 |
Phone: 800-661-1864 Email: info@simplyfunding.com Learn More |
 Since: January 2025 |
Related Headlines
| 09/21/2017 | Simply Funding announces new split provider |
Related Videos
Shimon Wein of Simply Funding at deBanked CONNECT |
Stories
Good Funding Announces Closing of up to $30 Million Credit Facility
May 19, 2021
Transaction Represents Company’s Inaugural Institutional Financing
TUSTIN, Calif., May 19, 2021 – Good Funding, LLC (“Good Funding”), a recently-launched small business finance company, has closed on a $20.0 million senior revolving credit facility with a U.S.-based, credit focused asset manager. The agreement includes an accordion feature with the option to increase the credit facility to $30.0 million. The transaction represents Good Funding’s inaugural institutional financing. Proceeds will be used to increase the Company’s funding capabilities and execute its strategic growth plan.
“We are thrilled to have closed on this first round of institutional financing,” said Jason Osiecki, Co-Founder and President of Good Funding. “This credit facility will allow us to accelerate the growth of our funding platform, expand our team, and ultimately empower even more small businesses to move forward.”
“With less than a year in business, in the midst of a pandemic that is still negatively impacting America’s small businesses, we view this investment as a strong endorsement of what Good Funding can accomplish,” said Co-Founder and CEO of Good Funding Ben Gold. “Closing on this credit facility validates our mission to transform the way small businesses access the capital they need to grow and thrive. We cannot wait to put this investment into action.”
Brean Capital, LLC served as the Company’s exclusive Advisor and Placement Agent in connection with this transaction.
About Good Funding, LLC
Founded in 2020, Good Funding is a privately-held financial services firm that provides alternative funding resources to America’s small businesses. Our products are designed for business owners who cannot access working capital through traditional methods, or simply need funding with a rapid-fire turnaround. Good Funding allows entrepreneurs, start-ups and established businesses to build self-reliance and a brighter financial future.
Media contact:
Jenny Alonzo
VP, Marketing
714.384.7189
jalonzo@goodfunding.com
Par Funding, Receiver Continue to Spar Over Its MCA Business
December 18, 2020
“From inception through 2019, [Par Funding] incurred a cash loss from operations of $136.2 million.”
That’s the conclusion reached by Bradley D. Sharp, CEO of Development Specialists Inc (DSI), the financial advisor to the Receiver appointed in the Par SEC case.
Par has scoffed at the Receiver’s analysis of its business. “We do not necessarily begrudge attorneys, whose skill sets are often in other areas, a potential inability to understand the math that often makes for a strong and profitable financial model,” Par’s lawyers wrote in an October court filing. “There is a reason that smart, mathematically inclined people are typically hired by banks, hedge funds and financial services firms. But the Receiver and his counsel’s inability to understand Par’s business has led to all manner of baseless accusations that are easily answered in the very documents they possess but do not understand…”
Par says it was profitable and walks the Court throught its mathematical process. Sharp says Par’s assessment “is misleading and does not reflect actual operations at the company.”
Sharp alludes to Ponzi-like characteristics but refrains from using that term. “From inception through 2019, [Par] paid $231 million to investors, consisting of principal repayments totaling $135.6 million and interest payments totaling $95.4 million. [Par] could not have made these principal and interest payments to the investors without additional funds from the investors.”
Par explained that the key to its business is in the compounding:
“The merchant funding model is profitable because merchant funding returns are reinvested, either in a new or different merchant, or in an existing merchant with adequate receivables as a consolidation, or as a refinance of a merchant which may already have MCA funding from another provider. And the reinvestment begins on the merchant funding returns which commence immediately and occur daily. In very simple form, the math works as follows. Assuming $10,000 is funded to a merchant pursuant to a funding agreement providing for a funding return of $13,000 over the course of 100 daily ACH withdrawals, the agreement would provide for repayment to begin immediately with daily payments of $130. As those monies are returned, portions are used to pay operating expenses, but most of the monies are re-invested to fund other merchants. Mathematically, this means that the original $10,000 is being used to fund more than one merchant. Over the life of a single $10,000 funding, that same $10,000 can be used to fund multiple merchants, all of whom are paying funding fees in excess of the principal amount received. Thus, the original $10,000, at a 1.30 factor rate, generates $13,000 on the first merchant cash advance (MCA). Those funds are reinvested and generate $16,900 on the second MCA, and $21,970 by the third MCA – an increase of $11,970 over and above the initial $10,000. And that can happen within a year. This is the powerful compounding effect of the financial model.
That is the simplest version of the model. In practice, the model is far more sophisticated than that because the leveraging to new merchants of the MCA returns begins as soon as the MCA payments come in.”
Par additionally said:
“At the conference on October 8, 2020, the Receiver’s counsel told this Court, and many investors, that out of $1.5 million received per day from merchants prior to July 28, 2020, $1.2 million was used for new MCA funding. Thus, according to the Receiver’s counsel, only $300,000 constituted net collections, about 20%. The Receiver’s counsel appears to be suggesting that the company is not holding on to receivables but, instead, is refunding the same merchants 80% of receipts. This proposition is wrong and its assertion shows that the Receiver and his counsel do not understand the MCA business.”
