SEAN MURRAY

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Sean Murray is the founder of deBanked (2010), deBanked CONNECT & Broker Fair (2018), DailyFunder (2012), and Broker Battle (2024). Organizer of B2B Finance Expo (2024).

Murray was born and raised on Long Island, NY. He has a Bachelors of Science in Accounting & Finance from the University of Delaware.

Murray started his career in fintech in 2006 at a startup called Merchant Cash & Capital in New York City. He is widely known for his extensive reporting on the small business finance industry and fintech.

Notables
11/27/24Author of The Case for Éamon de Valera's Birth and Baptismal Records Being Forgeries in Iarmhí, Vol. 1, No. 4. | PDF
2/24/24Originator and top researcher of the theory that Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto
1/27/24First to ever execute a domain name loan by smart contract on Ethereum
1/11/24Creator and producer of the first ever LIVE Broker Battle competition in Miami
10/7/23First to ever execute a transfer of ownership of a DNS domain on-chain
8/1/23Drew attention to a naming bug/exploit on Farcaster
3/28/23First to ever wrap a DNS domain using the ENS NameWrapper on Ethereum
2/15/22Executive Producer of Equipping The Dream
9/12/21Deployed a deBanked NFT Smart Contract on Ethereum
5/12/20Co-author of Did the IRS Forget Non-PPP Debt? Tax Implications of Debt Forgiveness with Grassi Advisors & Accountants
3/6/17Finalist for Best Fintech Journalist
11/3/16Co-author of Merchant Cash Advance Basics with CounselorLibrary
10/25/15Co-author of The Small Business Financing Report with Bryant Park Capital
Previous Speaker or Moderator For:
  • International Factoring Association Conference
  • New York Institute of Credit Conference
  • Alternative Finance Bar Association Conference
  • Lend360



Sean Murray



Recently Authored by Sean Murray

Need a Bank to Fund MCAs? You Can't Operate Without One
By: Sean Murray

banking“I learned back in the early 2000s when merchant processors started to offer merchant cash advances, that was the first time I ever heard of MCA," said Christian Sanchez, Relationship Manager for the National Deposits Group of Dime Private & Commercial Bank. Sanchez, who's been in banking for 25 years, understands MCAs in their current iteration from a unique vantage point in the ecosystem. Dime, for example, is a full‑service commercial bank based in New York that today provides a variety of customers, including MCA funding companies, with services like checking accounts, wire access, and ACHs. Sanchez worked with his first MCA client in 2021 and immersed himself in their business and the industry. When he got them onboarded and saw how well it worked out, he knew there was something there. By early 2024, he set out to find a place where he could meet many MCA funders at once and attended the deBanked CONNECT MIAMI conference that January. It was almost right afterward that he started a new role at Dime, and he has been actively looking to serve MCA companies ever since. "Through the connections I made—I attended Broker Fair in New York last May and from there my access to the industry has been great and I continue to meet contacts, and one contact leads me to another," Sanchez said. It’s more than just a basic account that Dime is offering to MCA funders.
christian sanchez - banker - dime
Christian Sanchez
"Our platform is designed to give you the tools that you need to run your MCA funding company," he said, "coming in from the standard online banking access, being able to view your accounts, run reports, extract information to your accounting system... We give you access to our ACH platform, which allows you to set up your payment collections, and based on how your deal is structured with the merchant, you can set those up with the different recurring schedules." Dime customers can also continue to use their own third‑party ACH processor if they choose. Banking, believe it or not, can be one of the most overlooked considerations in running a funding company. A bank's underwriting team has to understand the business, be comfortable with it, approve it, and be prepared to handle the flurry of activity—yet, even when they do, things may not always run smoothly. To that end, Sanchez said that even if someone already has an MCA banking relationship elsewhere and doesn't want to switch to Dime, being fully onboarded with another bank as a backup is a smart plan. The time‑sensitivity surrounding things like wire deadlines and daily ACHs is critically important in the industry. It’s crucial not to wait until it’s too late for that Plan B, since onboarding and risk underwriting are neither instantaneous nor guaranteed. "Obviously I would love to be the primary and having the biggest share," Sanchez said. "But at the end of the day, it's business. If I can be part of your business and work together, then I fulfill my need." Credit facilities, investors, and syndicates may also require an MCA funder to have a backup bank ready to go as a condition of working together. They might even require a Deposit Account Control Agreement (DACA), which Dime is equipped to put in place. "[A DACA] is a tri‑party agreement between the MCA funder, the lender, and the bank," Sanchez explained. "And what happens is this is a way for a lender to ensure that the MCA is doing what they say they were going to do..." dime signDime customers need not be located in New York, but those who want to drop in on their banker can do so at the Midtown Manhattan branch or set up a meeting with Sanchez himself. "A lot of times what I can assure you is, if you look for me, you can find me, whether it's by phone or we might be meeting somewhere but I'm constantly available." True to that promise, Sanchez said he will once again attend Broker Fair in person on May 19 in New York City. It’s important to note that, as a bank, there is still a rigorous underwriting process and not every company may be approved. "It's absolutely amazing to see how Dime is willing to work with MCAs," he said. "We have a clear understanding of the industry, the risk that's involved with it, but the bank has embraced it instead of running away."
Getting Backdoored? Put Your Mark on the Docs
By: Sean Murray

Christina Duncan was once working on a renewal as an MCA broker when things turned south. Her client suddenly received so many calls with offers for funding that they had to turn their phone off. "[The client] eventually reached out to us via email and basically said, 'Hey I don't know what's going on but these people are saying they're with you and they have my bank statements. I'm really concerned,'" Duncan said.
christina duncan aquamark
Christina Duncan, Founder, Aquamark
Duncan's renewal had been backdoored. It was hardly the first time, and she was hardly the only victim. As many in the industry often complain, it has become a growing trend in which a broker submits a client's deal and it somehow slips out the back door into the hands of a third party. The broker then ends up competing on their own deal, or they lose out on it completely. And that's how many brokers see it—​as something that happened to them. But there's also the business owner who is now left wondering how their data ended up in the wrong hands and what to do about it. In the above example, Duncan tried to help the client learn how an unauthorized party came into possession of those bank statements, but she was simply hung up on and blocked. It was a dead end. "So those are the situations that we encounter every day and it's tough to navigate," she said. Born in San Jose, CA and based in San Francisco, Duncan has seen it all. She started in equipment financing more than 15 years ago and gradually shifted into brokering MCAs. When complaints about backdooring began to crop up, everyone had their own opinion on the cause. "I've seen people get caught up on just trying to point the finger or use backdooring as an excuse for their lack of success," Duncan said, "But the reality is that it is very real. I'm a part of the DailyFunder forum. I see people talking about it all the time but there just hasn't really been an efficient way to deal with it." But then she came up with a solution: Aquamark, a defensive watermarking tool that differs from other tactics employed across the industry to reduce the risk of backdooring. It allows brokers to permanently stamp the documents as having originated from them. aquamarkWith the assistance of AI and a small team, Duncan left the broker world behind to go full-time into developing the technology, which she said can be used on all the documents in the process. "It's not just the bank statements, it's tax returns, your application," Duncan said. "What's happening is it's someone who has access to these submissions, these packages, and it very well could be internal, someone on your team, it could be a lender and the lender doesn't know that..." So it's not only a problem, but one that can happen at multiple levels in the process. The Aquamark tool, still in its early days but already being used by funders and brokers, can apply custom-branded watermarks onto PDF files with ease. On the one hand, she said, the tool had to be designed to prevent AI from removing the watermarks, and on the other hand it had to work with encrypted statements. When she solved both challenges, she knew she had something. Now, brokers simply upload their documents through the portal, and the platform returns them in seconds. "By design, I built this in a way that it's very lightweight and it's self-service," Duncan said. "You don't really need me to do anything and more importantly we're not storing anything. So essentially you're uploading your documents and I'm giving it back to you. There's no logs, there's no history, none of that is happening behind the scenes." The company's mission statement is a simple one: "Prevent Backdooring. Fund More Deals." As Duncan explains, lenders might not even know that a deal they've received has been backdoored because the submitting party doesn't always make it obvious where they got it. "It's tough, especially in this environment with all the competition, cost to acquire customers are through the roof, and you lose that," she said. "It sucks. And honestly it's so frustrating because aside from it being [how brokers make their money], for the merchants it puts that bad taste in their mouth in the industry. And it's very real. And so I just wanted to come out with something that—again, the MCA industry gave me a lot and this just feels like a way to give back, as cheesy as that sounds."



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Stories

Sean Murray Published in Iarmhí: The Case for Éamon de Valera’s Birth and Baptismal Records Being Forgeries

December 19, 2024
Article by:
iarmhi journal sean murray 2024
Left: Iarmhí Editor Seamus O’Brien | Right: Sean Murray

deBanked Chief Editor Sean Murray recently had a research paper published in Iarmhí, Vol. 1, No. 4, a journal based in Co. Westmeath, Ireland that’s edited by renowned historian Seamus O’Brien. The title is: The Case for Éamon de Valera’s Birth and Baptismal Records Being Forgeries.

The journal’s launch party commenced on November 27 at The Greville Arms Hotel in Mullingar. It’s available for sale online at Just Books. For international shipping, please contact the shop owner in advance at justbooksmullingar12@gmail.com.

This is Murray’s first paper on the subject. Research on the matter began in 2021 while he was writing a book on a related story that overlapped with the birth record circumstances of de Valera.

Murray’s great great grandfather Christopher Murray, who hailed from Raharney, Co. Westmeath, was a longtime leader of the Westmeath Men’s Social & Benevolent Association of New York and contributor to The Westmeath Examiner up until he died in 1936.

eamon de valera forged birth records

Sean Murray to Moderate Best Practices Panel at New York Institute of Credit Event

October 15, 2018
Article by:

deBanked President and Chief Editor Sean Murray will be moderating a best practices panel at the New York Institute of Credit Event on October 16th. The event is also supported by the IFA Northeast, the Alternative Finance Bar Association, and deBanked.

The subject of the panel is to discuss best practices when dealing with different financial firms, namely ABL, factoring, and merchant cash advance. The panelists are:

  • Bill Gallagher, President, CFG Merchant Solutions
  • Bill Elliott, President, First Business Growth Funding
  • Raffi Azadian, CEO, Change Capital
  • Dean Landis, President, Entrepreneur Growth Capital

Merchant Cash Advance APR Debate (Sean Murray v Ami Kassar)

November 24, 2015
Article by:

The other day, Inc. writer and loan broker Ami Kassar took some time out of his day from taking photos of his shadow in the park to engage me in a debate about the use of APRs in future receivable purchase transactions. He was apparently very bothered by my analysis of Square’s merchant cash advance program which has transacted more than $300 million to date.

To clarify my position here, I am indeed in favor of transparency, so long as it’s intelligent transparency. Coming up with phony percentages based on estimates and applying them to transactions where they don’t make sense is not transparency. Similarly, advocating that merchant cash advance companies and lenders alike move away from a dollar-for-dollar pricing model to one that requires the seller or borrower to do math or hire an accountant is also not transparency.

Even a Federal Reserve study that attempted to prove merchant cash advances were confusing inadvertently proved that APRs in general were confusing. If someone doesn’t know how to calculate an APR, then it’s unreasonable to assume that they could work backwards from an APR to determine the dollar-for-dollar cost of capital. In effect, APR is a surefire way to mask the trust cost despite arguments to the contrary.

My unplanned debate with Ami Kassar on twitter is below:

Sorry Ami. The only thing unclear is your argument.

