OppFi Shares More About The Bitty Advance Deal

OppFi, a publicly traded fintech with a $430M market cap, discussed its recent investment in Bitty Advance during its regular quarterly earnings call today. OppFi acquired a 35% stake in the company with the option to acquire a majority in 2027.

“This acquisition is intended to serve as the foundational piece of our new small business financing vertical,” said OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz. “Bitty is a credit access company that offers revenue-based financing and other working capital solutions. Bitty generates income through origination and service fee income and therefore does not have balance sheet or credit risk.”

Special mention was made about Craig Hecker, who is still the majority owner, and his great leadership.

“I’m personally looking forward to collaborating with Craig and helping him and his team take Bitty to the next level of profitable growth by leveraging OppFi’s expertise in data analytics, marketing and automation,” Schwartz said.

During the Q&A session, Dave Storms of Stonegate Capital asked Schwartz to elaborate on any exciting short-term synergies the deal might present for OppFi. This was his response:

Todd Schwartz: I think Craig is a talented operator and obviously someone who has a lot of experience in the small business space. We think the collaboration between our two companies is going to yield great results. To remind everyone, Craig has a business that currently is in origination, so he’s earning his income from origination and servicing. We think that has a lot of optionality. He also has a really good digital platform. We believe in this digitization of small business and think there’s a lot of growth there. I think when you take a lot of the things that we do well and the things that Craig’s doing well, there’s a lot of complementary skill sets.

And I think it’s going to yield great results. I think we’ve done a lot of research on the SMB market and we feel that there is supply/demand imbalance. And we feel that there’s ability to not only take market share, but as the addressable market continues to go online to search for working capital options, that there potentially is even growth in the total addressable market. So we’re excited. We think there’s some accretion to earnings that we mentioned in this year and then for the future but we feel really good about taking our time there. We’ve kind of started to talk about it for over a year and a half. And so I think we’re just happy that we’ve fulfilled on our and delivered on our promise that we’re going to create, that OppFi is going to create a brand that has best suite of best-in-class digital financial service products that address supply/demand imbalance and credit access. And we feel like we’re on our way. We have all the ingredients to be able to do that and will yield great results for us.