One could assess that a large element of this case consists of the Receiver being like, ha! well look at this! and Par responding, well, yes, that is actually how our business works.
In fact, that is precisely the angle Par took in defending its use of funding new deals with money collected from deals previously funded.
“First, the numbers show that collections are used to fund new MCA deals,” Par’s attorneys wrote. “This may come as a total surprise to the Receiver and his counsel, but funding merchants is the business of Par. That is like criticizing Ford Motor Corp. for using its car sales income to build and sell more cars.”
Both sides agree that Par advanced over $1 billion to small businesses but Sharp says that “reloads” distorted the numbers.
“Use of reloads escalates the obligations of the merchant as each reload adds an additional ‘factor’ along with any new funds advanced,” Sharp wrote. “In [one example the reloaded funds are] subject to the factor twice; once when the funds were originally sent and again when they are included in the reload advance. The use of reloads also significantly distorts the calculation of loss rates as the advances are simply refinanced without becoming a loss.”
Sharp concludes that the true end result for Par is a much higher default rate than it lets on to.
And then there’s this
Sharp has repeatedly brought attention to a list of merchants with unusual payment and funding activity. Par countered by saying there are good explanations for each.
Amongst all of this is that company insiders are alleged to have received tens of millions in payments from Par and the Receiver is confident, in part due to DSI’s report, that Par was majorly unprofitable.
“Based on our review to date, it is apparent that [Par] would not have been able to continue to provide payments to investors, or to continue to operate, without additional funds from investors,” Sharp wrote in a December 13th report.
This case is not the first rodeo for Sharp and DSI in the merchant cash advance business. They were also assigned to manage the 1 Global Capital case.
The case is ongoing. The Court recently approved a motion to expand the Receivership estate.
The SEC Already Suffered a Major Defeat in the Par Funding Battle – But Who is the Real Loser?
August 8, 2020
While the news media, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement are high-fiving each other over the course of events in the Par Funding saga (a lawsuit, a receivership, an asset freeze, and an arrest), there lies a major problem: The SEC already suffered a major defeat.
On July 28th, rumors of a vague legal “victory” for Par Funding circulated on the DailyFunder forum. The context of this win was unknowable because the case at issue was still under seal and nobody was supposed to be aware of it.
Cue Bloomberg News…
In December 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a scandalous story about a Philadelphia-based company named Par Funding. And then not a whole lot happened… that is until Bloomberg Law and Courthousenews.com published a lengthy SEC lawsuit less than two years later that alleged Par along with several entities and individuals had engaged in the unlawful sale of unregistered securities.
At the courthouse in South Florida, those documents were sealed. The public was not supposed to know about them and deBanked could not authenticate the contents of the purported lawsuit through those means. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the mixup happened when a court clerk briefly unsealed it “by mistake” thus alerting a suspiciously narrow set of news media to the contents. deBanked was the first to publicly point this out.
In court papers, some of the defendants said that they learned of the lawsuit that had been filed under seal on July 24th from “news reports.” Bloomberg Law published a summary of the lawsuit on its website in the afternoon of July 27th.
“It is fortuitous that the Complaint was initially published before it was sealed,” an attorney representing several of the defendants wrote in its court papers. “Otherwise, [The SEC] would have likely accomplished its stealth imposition of so-called temporary’ relief, that would have led to the unnecessary destruction of a legitimate business.”
The day after this, on July 28th, a team of FBI agents raided Par Funding’s Philadelphia offices as well as the home of at least one individual. Rumors about the office raid landed on the DailyFunder forum just hours later, along with links to the inadvertently public SEC lawsuit now circulating on the web.
The New York Post caught wind of the story and published a photo of an arrest that had taken place fifteen years ago, creating confusion about what, if anything, was happening. Nobody, was in fact, arrested.
The SEC lawsuit was finally unsealed on July 31st, along with the revelation that Par Funding and other entities had been placed in a limited receivership pursuant to a Court order issued just days earlier. The receivership order was a massive blow to the SEC. It failed to obtain the most important element of its objective, that is to have the court-ordered right to “to manage, control, operate and maintain the Receivership Estates.” The SEC specifically requested this in its motion papers but was denied this demand and others by the judge who leaned in favor of granting the Receiver document and asset preservation powers rather than complete control of the companies.
The language of the Court order was interpreted differently by the Receiver, who immediately fired all of the company’s employees, locked them out of the office, and then suspended all of the company’s operations which even prevented the inbound flow of cash to the company (of which in the matter of days amounted to nearly $7 million). The SEC did successfully secure an asset freeze order.
In court papers, Par Funding’s attorneys wrote that: “The Receiver’s and SEC’s actions are ruining a business with excellent fundamentals and a strong financial base and essentially putting it into an ineffective liquidation causing huge financial losses. In taking this course of action against a fully operational business, the key fact that has been lost by the SEC, is that their actions are going to unilaterally lead to massive investor defaults.”
