TSL Feature Articles

Texas is quickly putting itself on the commercial finance map with recent new firms starting and a region that is clearly growing.

In this interview, Bruce Gibson, first vice president, senior relationship manager, Ken Kaestner, director and ABL Group head, and Ron Krauskopf,  executive vice president - head of Specialty Commercial Lending, discuss how Provident Bank is scaling its asset-based and specialty lending capabilities to support middle-market borrowers across New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and New York. They highlight growing demand for flexible working capital solutions, the mainstreaming of ABL in a volatile environment, and Provident’s ability to compete with larger institutions while preserving local decision making and relationship continuity. 

The second quarter of 2026 demonstrated the continued resilience of the secured finance market, with 224 deals reported to SFNet's Secured Finance Deal Table. Activity remained broad-based across industries, financing structures and lender types, illustrating the flexibility of asset-based lending, factoring and specialty finance solutions as companies navigated a still-uncertain economic environment.

Asset-based lending is fundamentally focused on capital-intensive and asset-heavy businesses.  Because tariffs impact the sales of goods (as opposed to the provision of services) they will typically have an outsized impact on the borrowers under asset-based credit facilities.  This article will discuss recent tariff-related developments and analyze potential impact on the users and providers of asset-based financing.

The factoring industry entered 2026 with a familiar dynamic, but one that feels increasingly consequential: growth driven not by economic strength, but by constraint elsewhere in the credit system. The Secured Finance Network’s 2025 Year-End Factoring Survey shows an industry that is expanding across nearly every core metric—volume, utilization, revenue, and client demand—even as the broader economy slows and traditional lending channels become more selective.

Oil, Private Credit Stress, and a Renewed Opportunity for Secured Finance

As the secured finance industry moves through 2026, lenders are operating in an environment shaped by two converging forces: renewed geopolitical instability driving energy price volatility, and emerging stress within the rapidly expanded private credit market. Together, these dynamics are reintroducing uncertainty into credit markets—and, in the process, reinforcing the value of collateral‑based lending structures.

SFNet’s Reimagined: AI & Automation in Secured Finance is a new, one-day conference designed to explore how technologies are transforming asset-based lending and factoring today—and what comes next.  Keynote Speaker, Nick Pericle, a technology expert and the founder of Tenexity, will have a hands-on demonstration using tools and AI prompts to help business leaders grasp and come away with real world solutions that can immediately be implemented to improve their company workflow.

Lessons from Fraud, Growth, and Even a Little “Green Eyeshade”

 After a full and fast-paced day of sessions discussing fraud, lender diligence, and the now well-known First Brands situation, at SFNet’s Supply Chain Finance Convergence on March 3 in New York City, I couldn’t help but think about an unexpected cinematic analogy: Raiders of the Lost Ark. I do love movies, and I find it hard to believe that Raiders is now 45 years old. Goodness.