The Best in SMB Finance: Announcing Tearsheet’s 2025 Winners

The 2025 winners of Tearsheet’s SMB Finance Awards are here!

These awards shine a light on the innovation and excellence driving the SMB finance ecosystem. From breakthrough products to the teams and visionaries behind them, we’re celebrating those helping SMBs work smarter, grow faster, and operate stronger.

Whether you’re a bank, fintech, or ecosystem partner, if your work has made a meaningful difference for SMBs, this is your moment to be recognized.

2025 Winners of the SMB Finance Awards

Best Bank for SMBs: U.S. Bank

U.S. Bank earns the Best Bank for SMBs award for delivering an end-to-end operating system for small businesses beyond just banking. Its Business Essentials platform brings checking, payments, and cash-flow tools under one roof, giving owners faster access to deposits, streamlined expense controls, and modern payment acceptance with a free mobile card reader for new accounts. The bank has also expanded into practical, everyday workflows like bill pay, spend management, and payroll, reducing the fragmentation that typically slows down small operators. Promising results show that business owners are responding: they’re engaging more deeply with the unified toolkit and relying on it to run more of their back-office tasks. By combining full-spectrum banking with integrated digital tools that cut down administrative friction, U.S. Bank — serving more than 1.4 million businesses — has established itself as a go-to partner for small businesses.

Best Payments for SMBs: Extend

Extend wins Best Payments for SMBs. Managing spending can be a challenge for SMBs: tracking receipts, approving expenses, paying vendors, and keeping budgets in check. Extend helps simplify all of this by embedding virtual cards into the tools teams already use. Its recent enhancements, Budgets and Bill Pay, make the platform even more practical: Budgets allow companies to set spending limits by department, project, or category, while Bill Pay enables secure virtual-card payments to vendors directly. Together, these features give teams more control, improve visibility for finance, and make everyday payments and approvals smoother — all without changing the systems SMBs already rely on, including integrations with partners like BMO and SAP Concur.

Best Service Provider for SMBs: Intuit

Intuit takes the title of Best Service Provider for SMBs. Over the past year, Intuit has shifted from being a system of record to a system of intelligence, bringing AI-powered “done-for-you” experiences to millions of businesses. Its reimagined QuickBooks helps SMBs manage the complexity of day-to-day operations, from accounting and payroll to invoicing, payments, and customer management, while also delivering actionable insights. The recent addition of Intuit’s AI agents, including Payments, Accounting, Finance, Customer, Payroll, and Sales Tax, automates tasks and supports smarter decision-making. Since launching, over 2 million business customers have used the new Intuit AI agents within QuickBooks, with an 80% repeat engagement rate. By consolidating processes that were once scattered across multiple apps and providing guidance through AI and human intelligence, Intuit is helping businesses operate more efficiently, get paid faster, and focus on growth.

Best Embedded Finance Product for SMBs: Gusto

Gusto takes the award for Best Embedded Finance Product for SMBs with its new Payroll Bridge, an embedded line of credit that helps SMBs run payroll on time even when cash flow is tight. Integrated directly into the Gusto platform, Payroll Bridge allows admins to apply for and access funds without leaving their payroll workflow. Underwritten using payroll history and bank data, it offers flexible repayment plans, a short grace period, and full transparency upfront. By embedding capital where it’s needed most, Gusto gives business owners confidence, keeps employees paid on schedule, and addresses one of the most critical pain points for SMBs. Early adoption has already helped hundreds of businesses manage short-term cash flow, demonstrating how embedded finance can be both practical and scalable.

Best Card For SMBs: Brim Financial

This year’s Best Card for SMBs goes to Brim Financial for its unified, API-first SMB card and spend management platform, which enables banks, credit unions, and fintechs to launch modern card programs in weeks. By consolidating fragmented legacy systems into a single stack, Brim allows business owners to issue physical and virtual cards instantly, set spend controls, automate accounts payable, and integrate smoothly with accounting and ERP systems such as QuickBooks and NetSuite. Its platform supports multi-currency programs, embedded financing, and community-linked rewards, helping SMBs save time and focus on growth. Live with institutions such as Canadian Western Bank, Laurentian Bank, and Affinity Credit Union, Brim’s infrastructure equips traditional financial institutions with modern SMB card and expense management solutions.