Visa Is Now in the Working Capital Business — And Lendistry Is How It Gets There

SUMMARY

Visa has entered the small business lending market in a meaningful way. The San Francisco-based payments giant has launched Visa & Main, a $100 million working capital facility targeting small businesses across the U.S., and has tapped downtown Los Angeles-based Lendistry as the program's distribution partner.

THE DEAL: WHAT VISA & MAIN ACTUALLY IS

Visa & Main is not simply a grant program or a feel-good corporate initiative. It is a structured $100 million working capital facility, a real lending product, real underwriting, real capital at stake. Loan sizes range from $25,000 to $350,000, targeting businesses that have operated for at least 2 years. Eligible uses include increasing working capital, refinancing existing debt, funding operational expansion, and purchasing furniture, fixtures, and supplies.

Lendistry, the CDFI-certified, minority-led lender based in Los Angeles, is handling distribution. This is not a new relationship built for this occasion. Lendistry has established itself over recent years as one of the most prominent mission-driven lenders in the alternative and small business finance space, processing billions in emergency relief funding during COVID and building a sophisticated technology-enabled underwriting platform in the process. CEO Everett Sands has consistently positioned the company at the intersection of financial access and operational scale, exactly the profile a program like Visa & Main requires.

WHY VISA IS DOING THIS NOW, AND WHY L.A. SPECIFICALLY

The timing and geography of this launch are not coincidental. Los Angeles is entering a multi-year period of elevated global visibility: the FIFA World Cup arrives this summer, followed by the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. For small businesses in and around the city, that represents a genuine revenue opportunity, but one that requires upfront capital investment to capture.

As Lendistry's Everett Sands framed it, you don't simply wait for the World Cup to come to you. Watch parties have to be set up, additional staff hired, inventory stocked, and storefronts upgraded. All of that requires capital months before the event-driven revenue arrives. The window between knowing the opportunity is coming and being positioned to capitalize on it is exactly the gap this program is designed to fill.

Beyond the event calendar, the economic backdrop in Los Angeles is difficult. The lingering effects of the January 2026 wildfires continue to weigh on local small businesses, compounding the persistent pressures of inflation and supply chain disruption. According to the Federal Reserve's most recent small business credit survey, roughly a third of L.A.'s small business owners sought financing in the past year, and more than two-thirds of those did so to cover operating expenses, not to grow. That is the profile of a business community running close to the edge.

Visa's entry into this market, with a $100 million facility designed specifically for working capital access, speaks directly to that gap.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE INDUSTRY

The more significant story here is not Lendistry's role; it's Visa's.

Visa is the world's largest payments network. It processes trillions of dollars in transaction volume annually. It has unparalleled visibility into small business cash flow, spending behavior, and merchant category data. The company has the infrastructure to know, at a level of granularity that most lenders can only approximate, whether a small business is growing, struggling, or seasonal.

That data advantage raises a question the industry should be thinking about: is Visa & Main a one-time program, or is it the opening move in a broader strategy to bring Visa's data and brand into the small business lending stack?

The program, as announced, goes beyond just capital. Visa & Main will also offer payment processing tools designed to reduce friction for merchants adding mobile storefronts, trucks, kiosks, pop-up operations, a format increasingly popular among small businesses looking to meet customers where they are. The platform will also include anti-fraud tools, marketing support, digital guides, and workshops. That is not the feature set of a lender. That is the feature set of a small business operating platform, one that uses lending as the anchor product.

Visa's regional president of North America, Kim Lawrence, described it as connecting Visa's products and in-house knowledge with partner expertise to provide businesses with "flexible financing opportunities and customer acquisition and technology support." That framing is deliberate. Visa is not presenting itself as a lender. It is presenting itself as a capability layer, with Lendistry as the credentialed, mission-aligned delivery mechanism that gives the program community trust and compliance standing it couldn't build from scratch.

THE LENDISTRY ANGLE: A DISTRIBUTION MODEL WORTH STUDYING

For anyone watching how non-bank capital moves through the market, Lendistry's role here is instructive. The company has repeatedly served as the distribution infrastructure for large-scale capital programs that need community reach, regulatory credibility, and operational throughput.

During the pandemic, Lendistry distributed billions in California small business relief, becoming one of the most recognized names in CDFI lending. That track record, built on high-volume, technology-enabled disbursement with a mission-aligned brand, makes it a natural partner for a corporate entity like Visa that needs trusted last-mile delivery without building the compliance and community infrastructure itself.

Sands noted that Lendistry has already seen an uptick in applications since Visa & Main's launch. The platform is expected to expand in the coming months to include additional grants and financial support products, which suggests this is being built as a durable program rather than a one-cycle initiative.

THE "NON-PREDATORY" SIGNAL

One phrase in Sands' public comments is worth pausing on. He described access to responsible, non-predatory capital as being "like oxygen" to a business' survival, particularly during high-activity periods when revenue and expenses surge simultaneously.

The word "non-predatory" is doing work in that framing. It is a direct positioning statement: this program is intentionally differentiated from the segment of the small business lending market characterized by extremely high-cost, short-duration products. Given that more than two-thirds of L.A. small business borrowers are seeking capital just to cover operating expenses, the appeal of a $100 million facility with responsible terms and institutional backing is significant.

For the alternative lending industry more broadly, the optics of a major global brand like Visa planting its flag in the "non-predatory" camp, with an explicit equity mission through a CDFI partner, signals something about where reputational gravity in small business lending is shifting. Programs and lenders that can credibly claim mission alignment alongside competitive terms are gaining access to institutional capital and distribution partnerships that purely commercial players cannot easily replicate.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Visa & Main is a $100 million working capital program. But what it represents is considerably larger than that dollar figure suggests. It is a global payments network stepping explicitly into the lending stack, using a technology-enabled mission lender as its distribution partner, launching into one of the most economically complex small business markets in the country, timed to a moment of genuine local opportunity. The program's expansion into grants and additional financial products in the coming months will be the real tell for how seriously Visa is treating this as a long-term business line versus a brand activation.