open.
How it is funded
Our only intended source of income is display advertising, sold through advertising networks. The privacy page explains how those ads work and how to turn personalized ads off.
Advertisers do not choose what we cover, do not see it before it is published and cannot pay to be included or left out.
If we ever earn a commission from a link, the page carrying that link will say so next to it.
What we will not do
- Rank lenders or products by who pays us.
- Publish a "best" list we cannot support with data.
- Present a guess as a finding. Where the records stop, we say so.
- Publish anything about a named borrower. The public file names them; we report only totals.
Corrections
Every article has a change log. If we get something wrong we fix it and record the fix there. To report an error, write to us.
More detail is in how we work and data and methods.