Even with more nontraditional players making more loans to small businesses, loan origination at Bank of America is still up over 6% year over year.

Sharon Miller, managing director and head of small business at BofA, told Bank Innovation more business owners are going online and expecting full capabilities when they get there. She said BofA is delivering those capabilities and encouraging its roughly 3.3 million small business clients to choose the bank for more services so it can better serve them.

“Do more with us and we’ll be able to give you more insights as well,” she said, also touting the bank’s enhanced rewards platform.

Rising revenues paired with a positive economic outlook are setting the stage for a year of “robust” expansion, according to BofA’s Fall 2018 Small Business Owner Report. Of the more than 1,000 small business owners surveyed, 15% said they intend to seek loan financing this year, nearly double what it was a year ago.

The latest quarterly Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index shows 47% of small business owners surveyed said obtaining credit was “somewhat” or “very” easy in the past year, compared with 40% last quarter. Half of the respondents said they expect credit will be “easy” to obtain over the next year and only 1% said access to credit was the “most important” challenge they face.

But where will these loans come from?

Nearly a quarter of small businesses seeking a loan in 2017 did so online, up over previous years, according to the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, nonbanks from e-commerce giants to startups are using new data sources and underwriting practices to eat into a market traditionally dominated by banks big and small.

According to Biz2Credit’s Small Business Lending Index, loan approval rates among alternative lenders was up to 56.8% as of October, compared to 50.1% among small banks and just 26.8% among big banks.

Asked about challenges posed by alternative lenders like PayPal and Square, Miller said BofA welcomes “all competition.” She also said just because a business has plans to grow, is profitable and seeks a loan, doesn’t mean lending that money is the right thing to do.

On the prospect of a coming recession, which could put many alternative lenders under stress for the first time, Miller said she can’t speak for what other lenders are doing but that BofA believes in “responsible growth” regardless of the overall economy’s health.

“We are focused on responsible growth,” she said. “When we deploy capital we ask, Is it going to the businesses that are viable and have a good business plan? It may not be right for them or the community.

“It’s business by business, market by market, loan by loan,” she said, adding that BofA has a strong portfolio of clients it expects to keep.

It also appears the bank wouldn’t do anything in a downturn it’s already not doing in a strong economy.

“It doesn’t do us any good to approve a loan for a business that isn’t viable,” Miller said. “By and large, our products are not going to change.”

Other banks have concluded they can’t afford not to change.

Dan O’Malley, CEO of Boston-based startup Numerated, told Bank Innovation his company’s real-time lending and growth automation platform is largely the result of a mutually-beneficial partnership.

The platform helped Eastern Bank, the largest and oldest mutually owned bank in the U.S., make a digital transformation that quadrupled the size of its loan portfolio. (Perhaps it has something to do with the trimming down of a traditional lending process that used to take 2-to-3 weeks to as fast as 2 minutes and 57 seconds.)

“If you think it’s crazy to bring a team of entrepreneurs inside of a bank, it’s, like, double crazy to bring them inside a 200-year-old bank, on top of that a mutual bank, which means it doesn’t have any access to the capital markets to fund things,” O’Malley said. “But, nonetheless, that’s what we did.”

Eastern Bank became the No. 1 small business lender in Boston, beating banks “literally 100 times its size,” O’Malley said, and Numerated was spun out as an independent company in 2017. It has secured the backing of Venrock, FIS and others along the way.

Numerated has grown both its customer base and staff by 50% over the last four months and raised an additional $8 million to meet market demand and accelerate growth. It also welcomed Raj Date, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as an adviser and investor.

O’Malley said collaborations with fintechs can help small community banks and regional banks stay competitive or even take back business they might have lost over the years to bigger players.

“Nobody is better at relationship banking than regional and community banks — nobody,” he said. “Most businesses want to bank with a relationship bank and what has been lacking is the ability to have cutting-edge technology while also providing relationship banking. That is what our platform is built to do.”

O’Malley said the first question they typically tackle with prospective clients is whether the platform will stay true to the bank’s conservative underwriting standards.

“That’s what the benefit was of building this in a 200-year-old bank with no access to the capital markets,” he said. “This is not black box lending. This is thoughtful digitization of conservative credit policy.”