Heller Financial, Inc., the worldwide commercial finance company, today announced that after an extensive review of strategic alternatives, it will discontinue its origination of U.S. Small Business Administration ("SBA") loans, effective immediately.
"With increased competition from banks focused on capturing the small business customer by cross-selling a range of financial products such as cash management custodial and depository accounts in addition to SBA loans, the pricing and returns of this product have become much less attractive to Heller. Furthermore, we see excellent growth prospects in many of our other businesses and we believe we will enhance shareholder value by redeploying capital and other resources to take advantage of those opportunities" said Heller Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard J. Almeida.
