If you have spent any time around commercial finance you have heard all three words used for the same job. Someone calls themselves an ISO, someone else says they are a business loan broker, a third person says they take referral fees — and all three are sending business owners to a funder and getting paid when the deal closes. The words are not actually synonyms, though. They describe three different levels of involvement, and the difference decides how much work you do, how much control you keep, and how you get paid.
Referral partner: you make the introduction
A referral partner identifies a business that needs capital and hands it off. You are not collecting bank statements, you are not negotiating with underwriting, and you are not explaining a factor rate to anyone. You introduce the client, the funding partner takes it from there, and you are paid when the deal funds.
This is the lowest-friction version of the business and it is why most people should start here. There is no software to buy, nothing to learn about credit boxes, and no obligation to produce volume. The trade-off is that you do not control the client experience — someone else is doing the work, so the outcome depends on how good they are.
Broker: you work the file
A broker takes the deal further. You are gathering documents, understanding what the client actually needs versus what they asked for, knowing which lenders will look at a restaurant with four months of seasonality, and pushing back when an offer comes in worse than the file deserves.
Brokers earn more per deal because they are doing more of the work, and they build something durable, since a client who trusts you comes back. The cost is real: you need product knowledge, you need lender relationships, and you need to be available when underwriting has a question at 4pm on a Friday.
Worth knowing before you print business cards: broker licensing varies by state. Commercial and business-purpose lending is regulated much more lightly than consumer lending in most of the country, but several states — California among them — have licensing regimes that can reach commercial brokering, and a few require registration for what looks like a simple referral. This is worth twenty minutes with your own state's regulator, or a lawyer, before you scale up. It is not something to take a blog post's word for.
ISO: you are a sales office
ISO stands for Independent Sales Organization, and the term comes out of the merchant cash advance and payment processing world. An ISO is a broker operating as a business rather than an individual: you have a pipeline, usually a team, often your own marketing and lead generation, and direct contractual relationships with multiple funders.
ISOs frequently submit the same file to several funders at once to shop for the best offer, and they hold the client relationship tightly enough that the funder may never speak to the merchant directly. It is the most lucrative version of the role and also the most operationally demanding — you are running a sales company, with everything that implies.
So which one is Loanable's program?
All three, deliberately. We do not run separate tiers with separate paperwork, because in practice people move between these roles as they get more comfortable, and making someone re-apply to do more work is a strange way to encourage them.
A real estate agent who sends us two deals a year and a five-person MCA shop that sends us thirty a month sign up through the same form and get the same economics. What differs is how involved you choose to be in each file. You can hand off an introduction and never think about it again, or you can stay on the file, join calls, and manage the client through closing. Both are welcome, and both are paid the same way.
How the money works
Loanable runs a 50/50 net profit split. Whatever the deal earns after costs, you get half of it, on every product type — merchant cash advances, term loans, SBA, lines of credit, equipment financing, and commercial real estate alike. There is no tiered schedule where the good rate only starts after you have hit some volume number, and no product where the split quietly gets worse.
Payouts run every Monday by ACH, with no minimum threshold. If a deal funded last week, it pays this week. You can see what each deal earned in your partner dashboard as it happens, rather than reconciling a statement at month end and hoping the math matches what you were told.
Picking your lane
If you already have a book of business — clients, a list, a network you talk to regularly — start as a referral partner. Send a few deals, see how they are handled, and decide from there whether you want to be more involved.
If you want to build this into a real income stream, work toward the broker role. Learn what makes a file fundable, get comfortable with two or three products, and you will close a much higher percentage of what you touch.
If you are already running a sales operation and just need funder capacity and better economics than your current shop offers, you are an ISO, and the 150+ lender network is the part of this that matters to you.
Whichever describes you, the specific paths are covered in more depth here: becoming an MCA ISO, starting as a business loan broker, real estate agent referrals, mortgage broker partnerships, and personal loan referrals.
One program, whichever role you want
Sign up once and decide deal by deal how involved you want to be.
- 50/50 net profit split on every funded deal, across every product type
- Paid every Monday by ACH, with no minimum payout threshold
- 150+ lenders competing for the files you send
- Approved within 24 hours — no fees, no contracts, no volume commitment
Apply to the Loanable partner program — it takes about two minutes, and you will have a referral link and a partner dashboard the day you are approved.
Loanable is not a lender. We connect businesses with funding providers, and terms vary by deal.