Murray Loses Election for ENS Foundation Directorship

May 21, 2023
Article by:

BlockchaindeBanked president Sean Murray was one of two nominees earlier this month for an open director position of the ENS Foundation. ENS stands for the Ethereum Name Service, a protocol that allows users to substitute human readable usernames for long hexadecimal strings commonly associated with crypto addresses.

Instead of one’s address looking like this: 0x64233eAa064ef0d54ff1A963933D0D2d46ab5829, it could be debanked.eth or debanked.com or sean.debanked.com or some other domain name owned by the user.

Murray has been an advocate for ENS names as a form of web-based identity. He was one of the first 500 people in the world to use a .com address as an ENS name and the first in the world to turn a .com address into an NFT on mainnet using the official ENS Namewrapper contract. debanked.com, for example, is not only a website address, but also a crypto address and an NFT. Murray has been studying crypto since 2014 and deployed his first deBanked smart contract to ethereum in 2021.

Murray lost the election in a blowout but has expressed that his candidacy led to some positive changes in the ENS ecosystem. The ENS Foundation represents the technology’s official DAO. Murray’s competition was more qualified than he was for the role. The victor, Alex Van de Sande, helped launch ethereum, launched the first Ethereum wallet and Web3 Browser, and was a co-founder of ENS.

“I anticipate there eventually being some crossover between the traditional financial system and blockchain technology,” Murray said. “A username system would be an integral part of that. I’m not into speculating on coins or anything of that nature.”

How Erica Bell of Tax Guard Won Second in The Poker Tournament

October 13, 2024
Article by:
Sean Murray, Erica Bell (Tax Guard)
Left: Sean Murray. Right: Erica Bell, Tax Guard

When the final hand of the B2B Finance Expo’s official poker tournament had concluded, Erica Bell, a Business Development Account Executive for Tax Guard, walked away with 2nd place. Bell has enjoyed poker for a long time and knows the game well. She’s even played in tournaments at the Ameristar Casino in Blackhawk, Colorado and won 1st place in one of them.

“The game’s strategy is what I truly enjoy,” Bell told deBanked. “A couple of individuals came up to me and congratulated me [on coming in 2nd].”

Bell, who at least took home a small prize, has worked for Tax Guard for 5 and a half years. For those not familiar, “Tax Guard is a 3rd party due diligence company who provides real-time insights into hidden tax debt of individuals and businesses by retrieving and analyzing IRS data directly from the source, the IRS,” she says.

The company’s services are primarily used by commercial lenders and financial institutions to assess tax-related risks associated with borrowers. Tax Guard is widely known throughout the industry and has been frequently referenced on deBanked. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Hansen Rada, even did a Zoom interview with deBanked during the early lockdown era of Covid.

The company’s value is pretty straightforward, a lot of tax debt is not easily discoverable, and they’ll get the info you don’t even know you’re missing straight from the source.

“By offering earlier visibility into potential tax issues, liabilities, liens, & levies, we help our customers make more informed lending decisions and mitigate financial risks,” Bell explains.

And if there is a hidden tax issue, Tax Guard can proactively work to resolve it and even negotiate a payment plan. One downside of ignoring tax debt as a lender is having to compete with the IRS when they ultimately move to enforce collection.

Clients can use the Tax Guard portal to run reports or integrate their API right into a CRM. Other critical information can be obtained as well including a wage and income transcript from the IRS. “This includes data from W-2s, 1099s, and other income forms, as well as withholding details,” Bell says. “This data provides a comprehensive view of a taxpayer’s reported income and can be critical when assessing financial risks, resolving discrepancies and verifying financial details.”

Obviously, Bell says that anyone interested in learning more can reach out to her directly.

“My role is highly dynamic, being sales, strategic partnership and relationship focused,” Bell says. “I really enjoy working with extremely talented people at Tax Guard, meeting new folks in the finance industry and learning from their perspectives.”

She’s also apparently planning to host her own upcoming friendly poker tournament so it’s safe to say she has no intention of letting her skills get rusty.