The Receiver, in turn, tried to fire Par Funding’s attorneys from representing Par. Par’s attorneys say that the Receiver has communicated to them that it is his view “that he controls all the companies.”
“The SEC is simply trying to drive counsel out of this case, as an adjunct to all the other draconian relief that they insist must be employed to ‘protect the investors,'” Par’s attorneys told the Court. “Due Process is of no regard to the SEC.”
As lawyers on all sides in this mess assert what is best for “investors,” seemingly lost is the collateral damage that is likely to be thrust on Par’s customers. The Philadelphia Inquirer has repeated the SEC’s contention that Par made loans with up to 400% interest. Bloomberg News has called Par a “lending company” whose alleged top executive is a “cash-advance tycoon.”
A review of some of Par’s contracts, however, indicate that they often entered into “recourse factoring” arrangements. “This is a factoring agreement with Recourse,” is a statement that is displayed prominently on the first page of the sample of contracts obtained by deBanked.
Parallels between the business practices of Par Funding and a former competitor, 1 Global Capital, have been raised at several junctures in the SEC litigation thus far. But some sources told deBanked that in recent times, Par has been offering a unique product, one that is likely to create disastrous ripple effects for hundreds or perhaps thousands of small businesses as a result of the Receiver’s actions (even if well-intentioned).
The “Reverse”
Par offered what’s known as a “Reverse Consolidation,” industry insiders told deBanked. In these instances Par would provide small businesses with weekly injections of capital that were just enough to cover the weekly payments that these small businesses owed to other creditors.
One might understand a consolidation as a circumstance in which a creditor pays off all the outstanding debts of a borrower so that the borrower can focus on a relationship with a single lender. In a “reverse” consolidation, the consolidating lender makes the daily, weekly, or monthly payments to the borrower’s other creditors as they become due rather than all at once. Once the other creditors have been satisfied, the borrower’s only remaining debt (theoretically) is to the consolidating lender.
Par does not appear to have offered loans but sources told deBanked that Par would provide regular weekly capital injections to businesses that could not afford its financial obligations otherwise. Par, in essence, would keep those businesses afloat by making their payments.
That all begs the question, what is going to happen to the numerous businesses when Par breaches its end of the contract by failing to provide the weekly injections?
As the Receiver makes controversial attempts to assert the control it wished it had gotten (but didn’t), the press dazzled the public on Friday with the announcement that an executive at Par Funding had been arrested on something entirely unrelated, an illegal gun possession charge. The FBI discovered the weapons while executing a search warrant on July 28th but waited until August 7th to make the arrest.
It remains to be seen what the 1,200 investors will recover in this case or what will become of the Receiver in the battle for control, but sources tell deBanked that the authorities are all fighting over the wrong thing.
They should all be asking “what’s going to happen to the small businesses when their weekly capital injection doesn’t come in the middle of a pandemic?”
Midland Funding Gets Mentioned in John Oliver’s HBO Show
June 6, 2016The infamous Midland Funding you might know from the Madden v Midland case, was mentioned on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight and not in the best context. Midland is a subsidiary of Encore Capital Group, the largest publicly traded debt buyer in the United States and the episode was about the not-always-peachy world of debt buying and debt collection.
Oliver referenced Midland just to provide background on an industry as a whole, not to imply that they were involved in anything negative.
More background was added by Jake Halpern, the author of Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld, who explained that the sale of debt from one party to another is not always done using the most sophisticated means, with it often being simply a list of fields on an Excel spreadsheet.
Oliver, who took his research to the extreme, actually set up his own debt collection company in Mississippi and purchased $15 million worth of debt that was aged beyond the statutory collections period for the bargain price of $60,000. Rather than try to collect on the debt, which he mentioned would not have been illegal, he decided to forgive the debt entirely and set the record for TV’s largest monetary giveaway in the process.
Oliver was careful to remind viewers throughout that while there are a few bad seeds and horror stories, the industry itself is regulated and is not illegal. You can watch the episode below:
Funding Circle Still Focused on “Marketplace” and Small Business
April 13, 2016
At Lendit, deBanked asked Funding Circle co-founder and US market head Sam Hodges if the company’s domestic loan volume would eventually outpace originations in the UK. Hodges expressed optimism that it would and explained that the company’s UK origins had simply given that operation a 12-24 month head start.
The company has originated more than $2 billion in loans since inception. A page on their UK site specifies that 1,212,223,380 pounds have gone to british businesses, the equivalent of about $1.7 billion.
Asked if the company would branch out into other types of lending such as consumer, Hodges responded that the company remains dedicated to two principles, “marketplace and small business.” On that note however, he said their UK branch already engages in commercial property loans and didn’t rule out that such a product could eventually be made available in the US.
