Barbara Morrison, president of Oakland-based TMC Financing, has worked with thousands of small business owners over the years to help them secure commercial real estate financing backed by the Small Business Administration. Increasingly, she doesn’t like what she sees: More small businesses becoming dependent on convenient but costly merchant cash advances.
So Morrison created TMC Community Capital, an online microlender for medium- and higher-risk businesses that provides an alternative to cash advances from Square (NYSE: SQ), PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) and others.