Your next 1,500 business customers already bank with you
Ask a bank executive where the next wave of small business growth will come from and the answer is usually outward: new markets, new bankers, new marketing. The data points somewhere closer. Many of the small businesses an institution wants are already customers. They just look like consumers.
The US has 36.2 million small businesses, and 82% of them, 29.8 million firms, have no employees. MBO Partners counted 72.9 million Americans working independently in 2025, and Census recorded more than 530,000 new business applications in August 2026 alone. A large share of these owners start by running revenue through the personal checking account they already have.
If you segment customers by account type, a bakery that deposits $14,000 a month in card settlements looks like a household.
The signals are already in your core
A business leaves traces in the data an institution already holds. No single one proves a business, but together they tell a clear story to a model built to read them.
raivin's Identified Accounts module finds those customers, scores them and enriches each one into a profile a banker can act on. The result is a reason to call and a better first conversation: one that starts with the owner's business, not a product.
What it is worth
For an illustrative $1B-asset institution with 18,750 consumer relationships, an 8% discovery rate means about 1,500 small business accounts. If one in five opens a business relationship in year one at a $15,000 average operating balance, that is $4.5 million in new operating deposits, before any lending. The pilot replaces each of those assumptions with the institution's own numbers.
The first step toward growing small business relationships is seeing the ones you already have.
Sources: SBA Office of Advocacy, Frequently Asked Questions (2026); MBO Partners, State of Independence 2025; US Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics.