The thousands of small and midsize businesses that have relied on CIT for financing shouldn’t be immediately affected by the financial giant’s prepackaged bankruptcy.

But longer term, CIT’s filing for Chapter 11 protection could lead those businesses to look to other options for financing, said William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

“If they’re financing you and you have a relationship, a lot of that is going to be kept intact,” Dunkelberg told Portfolio.com. “Certainly, there will be difficulties created. I don’t think they’re going to go out and cancel loans. It’s not happy news, but it’s not going to catch a lot of people short.”

Many small businesses that had counted on CIT in the past might start looking elsewhere for financing as a result of the bankruptcy, to GMAC or other firms that can provide some of the same services as the small business lender.

“A lot of customers will be bailing out,” he predicted. “There are other finance companies, just not as big as CIT. (CIT’s) prospects aren’t as rosy.”

CIT filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday in what it called a different kind of bankruptcy, one with overwhelming support from its creditors. The company says it will emerge from bankruptcy by the end of the year, with its creditors in control of the 101-year-old company.

Shareholders and the U.S. government are likely to be the biggest losers in the prepackaged bankruptcy. Shareholders will be wiped out, and it’s likely the government will lose the $2.3 billion it put into CIT from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But the government had a chance to keep CIT afloat before bankruptcy.

As the company struggled through the summer, it looked to the government for more help. But regulators decided that though CIT was a major cog in financing for small business, its collapse would not pose systemic risk of the kind designated for such “too big too fail” institutions as Bank of America or Citigroup.

The prepackaged bankruptcy plan is an effort to limit the damage to the retailers who count on it for its specialized financing, the New York Times reports. CIT is the leading provider of factoring, in which a company sells debt it’s owed to CIT at a discount in return for immediate cash.

CIT listed assets in the bankruptcy filing of about $71 billion and nearly $65 billion in liabilities.