On Tuesday evening, several fintech companies finally received the green light they'd been waiting for: The U.S. Small Business Administration approved them to make loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the government's $2 trillion stimulus package. Those companies, however, never got the chance to lend—by Thursday morning, the PPP funding had run dry. That's left thousands of small businesses seeking PPP loans from fintech firms—which specialize in lending to the smallest of...

In the wake of the Great Recession, as lawmakers passed the Dodd-Frank legislation to rein in an ignominious financial industry, one paragraph of the law also validated a rebel contingent of reform-minded entrepreneurs. The passage mandated that banks must make consumers’ data available to them “in an electronic form.” And so was born the fintech industry. Now, as the novel coronavirus presents the world with its biggest economic challenge in more than a decade, fintech is having a moment of...