With two new tools, Intuit courts SMBs

This morning, Intuit QuickBooks announced the launch of two new products. The first, QuickBooks Get Paid Upfront, lets small businesses apply for an advance up to $30,000 for qualifying invoices; the second, QuickBooks Early Pay, lets employees paid through QuickBooks Online Payroll access earnings between paydays.

Why should we care?
Following Mastercard’s instant-card service for SMBs as well as Expensify’s cards for CPAs, the QuickBooks announcement reveals various fintech players’ long-term strategies for SMBs. Collectively, they approach these businesses as a promising—but slower-moving—growth and revenue opportunity. QuickBooks’ plan more specifically has involved gradual acquisitions that meet SMBs’s wide range of market needs. Last year, the company purchased Mailchimp for approximately $12B, which it sees as an opportunity to help SMBs grow through revamped marketing strategies and greater online engagement. Mailchimp joins Intuit’s suite of accounting, tax, and credit score tracking services. And, with Get Paid Upfront and Early Pay as two more Intuit offerings, the company is increasingly presenting itself as a fintech emporium for SMBs: building out new features as SMBs’s needs become clearer or more urgent. In the face of supply-chain uncertainty as well as financial hardship for many working-class people, these two most recent initiatives suggest that Intuit will roll out services that help keep SMBs, a core customer base, afloat through turbulent economic times—which, after all, is in Intuit’s financial interest.