For more than a decade we, as academic researchers, have investigated the experience of small business customers seeking financial products for their businesses. We have employed a variety of research methodologies to explore the “lived” experiences of small business owners seeking financing, including matched-paired mystery shopping, video ethnography, depth-interviews, controlled experiments, and surveys. From this research, we show that with limited financial sophistication, entrepreneurial small-business consumers approach the financial marketplace much more like retail financial consumers than sophisticated, corporate customers. Furthermore, we find that the customer service received by these small business customers seeking small business bank loan products is consistently poor and that the actual treatment of racial minority and women-owned small business banking customers is significantly inferior in critical ways. These findings suggest that the playing field for women and minority-owned small businesses is not level and the business and personal outcomes for these individuals and for the economy as a whole is suboptimal.
Christensen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.