The future of small business financing will likely involve a greater reliance on alternative credit solutions. As businesses and lenders adapt to these changes, the ability to navigate the complexities of the private credit market will be essential for achieving success and ensuring that small businesses have access to the capital they need to thrive.

Our recent discovery of Benford's law and its wide acceptance and use among the financial regulatory and services community was encouraging. Benford's law is a statistical tool that can be used to detect potential fraud or anomalies in numerical datasets. It is based on the observation that in many naturally occurring datasets, the first digit of the numbers follows a specific pattern, with the digit 1 being the most common, followed by 2, 3, and so on, up to 9.