How Cesar Valero Won The Tournament And Gets Deals Done

October 2, 2024
Article by:
b2b finance expo poker tournament winner
Left: Cesar Valero, Biz Dev at Spartan Capital. Right: Sean Murray

When Cesar Valero, Business Development Executive at Spartan Capital, sat down at one of the starting poker tables late last month to participate in the kick-off tournament for B2B Finance Expo, it had been almost exactly a year since he last played. His colleague Ryan Capella had finished second that time, which coincidentally had also been for a business event in Las Vegas. But here at B2B in 2024, the Spartan team was competing against a mix of players eager to show off their skills, some of whom play semi-professionally on the side.

According to Valero, they didn’t do any kind of practice ahead of time. “Frank [the CEO] just said ‘make sure you represent,'” he said. And after two and a half hours of impressive play that’s exactly what he did. The dealer and a hired pit boss keeping an eye on all the cards declared Valero the winner where he took home the grand prize gold bracelet and other goodies.

“We were actually really happy because we noticed that–obviously we celebrated a little bit–and then noticed after we’re like, ‘of the top four positions of the last two years, we [Spartan] have two’ that’s pretty good,” Valero said.

But more importantly, at the industry’s largest conference of the year, everyone suddenly knew who Valero was if they didn’t before.

“You can flat out tell them the best marketing at B2B was to win the poker tournament,” Valero said. People came up to him throughout the next two days calling him out by name. “Hey, Cesar!” they shouted, after having heard about his win.

And being the guy everybody wants to talk to is pretty much his job anyway. Spartan Capital provides revenue based financing and works with a large number of referral partners. Valero’s day-to-day is typically spent communicating with ISOs, whether it be phone calls or Zoom calls or in-office meetings, he is catering to what they need and trying to get deals funded. When asked if having a relationship with an ISO is an important part of the job, he said it’s the whole job.

“We’re a fair funder,” he said of Spartan. “We really don’t snub anybody out. Whether you’re the biggest guy in the space or the smallest guy in the space, we’re going to do our best to give you the best customer service we can. Our reps, pretty much nobody is a brand new rep. Everybody’s got experience. They know what they’re talking about.”

“Most deals are pretty straightforward,” he said, “but you always have that 10,15,20% that need a little more love…so it’s a fast paced environment and just try to keep up with it, make sure we’re doing the right service to our customers whether it be an ISO or a [merchant].”

Overall, Valero feels like the industry is on a strong trajectory, especially with tech and e-commerce platforms having rushed in to offer similar funding products to their customers.

“If they’re in it, they see the demand right?” he exclaimed, “and if they’re putting out billions of dollars like I see every quarter in press releases from Amazon or from PayPal or from one of the big players, they’re out there and they’re creating buzz… so better quality borrowers will be flowing in because the need is there across the board.”

Valero isn’t exaggerating about the fast pace. After having gone from the flow of deals to Vegas to even more deals, he couldn’t afford to let our interview about his big win go over the allotted time.

“I got about an hour and 15 minutes to the wire cut-off,” he said emphatically while thanking me for the call. “Let me see if I can do a couple more deals!”

B2B Finance at deBanked

July 5, 2024
Article by:

murray serhantWhen Broker Fair first debuted in 2018, the keynote speaker was none other than Ryan Serhant, then a fast rising New York City real estate broker and star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing. Today he’s got his own Netflix Series called Owning Manhattan.

“After selling real estate for 12 years, I decided to start my own company,” Serhant says in the trailer for the first episode, “and if you can’t sell, you can’t be here.”

That New York hustle attitude was the connecting link for why Broker Fair chose him despite the broker audience being largely engaged in small business financial services at the time. But since then the small business finance broker community has become increasingly diversified in its product offerings and real estate is frequently one of the assets on the menu.

“People will be surprised how many clients have real estate, not just a [primary home], but they own just a small multifamily down the road that they never touched or tapped into,” said Julio Sencion, Principal at Alta Financial, in a recent interview with deBanked.

