Intuit launches QuickBooks Capital, a small business lending service

Intuit is getting into the small business lending space with the launch of QuickBooks Capital. The QuickBooks users can now get access to small business loans of up to $35,000 with a time period of three to six months right from inside their bookkeeping software.

“As the largest small business accounting platform with approximately 2.4 million customers, the QuickBooks platform provides the complete set of small business data available in the market,” Rania Succar, head of QuickBooks Capital at Intuit, told CNBC.

QuickBooks Capital uses machine learning to help small business demonstrate credit-worthiness. "For example, we give small businesses the ability to get credit for future profits by looking at things such as open invoices", Succar said. She further added, "Using machine learning, we're able to predict when those invoices are likely to be paid, thereby providing an extremely detailed picture of a business' cash flow."

Intuit, the developer of TurboTax and QuickBooks, already allows businesses on its platform to connect with other lenders and has acted as a middleman in $700 million of loans since 2013. Now, Intuit will lend its own money, wagering that its access to businesses’ financial statements could help it evaluate creditworthiness and offer competitive terms.

Succar declined to state how much capital Intuit was willing to lend or its anticipated financial return. The amount of money at risk would be “limited,” she said, and a roughly nine-month experiment in which it lent to hundreds of businesses yielded “tremendous results.”