Capital Is Not Enough.
Small Businesses Need Financial Mobility.

By Ana Hammock, Chief Operating Officer, Ascendus 

At the 2026 National Community Investment Conference in Phoenix, leaders from across the community development finance field gathered to ask a question that drives much of our work at Ascendus: Why do so many small business owners still struggle to access the capital they need — even when lenders want to serve them?  

The answer, our panel made clear, is not a shortage of capital. It is a mismatch. 

Traditional lending products —built around fixed term loans, standardized underwriting, and linear repayment schedules —were not designed with the realities of today’s small business owner in mind. Service-based microbusinesses don’t operate on predictable cash flow cycles. They manage seasonality, late payments, rapid pivots, and growth spurts that don’t fit neatly into a loan amortization table. When the product doesn’t fit the need, even well-intentioned capital fails to create the intended impact. 

Rethinking What “Access” Actually Means 

At Ascendus, we have moved away from measuring success solely by loan volume. We think about financial mobility — the degree to which an entrepreneur can move fluidly along a path toward financial stability and long-term independence. 

This means supporting a borrower from the moment they are building their credit history, through the stabilization phase when working capital keeps the lights on, and ultimately toward the kind of financial health that opens doors to mainstream banking and growth capital.  

A revolving line of credit is, in many ways, a better expression of this philosophy than a term loan. It allows a business owner to draw what they need, repay as cash flow allows, and access capital again without starting over. For a caterer navigating large event contracts, a childcare provider waiting on reimbursements, or a retail shop owner managing inventory ahead of the holidays, that flexibility is not a convenience — it is the difference between stability and distress. 

What the Data Is Already Showing 

Our early experience with the Ascendus line of credit is reinforcing what many CDFIs have long suspected: the size and structure of capital matters as much as its availability. 

Smaller lines — those that help entrepreneurs manage short-term cash flow gaps — have a stabilizing effect. They reduce financial stress and keep businesses operational through difficult periods. Larger lines, once a business demonstrates capacity, begin to unlock real growth: the ability to hire, take on larger contracts, and invest in operations. 

This is the path to ascension we talk about at Ascendus. Not a single transaction, but a progression. 

The Structural Challenge We Need to Solve — Together 

None of this is simple to scale. Lines of credit are capital-intensive for CDFIs. Unlike term loans, which deploy capital and recover it over a fixed schedule, revolving products require us to hold full commitments on our balance sheet even when borrowers only draw a fraction of their available credit. That creates real constraints on how much we can deploy and how many entrepreneurs we can serve. 

Solving this requires more than product innovation. It requires stronger, more intentional partnerships between CDFIs, community banks, and mainstream financial institutions — pathways that allow entrepreneurs who start with us to continue growing beyond us, and that allow CDFIs to recycle capital toward the businesses that need us most. 

It also requires a shared understanding across funders, regulators, and policymakers that the right metric is not just “how many loans were made.” The right metric is: how many businesses moved forward? 

This Way Up 

The entrepreneurs we serve are not waiting for permission to grow. They are resourceful, resilient, and ready. What they need from us — as lenders, as coaches, as a community development ecosystem — is capital that meets them where they are, and a path that takes them where they are going. 

That is the work. And we are committed to it. 

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Ana Hammock is the Chief Operating Officer of Ascendus. She participated in the panel “Flexible Funding Models for Small Businesses” at 2026 National Community Investment Conference, alongside Claire Kramer Mills (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Kim Folsom (Founders First Capital Partners), and Jay Bockhaus (CORI Innovation Fund). 

Learn more about Ascendus’s lending products and coaching programs at ascendus.org.