When California State Treasurer Fiona Ma took the stage at the Inland Prosperity Conference in San Bernardino last month, her message was unusually pointed for a state official: small businesses in California’s inland regions are being left behind by the fintech revolution, and state government needs to do something about it.
Ma’s keynote outlined a series of initiatives her office is pursuing to connect small and medium-sized businesses with financial technology tools that have largely been adopted by coastal enterprises. The centerpiece is a proposed state-backed fintech navigator program that would provide free consultations to businesses with fewer than 50 employees, helping them identify and implement digital financial tools.
The Inland Empire, which stretches across San Bernardino and Riverside counties, is home to over 100,000 small businesses, many of them in logistics, agriculture, and services. These businesses face unique financial challenges, including long payment cycles from larger clients, limited access to traditional banking services, and the operational complexity of managing a workforce spread across a vast geographic area.
Fintech solutions exist for many of these pain points. Invoice factoring platforms like Fundbox and BlueVine can accelerate cash flow. Payroll platforms like Gusto and Rippling simplify workforce management. And digital lending platforms offer faster access to working capital than traditional bank loans. But adoption among inland small businesses remains low compared to their counterparts in Los Angeles or the Bay Area.
Ma attributed the gap partly to awareness and partly to trust. Many small business owners in the region are first-generation entrepreneurs who built their companies on personal banking relationships. The idea of uploading financial data to a platform they found through an internet search feels risky, even when the platform is well-established and properly regulated.
The navigator program would address this by embedding fintech advisors in existing small business development centers throughout the region. These advisors would be trained on a curated set of platforms that have been vetted by the Treasurer’s office for security, regulatory compliance, and suitability for small business use cases.
The initiative has drawn support from both fintech companies and community banks. Several digital lending platforms have offered to participate in pilot programs, and local credit unions have expressed interest in co-marketing arrangements that would introduce their members to complementary fintech tools.
Not everyone is enthusiastic. Some banking industry groups have raised concerns about the state effectively endorsing specific private-sector financial products, arguing that it creates an uneven playing field. Ma’s office has responded that the program would focus on categories of tools rather than specific vendors, though the details remain under development.
If the program moves forward, it could serve as a model for other states looking to bridge the fintech adoption gap between major metropolitan areas and smaller markets. The challenge, as with many government technology initiatives, will be execution speed. Small businesses cannot wait two years for a pilot program to conclude before accessing tools that could help them today.
