HL Hunt Says It Can Fund a Small Business in 24 Hours by Skipping the FICO Check. Here's the Trade-Off.

— HL Hunt markets its Business Funding line on a single core promise: it underwrites against what a business is actually doing right now — revenue, cash flow, bank deposits — rather than the owner's personal FICO score. The company offers five distinct products under that umbrella: merchant cash advances, invoice factoring, lines of credit, equipment financing, and SBA loan packaging assistance, and says qualified applicants can see funds in as little as 24 to 48 hours.

That speed-over-paperwork model is not unique to HL Hunt — it is the standard pitch across the alternative small-business lending market, and it exists because of a real trade-off. Revenue-based underwriting lets businesses with thin personal credit or a short time in business qualify for capital that a traditional bank loan would reject outright. In exchange, products like merchant cash advances and short-term lines of credit typically carry a much higher effective cost than bank financing, expressed as a factor rate or daily/weekly repayment schedule rather than a simple APR, which makes the total cost of capital harder for borrowers to compare at a glance.

HL Hunt does not publish its own factor rates, approval criteria, or average cost figures on the Business Funding page, so a prospective borrower cannot evaluate the actual price of capital until they apply and receive a specific offer. The company positions its separate Business Credit Builder program — which reports tradelines to commercial credit bureaus — as a path for businesses to eventually graduate from these revenue-based products into independent, no-personal-guarantee financing, though HL Hunt has not published data on what share of Business Credit Builder customers actually reach that outcome.