Split-Funding MCA and Daily Debit Loans Are Spreading Across the World

When banks say no, merchants all over the world are getting funded via non-bank alternatives that resemble products here in the USA. In Hong Kong for example, a special administrative region of China, there are non-bank businesses that offer merchant cash advances and/or daily debit loans.

Having had the opportunity to visit with some of those funders there last week, I was surprised to learn that we spoke the same language. By that I mean that they price deals with factor rates, work with local finance brokers, underwrite files using recent bank statements, do site inspections and more. They even a have decision issued by the highest court in the land that declared merchant cash advances to be purchases, not loans.

Even the pitch is basically the same. “Banks aren’t lending to small businesses,” I heard time and time again in Hong Kong. And that’s probably not going to change any time soon. While the non-bank business financing scene is starting to take off, merchant cash advances in particular have been around there for about seven years already.

Hong Kong’s population is a little less than a third of the size of Australia, where many US-based funders have been expanding to over the last couple years.

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.