Funding Brokers: Critical Thinking is Greater Than Positive Thinking
December 28, 2015
THE NEW THOUGHT MOVEMENT HAS TAKEN OVER THE SALES PROFESSION
Somewhere between the 19th and the current 21st century, the profession of sales as a whole integrated the concepts of the New Thought Movement, going so far as to actually shape the mantras, slogans and thought processes of salespeople everywhere.
In my opinion, the New Thought Movement has the potential to do far more harm than good, because it does not emphasize the importance of individuals learning how to critically think. It has an over-reliance on positive thinking and positive faith, with a complete disregard for critical thought and analysis. When a person fails to critically think, they can easily fall prey to scams, manipulation, brain-washing, etc. and even mismanage their finances through various forms of impulse (emotional-based) spending. As a result, for whatever amount of good that the movement does, in my opinion, it has the potential to do far more damage, such as the damage that I believe it has done to the sales profession.
THE HISTORY OF THE NEW THOUGHT MOVEMENT
It started in the 19th century with the promotion of ideals by philosophers such as Napoleon Hill, that life begins in the mind and that the quality of your life would be based on your level of positive thinking and positive faith. The mantra of the movement is that if you maintain the right level of positive thought processes as well as keep high levels of positive faith, then you can “attract” to you whatever you desire, which usually centers around materialistic items like fancy cars, shallow things like very attractive mates, significant wealth, or good health and wellness.
By the 20th century, the movement would eventually spread to various religious denominations in the form of the prosperity gospel (the word of faith movement), promoted through television evangelists and the vast majority of mega churches throughout the country.
By the 21st century, the movement would spread to even more authors and even film producers with the 2006 film “The Secret” which also included a book version of the ideals promoted during the film.
It was also by the 21st century that the movement had been fully ingrained into the vast majority of sales training material, which would serve as the foundation for a lot of what I deem to be “issues” of the sales profession today. These being the utter lack of critical thinking and critical analysis which leaves too many sales people as mindless, robotic, and routine order-takers, rather than strategic thinkers, innovators, and business developers.
NEW ENTRANTS TO THIS INDUSTRY ARE INSPIRED BY TECHNIQUES FROM THE NEW THOUGHT MOVEMENT
Since this year’s March/April edition of deBanked Magazine, we have talked about the Year of The Broker as it relates to the surge of new brokers coming into the space. These new entrants are inspired by funders, lenders and large brokerages using techniques from the New Thought Movement.
The rah-rah sales motivational speech that’s provided to these new brokers is founded mainly on the New Thought Movement. The people recruiting these new brokers into the space get them to dream about:
- Getting out of debt
- Moving out of their mother’s basement
- Living in a big/fancy house
- Having a very attractive mate on their arm
- Driving a Mercedes Benz S-Class
- Making $25k, $40k, or $50k per month
- Being “the man” in the nightclub, buying up all of the drinks and being the life of the party
They would sum up their rah-rah sales motivational speech with simply, “As you think, so shall you become,” quoting the great Bruce Lee.
Thoughts that arise of a critical nature that look for more market research, market planning, trends, innovative solutions, ROI analysis, and other forms of foresight are either quickly shunned as “over-thinking” or “negative thinking”. You might flat out be kicked out of the room where the rah-rah sales motivational speech is being conducted, with accusations of having “stinking thinking.”
THIS ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE, IT’S CRITICAL THINKING
The New Thought Movement’s over-reliance on positive thinking and positive faith can be detrimental to personal growth. Being a part of the Mom and Pop Network isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I have operated within the Mom and Pop Network, but what’s shortsighted is not giving brokers all the tools they need to think critically and truly be successful.
For you to survive, you are going to need to have resources that the vast majority of other brokers don’t have access to. Relying on UCC records and Aged Leads (that every other broker is calling on), isn’t going to cut it. You are going to need resources that provide you with a significant market competitive advantage which includes but isn’t limited to: having better data so you can produce your own exclusive internal leads, having “center of influence” partnerships with banks, credit unions, and other professionals, having access to creative financing in the form of either equity or debt, among other advantages. These advantages will not just give you a leg up over other brokers in the market, but they are truly the key to your long term survival.
A FINAL WORD
In my opinion, The New Thought Movement does more harm than good, by not emphasizing the importance for individuals to learn how to critically think.
We are living in the day and age where to survive in any professional sales environment, you are going to have to be more of a critical thinker and do things outside of “the box”, versus being the stereotypical smiley faced, overly optimistic, robotic, sales guy, that’s incapable of true “independent thought.” You want to be the sales guy that thinks and operates outside of the box, which is basically this bubble in which everybody else is operating and thinking within. You can’t achieve this unless you first embrace cynicism by taking a long hard look at this box, poke holes in it, discover new ways to profit, and then blaze your own trail.
Being cynical, pessimistic and “negative” are the first steps towards becoming an excellent critical thinker, even though they will not make you feel as “good” as compared to that of being optimistic and positive. But in that regard, I must quote Dave Ramsey in that: Children do what feels good. Adults make a plan and follow it.
Critical thinking doesn’t feel good, but you can’t properly plan without it.
Alternative Funding: Over The Top Down Under
September 2, 2015
San Francisco had its gold rush, Oklahoma had its land rush and now Australia is experiencing a rush of alternative funding. After a slow start a few years ago, foreign and domestic companies have been flocking to the market down under in the last 18 months.
As many as 20 new alt-funders are doing business in Australia, but that number could swell to a hundred, said Beau Bertoli, joint CEO of Prospa, a Sydney-based alternative funder. “The market in Australia has been very ripe for alternative finance,” Bertoli, said. “We see an opportunity for the alternative finance segment to be more dominant in Australia than it is in America.”
Recent entrants to the embryotic Australian market include Spotcap, a Berlin-based company partly funded by Germany’s Rocket Internet; Australia’s Kikka Capital, which gets tech backing from U.S.-based Kabbage; America’s Ondeck, which is working with MYOB, a software company; Moula, which began offering funding this year but considers itself ahead of the curve because it formed two years ago; and PayPal, the giant American payments company.
The new entrants are joining ‘pioneers’ that have been around a few years, like Prospa, which has been working for three years with New York-based Strategic Funding Source, and Capify (formerly AUSvance until it was consolidated into the international brand Capify), which came to market in 2008 with merchant cash advances and started offering small-business loans in 2012.
Some don’t take the newcomers that seriously. “There are small players I’ve never heard of,” said John de Bree, managing director of Capify’s Sydney-based office, in a reference to local Australian funders. “The big ones like OnDeck and Kabbage don’t have the local experience.”
But many players view the influx as a good sign. “I think it’s an endorsement of the market,” Bertoli said. “There’s more publicity and more credibility for what we’re doing here in terms of alternative finance.” It’s like the merchant who gets more business when a competing store opens across the street.
Besides, the market remains far from crowded. “I’m not concerned about the arrival of OnDeck and Kabbage because it really does validate our model,” maintained Aris Allegos, who serves as Moula CEO and cofounded the company with Andrew Watt.
The market’s relatively small size – at least compared to the U.S. – doesn’t seem to bother players accustomed to the heavily populated U.S., a development some observers didn’t expect. “I’m very surprised,” de Bree said of the American interest in Australia. “The American market’s 15 times the size of ours.”
Others see nothing but potential in Australia. “This is a market that will evolve over time, and we think the opportunity is enormous,” said Lachlan Heussler, managing director of Spotcap Australia.
Some view the Australian rush to alternative finance not so much as a solitary phenomenon but instead as part of a worldwide explosion of interest in the segment, driven by banks’ reluctance to provide loans since the financial crisis, de Bree said.
Viewed independently or in a larger context, the flurry of activity in Australia is new. “The boom is probably only getting started,” Bertoli maintained in a reference to the Australian market. “Right now, it’s about getting the foundation of the market established.”
To get the business underway in Australia, alternative funders are alerting small-business owners and the media to the fact that alternative funding is becoming available and teaching them how it works, de Bree said. “Half of our job is educating the market,” noted Heussler.
New players are building the track record they need to bring down the cost of funds, according to Allegos. “Our base rate is 2 percent or 3 percent higher than yours,” he said, adding that the cost of funds is more challenging than gearing up the tech side of the business.
Although the alternative-lending business started later in Australia than in the United States and lags behind America in in exposure, it’s maturing rapidly, said de Bree. Aussie funders are benefitting from the lessons their counterparts have learned in the U.S., he said.
But the exchange of information flows both ways. Kabbage, for example, chose to enter the Australian market with a local partner, Kikka. Kabbage learned from its earlier foray into the United Kingdom that it makes sense to work with colleagues who understand the local regulatory system and culture, said Pete Steger, head of business development for Atlanta-based Kabbage.
Such differences mean that risk-assessment platforms that work in the United States or Europe require localization before they can perform effectively in Australia, sources said.
Sydney-based Prospa, for example, got its start three years ago and has been working ever since with New York-based Strategic Funding Source to localize the SFS American risk-assessment platform for Australia, said Bertoli, who shares the company CEO title with Greg Moshal.
Moula, which has headquarters in Melbourne, sees so many differences among markets that it decided to build its own local platform from scratch, according to Allegos.
One key difference between the two markets is that Australia does not have positive credit reporting. “We have nothing that even comes close to a FICO score,” said Allegos. The only credit reporting centers on negative events, he said.
Without credit scores from credit bureaus, funders base their assessments of credit worthiness largely on transaction history. “It’s cash-flow analytics,” said Allegos. “It’s no different from the analysis you’re doing in your part of the world, but it becomes more significant” in the absence of positive credit reporting, he said.
Australia lacks credit scores at least partly because the country’s four main banks control most of the financial sector and choose not to release credit information, sources said. The banks have warded off attacks from all over the world because the regulatory environment supports them and because their management understands how to communicate with and sell to Australian customers, sources said.
The big banks – Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, and National Australia Bank – set their own rules and have kept money tight by requiring secured loans and long waiting periods, Bertoli said. It’s difficult for merchants who don’t fit into a “particular box” to procure funding, he maintained. “It’s almost like an oligarchy,” Allegos said of the banks’ grip on the financial system.
Eventually, the banks may form partnerships with alternative lenders, but that day won’t come soon, in Allegos’ estimation. It could be 12 months or more away, he said.
Even as the financial system evolves, deep-seated differences will remain between Australia and the U.S. Most Americans and Australians speak English and share many views and values, but the cultures of the two countries differ greatly in ways that affect marketing, Bertoli said. “In your face” advertising that can work well with “loud, confident” Americans can offend the more “laid-back” Australian consumers and business owners, he said.
Australians have become tech-savvy and comfortable with online banking, but they guard their privacy and often hesitate to reveal their banking information to a funding company, Allegos said. The entrance of OnDeck and Kabbage should help familiarize potential customers with the practice of sharing data, he predicted.
Cost structures for businesses differ in Australia from the U.S., Bertoli noted. Australian companies pay higher rent and have to pay minimum wages set much higher than in the United States, he said. Published reports set the Australian minimum wage at $13.66 U.S. dollars. The higher costs down under can take a toll on cash flow. “Take an American scorecard and apply it to Australia?” Bertoli asked rhetorically. “You just can’t.”
Distribution’s not the same for commercial enterprises in the two countries, Bertoli maintained. Despite having about the same geographic area as America’s 48 contiguous states, Australia has a population of 23 million, compared with America’s 322 million.
No matter how many people are involved, changing their habits takes time. Australian merchants prefer fixed-term loans or lines of credits instead of merchant cash advances, Bertoli said. In many cases Australian merchants simply aren’t as familiar as Americans are with advances, Allegos said.
Besides, the four big banks in Australia tend to solicit merchants for credit and debit card transactions without the help of the independent sales organizations and sales agents. In the U.S., ISOs and agents play an important role in explaining and promoting advances to merchants, Bertoli said. Advances make sense for merchants because advances adjust to cash flow, and they help funders control risk, but just haven’t caught on in Australia, Bertoli said. Australians resist advances if too many fees are attached, said Allegos.
Pledging a portion of daily card receipts might seem too frequent, too, he said. Besides, advances are limited to merchants who accept debit and credit cards, while any business could conceivably choose to take out a loan, said de Bree.
Advances have to compete with inventory factoring, which has become a massive business in Australia, according to Heussler. The business can become intrusive because funders may have to examine balance sheets and talk to customers, he said.
Australia’s reluctance to turn to advances, leaves most alternative funders promoting loans and lines of credit. Prospa, for example, uses some brokers to that end but also relies on online connections, direct contact with customers, and referrals from companies that buy and sell with small and medium-sized businesses.
“Anyone that touches a small business is a potential partner,” said Heussler, including finance brokers, accountants, lawyers and even credit unions, which have the distribution but not the product.
Moula finds that most of its business comes from well-established companies and that loans average just over $27,000 in U.S. currency and they offer loans of up to more than $77,000 U.S. The company offers straight-line, six- to 12-month amortizing loans.
Using a model that differs from what’s common in the U.S., Moula charges 1 percent every two weeks, collects payments every two weeks and charges no additional fees, Allegos said. A $10,000 (Australian) loan for six months would accrue $714 (Australian) in interest, he noted.
Spotcap Australia offers a three-month unsecured line of credit and doesn’t charge customers for setting it up, Heussler said. If the business owner decided to draw down, it turns into a six-month amortizing business loan for up to $100,000 Australian. Rates vary according to risk, starting at half a percent per month but averaging 1.5% per month.
If companies have all of the necessary information at hand, they can complete an application in 10 minutes, Allegos said. Moula has to research some applications offline if the company’s structure deviates too greatly from the usual examples – much the same as in the U.S., he maintained. The latter requires strong customer-service departments, he said.
Kikka uses a platform based on the Kabbage model, which gives 95 percent of customers a 100-percent automated experience, Steger said. “It goes to show the power of our automation, our algorithms and our platform,” he maintained.
Spotcap prefers to deal with businesses that have been operating for at least six months, Heusler said. The funder examines records for Australia’s value-added tax and other financials, and it likes to connect with the merchant’s bank account. Spotcap can usually gain access to the account information through cloud-based accounting systems and thus doesn’t require most companies to download a lot of financial documents, he noted.
Despite the differences between the two countries, banking regulations bear similarities in Australia and the United States, sources said. In both nations the government tries harder to protect consumers than businesses because they assume business owners are more financially savvy. For consumers, regulators scrutinize length of term and pricing, sources said, and on the commercial side the government is concerned about money laundering and privacy.
Regulation of commercial funding will probably intensify, however, to ward off predatory lending, Bertoli said. Government will consult with businesses before imposing rules, he said. A couple of alternative business funders aren’t transparent with their pricing and they charge several fees – that sort of behavior will encourage regulation, Allegos said.
“I know they’re watching us – and watching us very closely,” he added.
