If you're shopping for a small business loan, the first piece of advice you'll usually get is "ask around." Talk to people in your network. See who's used what. Maybe call a few banks.
That advice isn't wrong, exactly. It's just slow. In a market where most banks won't pre-screen you, every cold application leaves a soft pull on your credit and takes a week to come back as "no." If you apply to ten banks that were never going to lend to you, you've burned a month and dinged your credit for nothing.
There's a faster way. Every US bank tells you, quarterly, exactly what kinds of loans they're making. You just have to know where to look.
The data is already public
Every FDIC-insured bank files what's called a Call Report. It's a quarterly report to federal regulators, and it's public. In it, the bank breaks down its loan portfolio by type: commercial real estate, residential real estate, commercial and industrial (C&I), agricultural, consumer. The newer versions of the report also break small business loans out by size band.
What this means in practice: you can pull a bank's quarterly filing and see, roughly, how many small business loans they hold, what sizes those loans tend to be, and how the mix is trending. If a bank's portfolio is 60% commercial real estate and almost no C&I lending, and you're looking for a working capital line, you can usually skip them. If a bank's small-business book is concentrated in $100K to $500K loans and you want a $250K SBA, they're a better fit than the bank concentrated in $1M+ loans.
You don't get borrower names. You don't get individual deal details. But you get enough of a portfolio profile to know whether the bank is in your lane.
The signals that matter
A few specific things to look at when you're sizing up a potential lender:
Loan mix. Is the bank weighted toward the kind of credit you need? A bank that does mostly residential lending isn't going to be your best bet for commercial real estate, even if they technically can. Banks tend to do more of what they're already doing.
Size concentration. If most of a bank's small business loans are over $1 million, your $200K application will sit in a queue behind bigger deals. If most are under $250K, you'll get faster attention but you might not get approved for a bigger amount. Match the size band.
Industry exposure. This one is trickier because Call Reports don't tag loans by industry. But if a bank has heavy SBA 7(a) exposure, they've underwritten a lot of small businesses across many sectors. If they have heavy commercial real estate, they probably know hospitality, retail, and multifamily.
Geographic footprint. A bank's branch network usually tracks where they lend. If they have no presence in your state or metro, they're less likely to fund you, even if there's no formal restriction.
Growth trend. Is the bank's small-business book growing or shrinking? A growing book often means they're hungry for new applications. A shrinking book might mean they're being selective.
What this saves you
Most borrowers spray applications at the first ten banks that come up in a Google search. The result is predictable: a few automatic rejections, a few polite no-thank-yous, maybe one or two genuine conversations. Most of the rejections were never going to convert. The bank just doesn't lend in your category.
If you spend even an hour upfront figuring out which banks actually lend in your category, you'll skip the rejection theater. Three good applications beat ten random ones every time.
How to actually do it
Manual approach: go to cdr.ffiec.gov, search for individual banks, download their quarterly Call Reports, and read the loan schedule (Schedule RC-C). It works, but it's tedious, and you have to do it bank by bank.
Faster approach: use a tool that aggregates this data and lets you filter by scenario. That's what BankingLENS Borrower Assist does. You input your state, loan type, and size, and we score every US bank against your scenario based on what they actually lend on. Free sneak peek. Full report with contact info and outreach suggestions available below.
Either way, the principle is the same. Match the bank to the data, not the other way around.