A Journey Through Collections With Erica Gilerman

“Within two weeks, I closed my first deal. I just clicked in the industry,” said Erica Gilerman.

Gilerman wasn’t talking about funding a deal. She was talking about collecting on one.

“Closing the deal on our end means that we have a signed, sealed, and delivered stipulation, one that our client is happy with, and one that truly makes sense financially for the merchant as well,” she said.

Erica Gilerman, Chief Legal Officer, Triton Recovery Group

Conventional wisdom in the small business finance industry has long held that anyone can put money out the door; getting it back is the hard part. Gilerman currently serves as Chief Legal Officer of that hard part, working for Triton Recovery Group in South Florida.

Talk to anyone at Triton and they’ll probably tell you that successful collection begins during the underwriting process, before a deal is ever funded in the first place. In a taped interview deBanked conducted with Triton CEO Leo Vargas in 2024, he said, “The underwriting process to me is the most important piece of getting a deal done in the industry.” Vargas offered examples, saying that it’s critical to know from the outset what merchants plan to use the funds for and that the terms of any deal should be set in accordance with a merchant’s anticipated receivables, not deposits.

Today, Triton has 75 employees. But when Gilerman was being recruited to work there in 2021, the company had only six. Vargas was looking to add an attorney to his then-fledgling traditional commercial collections firm, which was focused entirely on the merchant cash advance industry, and he posted an ad in the New York City market.

“I will never forget… it was very interesting to me because it was in all caps and it said ‘COLLECTIONS ATTORNEY, NEW YORK,'” said Gilerman.

She answered the ad, met Vargas in New York, and received an offer. There was just one catch: She had to spend a month training at Triton’s Miami office to learn its particular niche of collections. That required a significant sacrifice, time away from her family, but she decided to take a chance and then determine whether the job was right for her. She started in July 2021 as the firm’s General Counsel.

“Within two weeks, I closed my first deal. I just clicked in the industry,” she said. “Between my accounting background—I understand how the factor rates work, I understand how businesses operate, I take a very unique approach to everything in the sense that I will collect in a way where I put myself in the debtor’s shoes.”

Gilerman, the daughter of immigrants, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and she attended Madison High School in Brooklyn. She was accepted into the school’s law program, which had been created by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg, herself a Madison graduate, had created the curriculum.

“My love for law really kind of came to play there, and I learned a lot from that program,” Gilerman said, “and that’s why I’m very proud to say I’m a New York City public school graduate, and that’s how I fell into law.”

Gilerman faced a personal family tragedy as she began college at Pace University, around the same time Lehman Brothers collapsed. Pace’s campus in Downtown Manhattan had a front-row seat to the turmoil unfolding across the financial system.

“I will never forget that in that moment I realized I need to find a career that will not keep me into some sort of niche, because 25 years from now I could be one of those people that was carrying boxes,” Gilerman said, “and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and it was a very eerie dynamic being on Wall Street at the time.”

Gilerman initially intended to pursue a career in public accounting as a result but ultimately swerved back toward law. After becoming an attorney, she worked in employment litigation before moving on to collecting medical debt for hospitals in New Jersey.

“You have to have a specific type of personality to be in collections, especially as a woman,” she said. “I would candidly say I would never expect myself to be in collections. That was not my goal in law school, but I would not change it for the world now. This is exactly the niche industry I need to be in.”

Part of that certainty came from finding the right person to work with.

“I will say that I learned most of the MCA space, especially on the front end side, from Leo. He taught me the collections mindset for commercial collections, and we just clicked in a way that it was just a great synergy from the beginning.”

Triton was still quite small at the time. When Gilerman visited the company’s original Miami office, they had to set her up in the break room. By the end of 2021, however, the COVID lockdowns were finally beginning to dissipate nationwide, and the company hit the gas pedal by sponsoring a conference that December in New York: Broker Fair.

“We were able to expand and start hiring more after the very first deBanked [conference] that I attended, which was December of 2021,” Gilerman said.

By then, her mind was fully made up. She and her family moved to Miami two weeks after the conference. Five years and nearly 70 additional employees later, spread across two states (Florida and Texas), she has since become the company’s Chief Legal Officer.

In those early days, Gilerman was still trying to wrap her mind around the financial product Triton’s clients worked with. She said she came to really understand “that without the MCA industry, there is no such thing as a mom and pop shop anywhere in this country and it really changed my perspective of what alternative finance as a whole is.”

Triton’s collection practice handles MCA, commercial loans, and equipment financing on a contingency basis. Ask the team a question about underwriting and they’ll readily offer an opinion. They’re only interested in legally enforceable paper.

The latest frontier in collections includes dealing with merchants who have turned to LLMs to fire off letters, emails, and demands, often containing incorrect information or citations to the wrong statutes. It has become commonplace to see merchants effectively act as their own attorneys with the help of AI, or even claim that AI is representing them.

“I see a lot from ChatGPT and Claude there, and the problem is that they continue to just say the same thing over and over,” she said. “You could tell by the tone because no one’s actually telling them to make it sound like themselves.”

Even on phone calls, merchants may attempt to bring AI agents onto the line with them.

On the flip side, collectors can use AI too. In a recent social media post, Triton CEO Leo Vargas said, “The best agencies will use AI to eliminate repetitive tasks, improve compliance, analyze consumer behavior, optimize account placement and provide collectors with better insights before they ever pick up the phone. Collections has always been about people. AI simply gives those people better tools to succeed.”

Vargas also referenced Gilerman in an email to deBanked. “Five years ago, [Gilerman] took a chance on Triton and joined us during an important stage of our growth,” he said. “Since then, she has grown alongside the company and worked her way to becoming our Chief Legal Officer and a key member of our executive leadership team.”

“Collections, especially the MCA space, this is us playing chess,” Gilerman asserted. “And for us, a checkmate is getting that payment through the door, making our client happy, allowing our client to then redeploy those funds.”

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.