Pacific Mercantile Bancorp in Costa Mesa, Calif., is partnering with fintech firm P2Binvestor to help business clients in its home state.
The $1.4 billion-asset Pacific Mercantile is using P2Bi’s joint funding program to serve businesses that are not ready for traditional bank financing, the companies said in a press release on Thursday.
Pacific Mercantile is P2Bi’s second community bank client. The fintech began working with Amalgamated Bank in New York after Amalgamated
“We sought an innovative fintech partner to help us customize a loan structure aimed at solving a cash-flow challenge for an important client,” Thomas Inserra, Pacific Mercantile’s chief credit officer, said in the release.
For instance, Pacific Mercantile worked with P2Bi to help a client that had more than $10 million in back orders while struggling to secure funding to address its working capital cash-flow needs. The client needed the funds to buy raw materials and supplies to fulfill orders.
Pacific Mercantile selected P2Bi because of a shared purpose for helping businesses succeed and the fintech’s “innovative technology solutions and willingness to work collaboratively to provide a custom-tailored solution engineered specifically for this client,” Inserra said in the release.
Krista Morgan, co-founder and CEO of P2Bi, said in an interview that her firm connected with Pacific Mercantile at a banking conference. She said she expects the partnership to expand to new loan originations.
P2Bi is focused on finding more community bank partners to help businesses in all different regions, Morgan said. The company is testing a white-label technology offering that banks could use to serve commercial borrowers.
