Welcome to the ModernTax Daily Beat — a new series where we break down what's happening in our world of SBA lending, tax technology, and the workflows that power small business financing. This is the companion newsletter to our daily video updates. Let's get into it.
Anthropic — the company behind Claude, which powers a lot of our AI solutions at ModernTax — recently dropped data research that stopped us in our tracks:
49.7% of all agentic AI tool calls are focused on software engineering.
Healthcare, legal, finance, lending, and tax — each of these massive industries accounts for less than 5% of agent activity. Han Wong called this the Greenfield Opportunity, and we couldn’t agree more.
Here’s why this matters to us and to everyone in the SBA lending ecosystem:
The workflows that power small-business lending — underwriting, credit analysis, borrower document collection, tax transcript review, and compliance checks — are still overwhelmingly manual. Check our client email queue on any given day, and you’ll see it: requests being processed on checklists, not through intelligent automation.
That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation about where the opportunity sits.
When Anthropic broke down what comes after software engineering on the agent adoption leaderboard — back office automation, marketing, sales and CRM, finance and accounting, data analysis — every single category was sub-10%. These are the exact workflows we think about daily at ModernTax.
Our take: If you’re building a company in these verticals right now, you have to think about the full workflow — not just one step or one persona. For us, that means understanding the lender’s workflow, the borrower’s workflow, the underwriter’s needs, the credit analyst’s process, and, ultimately, the regulatory agencies that oversee all systems (SBA) that sit beneath it.
The race isn’t about who builds the flashiest tool. It’s about who maps the entire workflow and builds agents that can operate across it.
The second thing on our mind: the agent identity stack.
If you’ve been following the AI world the past few weeks, you’ve seen the drama around OpenClaw — an open-source tool that lets AI agents do more across the web — running into Google’s account restrictions. Google essentially blocked these agents from accessing their sites.
This might seem like a tech-world issue. It’s not. It’s directly relevant to what we do.
Here’s the connection: for AI agents to operate in regulated environments like SBA lending, they need a robust identity and authentication layer. We’re talking about:
User authentication — who is this agent acting on behalf of?
Delegated permissions — what exactly is the agent allowed to do?
Scope limitations — what can’t it touch?
Logging and auditability — what did it do and when?
Revocation — how do you shut it down if something goes wrong?
We work with financial institutions and non-bank lenders who operate under SBA and IRS requirements. So we have to think deeply about what these institutions will require from AI vendors before they let agents into their workflows.
And it goes further than lending. Think about the IRS itself. If you have an agent trained on all the relevant IRS code, specific to your tax situation and your needs as a taxpayer, why shouldn’t that agent be able to authorize actions, resolve issues, and access information on your behalf?
We believe that’s the future. But authentication, policy, and platform risk questions have to be solved first. That’s why we’re putting together events this year specifically around this question: How do you operate in an AI-first world with government services?
If MCP and agentic tools keep expanding — and they will — the sites and services that don’t figure out how to let agents in securely are going to become bottlenecks for the entire ecosystem.
A few things are happening on our side of the house:
🔹 Tax Season Is Here. We’re in the early innings of tax preparation season. If you’re a business owner going through — or preparing for — an SBA financing process, we want to make sure you’re ready. We’re offering free assessments for businesses that want to know where they stand before entering a regulated lending process. Reach out and we’ll make sure all the i’s are dotted, and t’s are crossed.
🔹 Spring Travel Season ModernTax will be on the road. Here’s where you can find us:
South by Southwest March 12–15 Austin, TX
MRC Vegas (Merchant Risk Council) March 16–17 Las Vegas, NV
SE Small Business Lenders ConferenceMarch 18–20 Savannah, GA
We’re especially excited about the SE Small Business Lenders Conference — it’s our first time attending. We won’t be sponsoring this year, but we’ll be there and would love to connect.
At SXSW, expect some interviews and insights from folks in the lending and startup world. At MRC, we’ll be diving into merchant risk, fraud, and the data infrastructure that supports it.
🔹 Newsletter Cadence You’ll be seeing a lot more from us. This Daily Beat will be a regular fixture — high-level views of what we’re working on, what we’re seeing in the market, and what matters for SBA lenders and their borrowers. We’ve also got some team spotlights coming, introducing new people joining ModernTax and what they bring to the table.
That’s the beat for today. If you’re in the SBA lending space, working with small business borrowers, or just thinking about how AI is going to reshape financial services — stick around. We’re going to be covering all of it.
Check us out at moderntax.io. Questions? Hit us up here on Substack or via email.
— Matt Parker, CEO, ModernTax
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