In general, however, the Australian government supports alternative finance, Bertoli said, because they want there to be options other than the four big banks and wants small business to have access to capital. Small businesses account for 46 percent of economic activity in Australia and employ 70 percent of the workforce, he noted, saying that “if small businesses are doing badly, the economy is doing badly.”
Hence the need, many in the industry would say, for more alternative funding options in Australia.
Good Recordkeeping Plays Important Role in Funding Success
April 17, 2015CPA Yoel Wagschal recently started working with a syndicator who relied on Excel spreadsheets to track all his deals. The syndicator thought he had everything in tip-top shape, but it turns out that his system was hard for an outsider to understand and the data didn’t reconcile with his bank statements.
Wagschal, who heads an accounting firm in Monroe, New York, comes across this problem frequently these days. It’s been exacerbated by the exponential growth of the alternative funding industry in recent years. There are a sizeable number of alternative funders that started out small and have grown by leaps and bounds, yet they are still using rudimentary systems to keep track of their business dealings. In most cases, funders want to do the right thing, but they don’t always know how or the extent of what’s involved. Unknowingly these funders may be setting themselves up for financial or legal troubles.
“Sooner rather than later you are going to find yourself swimming in the Atlantic Ocean without any plan on how to get out of there,” Wagschal says.
Although newbie funders may be able to get by with simple tools and minimal staff, more sophisticated efforts are required once they are doing multiple transactions a month. It’s one thing when you are tracking a few daily deals on a spreadsheet. It’s quite another when you’re trying to keep track of all the moving parts for hundreds of deals.
What’s more, there’s a lot of slicing and dicing of data that goes into properly understanding your existing business and growth possibilities. If you don’t use the right tools to help you keep precise records, it’s nearly impossible to understand the fundamentals of your business in order to grow. Excel, while a useful tool, has its limits, and funders who rely exclusively on spreadsheets don’t get the benefits of other more sophisticated options that have become available to them in the past few years. Manually entering data also increases the possibility of human error, which can lead to thousands upon thousands of lost revenue for a funder’s business.
The Pitfalls of Not Keeping Good Data
Keeping good data is especially important to funders who want to take on additional investors or who are considering a sale at some point. Kim Anderson, chief executive of Longitude Partners Inc., a strategic advisory firm in Tampa, Florida, works with a number of funders that are looking to facilitate additional growth by bringing on outside investors. Many of these companies find themselves scrambling because they don’t readily have access to the kind of information potential investors want.
Not keeping good books can also inhibit a funder’s ability to expand into additional markets. Say a funder wants to introduce a new product or migrate a product offering to a different vertical. Companies that don’t analyze their data effectively may have a hard time understanding what part of their existing portfolio would be the most appropriate or profitable segment to introduce the product to, Anderson says.
Potentially impeding growth is bad enough, but funders that don’t keep proper books can also find themselves embroiled in legal or tax troubles. Some MCA providers, for instance, have faced stiff penalties for treating transactions as loans on their books instead of the purchase and sale of future income.
“If they are showing the revenue recognition in the exact same way that loan industry companies are doing, then they are setting themselves up to be judged in the same way that a loan company would,” says Christina Joy Tharp, a staff accountant in Wagschal’s office. If you’re using the same accounting methods as lenders, you could be deemed a predatory lender by multiple enforcement agencies, even if that’s not your intent, she says.
The strength of your business can also be significantly impacted by how you classify performing and nonperforming loans or receivables. “There are thousands of pages of rules on how banks have to classify performing and non-performing loans. None of that exists for this industry, which is completely unregulated,” says Alex Gemici, managing director and head of M&A at World Business Lenders, an alternative lending company in Manhattan.
As a result, funders don’t have a universal way of keeping their books. Many funders believe that as long as they are collecting sporadic payments, a loan or receivable should be classified as performing. Gemici strongly disagrees, saying this approach sets up a funder for potential failure given that the default rate for loans/receivables is about one in five. “It’s one thing to show on your books that loans or receivables are performing, it’s another when you run out of cash,” Gemici says.
Choosing an Outside Provider
Recognizing that Excel spreadsheets can only carry a funder so far and that out-of-the-box software probably won’t be a complete solution for alternative funders, a small number of companies have stepped up to provide customized solutions for the industry. MCA funders—where the perceived need is greatest—are a particular focus for these providers.
Benchmark Merchant Solutions, a processor in Amherst, New York, is one such company honing in on the MCA funder space. In 2014 the company launched MCA Track, software that’s designed to help MCA funders with their recordkeeping needs. It also helps them keep track of their income for tax purposes.
Among other things, MCA Track allows funders to view their performance at a glance. It shows them, for example, how merchants are performing, how the funds are allocated according to syndicator, the status of a deal, open cash advances, closed cash advances and defaulted cash advances. Funders can also get profitability data and other types of big picture information about their business as well. The software costs about $2,000 a month depending on the user’s size.
