Letter From the Editor – March/April 2015

A single innocuous quote by one of this issue’s sources is all it took to put everything in perspective. “2015 is the year of the broker,” said Sendto’s Amanda Kingsley. Could that even be possible if 2014 was defined by algorithms?

In the pages that follow, we investigate the impact that the OnDeck and Lending Club IPOs had on public awareness but from a unique angle. Loan volumes are up everywhere you look, but so are the number of middlemen that are trying to get in on the action. The broker business is booming.

Even the lending platforms leading the technology charge could best be described as brokers. They connect borrowers with investors for a fee. So too could the investment bankers who have been tirelessly making the rounds to assist with capital raising.

But it was when a 25-year old college dropout told me that deal-making afforded him the ability to go from taking the bus to work to driving a new Ferrari, that I became convinced that 2015 might indeed be the year of the broker.

This isn’t to say that mistakes aren’t being made along the way. The influx of inexperienced newcomers has created a complicated environment.

I was a broker once too. When I launched MerchantProcessingResource.com (now deBanked) back in 2010, I was still making deals myself. Through the blog and publication, I try to cover the wider industry from an insider’s perspective. That often means rolling up my sleeves and experiencing it firsthand.

Just this past February we not only accepted a payment in bitcoin, but the agreed upon advertising price was actually set in bitcoin, not dollars. These are revolutionary times.

Many of the financial companies and systems we delve into might need banks, but they are not banks themselves. That is the essence of the industry we hope to capture. As technology improves, the world is becoming a little less banked. And so with that, hello again. I’m back. I’m excited. I’m deBanked.

I hope you enjoy this issue.

–Sean Murray

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.