How HL Hunt’s Business Credit Builder reports a tradeline for firms with no credit file
The membership product opens a revolving account in a business’s name and reports it monthly in Metro 2 format, with no personal guarantee and no personal credit check.
A business with no credit file is, to most lenders, indistinguishable from a business with a bad one. Commercial underwriters, suppliers setting payment terms and some insurance carriers all pull business credit, and a new LLC with no reported tradelines has nothing for them to evaluate. HL Hunt Financial's Business Credit Builder is built around that specific gap.
The product is a membership-based revolving credit account opened in the business's name. Each month the member makes an on-time payment, and HL Hunt reports the resulting tradeline to the major commercial credit bureaus in Metro 2 format — the same standardized data format banks and large creditors use when they furnish data. The intent is to produce a scoreable commercial credit file that exists separately from the owner's personal credit.
According to the company's published materials, the program requires no personal guarantee, no personal credit check and no operating history. That is the design decision that most distinguishes it from conventional small-business credit, where a personal guarantee from the owner is standard and a thin business file is typically compensated for by underwriting the owner instead. HL Hunt states that its file is built on the business entity alone, which it positions as relevant for new entities and for owners whose personal credit is in repair.
Membership is tiered. HL Hunt lists seven levels running from $9.99 per month, which reports a $150 tradeline, to $199.99 per month at a $15,000 tradeline, with no setup or application fees and a stated 0% APR. Higher tiers report larger credit limits, which the company says carry more weight with bureaus and lenders. Every tier includes credit monitoring, marketplace access, a business valuation and a trade reference letter.
Credit is not issued as open-ended cash. It can be spent only through HL Hunt's own marketplace of business software, products and services — a constraint the company frames as controlled spending, and one that also keeps the credit line inside its own ecosystem. Reporting goes to Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business, Equifax Business and the Small Business Financial Exchange, with TransUnion also cited in the company's FAQ.
HL Hunt publishes a set of expected outcomes: a PAYDEX score generating within 30 to 60 days, starter vendor credit by months three to six, and prime-grade scores of 90 to 100 PAYDEX at twelve months. It also cites an average score improvement of 85 points in the first year and says 87% of members see improvement within 60 days. These are the company's own figures and have not been independently verified.
The company is direct that the twelve-month horizon matters, warning that cancelling early raises utilization, shortens credit age and forfeits payment history before it fully weights a PAYDEX score. Read plainly, that is also a description of the product's cost structure: the benefit accrues only to members who stay subscribed through a full reporting year, and at the upper tiers a twelve-month commitment runs to roughly $2,400.
On the corporate side, HL Hunt describes itself as a founder-owned, bootstrapped group spanning credit, payments, banking, AI underwriting and bureau reporting, with nine product lines including a Metro 2 reporting platform and an underwriting engine it calls Hunt Score. It says its lending entity, HL Hunt Lending LLC, holds NMLS registration (#2759282) with state licensing in progress, that its banking products run through a Banking-as-a-Service partnership with an FDIC-insured sponsor bank, and that its bureau reporting is built to FCRA, CROA and Metro 2 requirements. Its stated security posture includes a SOC 2 controls framework with an audit "roadmap in motion" — that is, a framework in place rather than a completed audit.
Businesses evaluating any credit-building product should confirm how the tradeline is furnished and whether the reporting bureaus are the ones their prospective lenders actually pull. Because the credit is usable only inside a single marketplace, the practical value also depends on whether that marketplace carries goods and services the business would have purchased regardless.