Benny Silberstein, chief operating officer of Benchmark, says the software was created because the processing company found that funders were often asking Benchmark to get data for them, especially when there were discrepancies. It can be real headache for funders to wade through inconsistencies with merchants, syndicators and ISOs, Silberstein says. “I can’t begin to tell you how many times funders asked us for a list of all the payments they’d received.”
PSC of Port Washington, New York, is another company trying to help MCA funders keep better records and manage their business more effectively. For a monthly membership fee, the company offers a front-end to back-end relationship management solution that allows funders to track all their contacts, documents, deals and commissions. Daily reports provide detailed data and summary information about an MCA’s funding business. The data includes the actual advance amount, the right to receive amount, the factor rate, processing fees, daily debits and credits, commissions paid to outside brokers or their own people, other management fees, ACH fees, wiring fees, payments, missing payments, collections information and participation with other syndicates.
The product has been on the market for about two years and the monthly fee varies according to a funder’s size, says Tom Nix, director of sales for PSC. He declined to be more specific about cost.
“The companies that are small and just starting out—if they are just doing a few transactions a month—they could probably get by using a spreadsheet. But that’s only feasible if you have a few transactions that you’re doing per month. Once you’re growing, when you get up to 10, 20, 30, 100 deals, the management of data becomes truly uncontrollable,” says Nix, who has seen a number of funders struggling to stay afloat or exit the business entirely because of their inability to keep good records.
“If you don’t have the right information and understand it, you’re going to give money to someone and you won’t [necessarily] get it back,” Nix says.
It’s possible for funders to set up their own infrastructure, but it can be costly and some feel it detracts from their ability to generate new business. That’s why Anthony Mannino, president of Nulook Capital in Massapequa, New York, chose to work with PSC. He researched the idea of doing all the back office and data collection on his own, but he decided not to reinvent the wheel since it would have meant hiring additional staff and would divert the company’s attention away from its primary focus—bringing in new business.
“A service provider like PSC gives us the ability to grow our company controlled and in a much quicker manner than we ever could than if we had to build our back end on our own,” Mannino says. “It takes most of the responsibility off of my company so we are able to focus on just growing the business and growing the sales.”
CloudMyBiz Inc. in Los Angeles is another company trying to service the alternative funder market, providing customized CRM systems for both lenders and MCA providers.
The CloudMyBiz system relies on a platform called Salesforce and is customized to the funding industry. It helps funders with the various facets of origination, underwriting and loan servicing. It helps them generate and track leads, automate funding workflow, understand and manage their deal pipeline and daily funding activities, collect and schedule recurring ACH payments and track syndication partners.
You could buy the Salesforce software and use it out of the box, but it provides only the basic functionality that funders need to run their business properly, says Henry Abenaim, principal consultant at CloudMyBiz. That’s where CloudMyBiz comes in by customizing the software for a funder’s specific business requirements. The fee varies widely, depending on the funder’s specifications, he says, declining to be more specific.
About two and a half years ago, Creative Vision Studio LLC in Long Beach, Calif., which had focused on the merchant credit card processing industry for more than a decade, also started offering a CRM system to MCA providers. The software is called Bankcard Pros CRM and customers can use it for merchant credit card processing, MCA or both. The software automates the data entry, underwriting, approval, funding and payback process from start to finish, says Robert Hendrix, the company’s chief executive. Funders also have access to 17 different management reports so they can track the performance and profitability of their entire portfolio per month.
The company charges an upfront fee of $4,000 to $5,000 to use the software, which is customized to a particular client’s business. There’s a $399 monthly fee after that. While it may seem costly to some funders, Hendrix says the software pays for itself within a month because of the efficiencies created. Importantly, the software eliminates the possibility of costly human mistakes that can occur in manually updating daily payments on a spreadsheet. “One little mistake can cost funders $2,000 to $3,000, even up to $10,000. They can be very costly mistakes,” he says.
It is, of course, possible for funders to keep good books and records using homegrown systems and personnel, and funders need to carefully weigh their options, taking into account that doing it right will probably require a meaningful investment in infrastructure and personnel. Whether they do it alone or hire an outside vendor, the important thing for funders is to collect the data and be able to evaluate it and display it in a way that makes sense to them, their customers, tax preparers, potential investors and others who need access.
Funders also need to remember that being successful in the business over the long term requires them to do more than simply capture accurate data. Beyond that, funders need to be able to manipulate the information in a way that helps them understand the nuts and bolts of their specific business, says Anderson of Longitude Partners.
“They may be able to produce enough financial information to complete an accurate tax return, but when it comes to understanding their operating metrics, they may not have collected or evaluated all of the right information to answer questions about what really drives the growth or sustainable profitability of the business,” he says.
See Post... simply funding. i'll save that for another time.. but wow, just wow. been in this space for 15 years and i guess it makes sense that i have some crazy experiences to share... there are so many hones... |
See Post... simply funding. i'll save that for another time.. but wow, just wow. been in this space for 15 years and i guess it makes sense that i have some crazy exeriences to share... there are so many honest and professional funders in this space.. but these two are not.... |
See Post... simply funding has the best split offers, i would give them a call... |
