Harborcrest Financial Group Brings a Fintech Edge to New Haven Banking

Julian Sorensen spent seven years as a commercial loan officer at a regional bank, watching small business owners get rejected for loans not because their businesses were unsound, but because their financial documentation did not fit neatly into standardized underwriting software. "I kept seeing good businesses turned down over paperwork formatting, basically," Sorensen said from Harborcrest Financial Group's office near New Haven's Ninth Square. "I thought there had to be a smarter way to evaluate risk than a rigid checklist built for a different era."

In 2018, Sorensen left the bank to found Harborcrest Financial Group, a financial services firm that combines traditional small business lending with a proprietary underwriting model designed to better evaluate cash-flow-based businesses like restaurants, contractors, and retailers that often struggle with conventional bank applications. The company has since grown to 41 employees and has issued financing to more than 800 small businesses across Connecticut.

Rebuilding Underwriting From the Ground Up

Harborcrest's underwriting approach relies on analyzing a business's actual cash flow patterns, including seasonal fluctuations common to Connecticut's tourism and construction-adjacent businesses, rather than relying solely on traditional credit scores and collateral requirements. Sorensen says this required building custom software rather than licensing an off-the-shelf underwriting platform, a costly early decision that strained the company's finances before its lending model proved itself.

"We basically had to build our own bank's guts from scratch," Sorensen said. "It would have been cheaper and faster to just use what everyone else uses. But what everyone else uses was the exact problem I was trying to solve." Harborcrest's default rates, according to Sorensen, have remained competitive with traditional bank lending despite serving a riskier-looking borrower profile on paper.

Serving Borrowers Banks Overlook

Renata Volkov, Harborcrest's head of underwriting, said the company's client base skews toward businesses that had been previously rejected by at least one traditional lender. "A lot of our clients come to us feeling like they did something wrong," Volkov said. "Usually they didn't. They just didn't fit a model that wasn't built with their kind of business in mind." Harborcrest has become particularly active in financing New Haven-area restaurants and specialty retailers, sectors Sorensen says traditional banks often view as too volatile.

Balancing Technology and Local Judgment

Despite Harborcrest's technology-driven underwriting model, Sorensen has resisted fully automating lending decisions, insisting that a human loan officer review every application before approval. "The algorithm gets you most of the way there," he said. "But I still believe a person who knows this region needs to make the final call. A model doesn't know that a restaurant's slow season is normal for New Haven in February."

Harborcrest recently closed a funding round that will allow the company to expand its lending capacity and hire additional underwriting staff, and Sorensen says he is exploring similar expansion into manufacturing and logistics lending. "Every business I turn down still haunts me a little," he said. "That's probably not healthy, but it's also why I built this company instead of staying at the bank."