Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, July 25th.

Today on Forbes, Inside America's Top Small Business Bank.

If small business is the beating heart of the American $30 trillion economy,

then it might be surprising to find out that the lifeblood it counts on in the form of funding via loans

comes not from

Wall Street's megabanks like J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, but from a tiny,

branchless bank in Wilmington, North Carolina, just seven miles from Michael Jordan's boyhood home.

Founded in 2008, Live Oak Bank shares, has 1,053 employees, $14 billion in assets, and a $1.5 billion market capitalization.

Since 2017, it has issued $15.4 billion in government-backed 7-A loans, more than any other bank in the country, including the

aforementioned Wall Street heavyweights. The 7A program is the Small Business Administration's

flagship offering, designed to help small businesses that might not qualify for conventional

credit. Live Oak's average loan is just $1 million, chump change for bigger brand name competitors,

but the lender does around $2 billion a year in SBA loans, plus another $3 billion in conventional

small business loans. Live Oak doesn't look or act like a typical bank, and that's the point.

Its 85-acre campus in Wilmington is surrounded

by long-leaf pines, not oaks. In a boreal misnomer, no one seems bothered by. The four main

buildings are styled more like a Silicon Valley startup than a bank, with cypress siding,

exposed wooden beams, and not a marble column or roll-top desk in sight.

And, of course, it has the requisite full gym and health clinic on site.

Rocking chairs line patios that overlook an 8.5-acre retention pond, big enough to be mistaken for a lake,

one of the only visual clues that this is the south, not south of San Francisco.

Live Oak has no branches. All deposits come in online. And while most people think of small

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