Letter From the Editor – November/December 2015

Somehow 2015 is already over. It started off as the year of the broker but it ended up as a culmination of many things. It was the year of capital raising and rebrands, the year of regulatory interest and RFIs, the year of unicorns and leaderboards. 2015 solidified alternative lending’s place across multiple continents. Bankers started talking like technologists and technologists like bankers.

In 2015, we introduced William Ramos who went from working at a Lowes Home Improvement store to driving a Maserati after he landed a temporary job as a financial cold caller. We also showed you Jared Weitz, who went from working as a plumber to running a financial company that’s now on pace to originate $100 million in small business funding a year.

As we close out 2015 here, we’ll introduce you to the man whose company is producing billions (that’s billions with a ‘b’) of small business funding. Daniel DeMeo is the CEO of CAN Capital, a company who has weathered both the dot-com bust and the financial crisis and still manages to be one of the industry’s top players. DeMeo shared what he’s all about and the story of CAN you haven’t read anywhere else.

That’s the good stuff, but there’s some bad stuff too. While critics have broadcast some of the not so flattering stories in alternative lending’s rise, there’s a darker side that no one has dared write about, bad borrowers. Perhaps a byproduct of rapid technological change, merchant fraud has become an all too common occurrence. These predatory merchants are causing chaos, damaging margins, exploiting underwriting weaknesses and potentially driving up the cost for the good guys. In this issue, we explore the reality of bad guys and their tactics.

And that’s not all we have of course. In 2015, we compiled the first report on merchant cash advance and small business lending in collaboration with Bryant Park Capital. We measured the industry’s growth, learned of its diversity, and got a numerical sense of the confidence for the future. A sample of that report is included within.

That was 2015 summed up, the year that Marty McFly met us all in the future. 2016 will undoubtedly mean robots, laser beams and interplanetary colonization. Sprinkled in between all that will be online loans, merchant cash advances, bitcoins, and financial disruption. In 2016, the world may become deBanked once and for all.

–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.