Companies like World Business Lenders figured that out a long time ago while still more discovered the business during the covid recovery, leading deBanked to produce a video miniseries about real estate investing in the summer of 2021. The guests ranged from real estate influencer Ralph DiBugnara to NestSeekers International’s Chief Economist Erin Sykes to a couple of old fashioned guys named Danny and Bruce who started investing in real estate across New Jersey long ago.

deBanked also interviewed house-flipper turned real estate tech CEO Andrew Luong of Doorvest, did a deep dive as to why real estate was becoming the side hustle of choice in the industry, and even bought real land using the blockchain for the purpose of a story.

Equipment financing has also taken off, leading deBanked to produce the first ever sales reality series named Equipping The Dream in 2022.

That’s been complemented by regular coverage and even sitdown interviews from Andrew Carman, Steve Geller, and George A. Parker.

deBanked’s Sean Murray has previously presented at the International Factoring Association’s (IFA) Fintech educational event, been a guest on the Coleman Report run by renowned SBA expert Bob Coleman, and moderated panels separately for the New York Institute of Credit and the Alternative Finance Bar Association.

Murray was also the host and producer of the industry’s first ever Broker Battle which took placed in Miami Beach this past January.

deBanked is also affiliated with the largest online small business finance community in the US, DailyFunder, and has produced nearly two dozen events since 2017.

“Back in 2018, there was a question that Serhant posed on stage to the Broker Fair audience to make sure he understood where they were coming from,” Murray said. “‘You guys are all B2B right?’ he said, and I think his characterization was spot on, because B2B is pretty much what we’ve been all along.”


deBanked is collaborating with the Small Business Finance Association on the B2B Finance Expo that’s taking place in Las Vegas on September 23-24. For info, visit: https://www.b2bfinexpo.com

B2B Finance Expo: Las Vegas, September 23-24

June 18, 2024
Article by:


Wynn Las VegasThe inaugural B2B Finance Expo will debut in Las Vegas this Fall from September 23-24 at The Wynn. Powered by deBanked in collaboration with the Small Business Finance Association (SBFA), the conference will bring together the leading lenders, funders, and brokers from across the spectrum of commercial finance, leasing, mortgage, and revenue-based capital products.

“The goal is to bring together leaders in commercial finance at an upscale event focused on delivering value to participants,” said Steve Denis, Executive Director of the SBFA. “Our content will gather industry leaders’ perspectives on partnerships, capital markets, diversifying income streams, and compliance in an environment that balances education, growth, and relationship building.”

“We’ve produced nearly 20 commercial finance related conferences since 2018,” said deBanked founder Sean Murray. “Brokers from all segments of commercial finance looking for a valuable conference to expand their network, learn, and grow their business should attend B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas this year. It’ll be the biggest one of its kind this Fall.”

B2B Finance ExpThe SBFA is a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring Main Street small businesses have access to the capital they need to grow and strengthen the economy. The SBFA’s mission is to educate policymakers and regulators about the technology-driven platforms emerging in the small business lending market and how their member companies bridge the small business capital gap using innovative financing solutions. Attendees of the conference will have the opportunity to support this initiative.

To register, visit b2bfinexpo.com. To inquire about sponsorship, complete this form here.



Found on DailyFunder:

07-03-2019

Inform More, Earn More...
sean murray, president and chief editor at*debanked, makes great points about education for sales agents being paramount to their success.*if knowledgeable about the diversity of financial products, and their distinctions from one another, agents can*help customers make informed decisions, which allows them to close more deals., , *, , customers trust in the person, brand or company they are working with is...
06-07-2019

How in the WORLD!!!??...
sean murray over at debanked to do a nice piece for his magazine debanked., , this is just getting crazy!!! still waiting for approval/denial and merchant has been called 4 times already.... wwooowwwwww!!!!...
01-28-2019

Quicksilver...
sean murray would have stepped in to stop this but i guess doesnt want to hurt his bottom line...