By: Sean Murray

Sean Murray is the founder of deBanked (2010), deBanked Connect & Broker Fair (2018), and DailyFunder (2012). Murray entered the nonbank finance industry in 2006 and has a Bachelors of Science in Accounting & Finance from University of Delaware. He is widely known for his extensive reporting on the merchant cash advance industry and fintech. ![]() ![]() ![]() | ![]() |
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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.
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03/31/2021 | Video: Jennie Villano and Sean Murray |
10/15/2018 | Sean Murray to moderate NYIC panel |
01/23/2017 | Sean Murray is Finalist at LendIt Awards |
Why Not to Have a Youtube Channel | Happy Canada Day |
Ep 37 - deBanked's March Forward | Episode 16 |
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:
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.
deBanked employees were summoned to an all-hands meeting in the company’s modest Brooklyn, NY headquarters yesterday afternoon to bear witness to a special announcement.
“We’re launching a SPAC,” deBanked president and chief editor Sean Murray said to a stunned room. “I’ve been writing about fintech for more than ten years, but an inspirational meme posted by a bot on twitter got me thinking. And I was just like, ‘You know what? F*** it, let’s just buy the whole fintech industry.'”
Everyone quickly agreed that it was a genius move.
“What was the last stimulus? like what, $1.9 trillion or something? We’ll raise at least 10x that amount in our IPO,” he continued. “No financial technology company is off limits, we’re going to buy them all. I can’t believe no one has thought of this yet!”
Murray realized that such a brilliant strategy was likely to rattle the largest banks and he said that he had already placed calls to Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan and David Solomon at Goldman Sachs to ease them into his swift rise to financial power.
“I mean did I actually speak to them? Technically per se not really, but I heard them speak on Clubhouse of which I am an elite exclusive member,” Murray said.
When pressed for details about this Clubhouse conversation, Murray backpedaled and said he actually just read an article about Clubhouse but that the article referenced Elon Musk and that he was basically just as important as the famed bankers. Several sources who wished to remain anonymous said that Murray was only invited to Clubhouse after shamelessly begging for an invitation on twitter.
Attempts to verify his membership revealed a profile picture where he is giving a thumbs up while holding a glass of scotch, one of which he said came from a bottle that cost more than I would ever make in my whole life. A fact check, however, revealed that it was really just expired apple juice that a building maintenance worker had left out near the common area garbage disposal.
When asked to explain this, Murray said, “Bro, why do you think we’re doing a SPAC? Once we have the money, we’ll be drinking freaking Apple computers!”
By the end of the big company meeting, Murray pulled out a joint and began puffing it furiously through a mouth hole he cut open in his 7 simultaneously-worn covid masks, prompting one staff member to ask if his fanciful plan was at all related to New York’s newly enacted marijuana law.
“Wait, you mean this sh*t’s legal now?” he asked. “F***, make it two SPACs then!”
Update: The recording is here
deBanked will be streaming live today at approximately 12:15 with special guest Jennie Villano of NewCo Capital Group. She will be joined by host Sean Murray in the studio. This is not a Zoom or virtual discussion. There is no need to register. Anyone can tune in free at debanked.com/tv or debanked.tv
The Merchant Cash Advance facebook group, a community created and administered by deBanked, has reached 1,000 members. The social media group is a popular place for those in the non-bank business finance community to engage with each other online.
“We’re seeing an uptick in collaborative business development, especially among smaller brokerage organizations and those who work independently on their own,” deBanked President Sean Murray said. “A lot of ideas, motivation, referrals, and deal-making is being conducted online, more-so than before because of the 2020 lockdowns where in-person collaboration slowed to a crawl.”
Separately, deBanked shares common ownership with DailyFunder, the largest b2b finance community on the web.
“We actually witnessed a very insightful trend on DailyFunder,” Murray said. “Approximately 7.5% of the active membership that existed on March of 2020, had left their jobs or closed their business by March of 2021. It sounds troublesome on its face except that we added more members than we lost in that timeframe. More people came in than left, a net increase. I think the data is pointing to the future being very strong!”
With tax season upon us, the events of 2020 will soon be reviewed and evaluated by everyone’s best friend, the IRS. Lenders that offered debt forgiveness might have done a favor to distressed borrowers in 2020, but a consequence of that courtesy is that the borrowers’ forgiven debt might be taxable.
This is as good a time as ever to review a report prepared by Grassi Advisors & Accountants whether you are a lender that forgave debt or a borrower that had debt forgiven.
“This issue was noticed early last year,” said deBanked President Sean Murray, “but at the time everyone was so focused on PPP forgiveness, the EIDL program, and government stimulus, that I think the potential consequences of lenders forgiving non-PPP debt for their borrowers were lost in the shuffle. Imagine you’re a borrower that had $100,000 of non-PPP debt forgiven last year and you’re only now about to learn that the IRS may classify that as income. Or worse yet, you don’t even realize it and are told that later on during an audit.”
In May 2020, deBanked labelled this as a hidden tax time bomb that was set to detonate in 2021. And now here we are.
Today, we’re announcing a new feature for digital advertisers. Businesses advertising on our website now have the option to login with a deBanked account and track their ad click figures in close to real time.
We began to roll this out in January to all ad clients that expressed an interest in it. A press release went out this morning.
It’s one of several things that we’ve been working on for a while. Our clients can also view what their current ads are when they log in, even if it’s more than one campaign.
The data is updated on an automated basis and the identities of the visitors that clicked is kept anonymous. We’re also offering white-labeled deBanked-hosted landing pages as a service to assist with managing the conversion process. As everyone knows, we also have designers that can create the ad artwork itself.
deBanked serves a business-to-business market and I think the elephant in the room is that much of the industry’s referral business is being sourced through our website. We outpace all of our competitors on a page view basis by a long shot and we’ve determined that it would be valuable for our digital clients to track the activity we’re generating, and then if further assistance is needed, facilitate the conversion process as well. We think about it from the user perspective too. We want the user clicking those ads to find whatever it is they’re seeking. We’re ultimately striving for an end-to-end experience where all parties are satisfied.
We’ve also compiled a short FAQ about how to interpret the click data.
You can email questions to info@debanked.com.
Thanks so much for being part of the deBanked universe.
– Sean Murray
There has been fast-growing demand for digital finance products this year, according to the Smarter Loans Annual State of Canadian Fintech study. The report surveyed more than 2,500 users of the Smarter Loans site.
The findings show an accelerated shift to digital transactions, which Smarter loans co-founder Vlad Sherbatov attributed to a pandemic-acceleration of the tech-leaning trends that were already coming.
“One of the central insights from this year’s study is the overall increase of fintech adoption and lending,” Sherbatov said. “We’ve also noticed the fact that people are just much more likely to manage their finances online today than they were at this time 12 months ago or a year ago.”
Intending to gain insight into Canada’s fintech industry, Smarter Loans began sending questionnaires to their users starting in 2018.
“We survey some of the people that flow through our website that have used a fintech lending product in the past 12 months, we ask them questions about their experience,” Sherbatov said. “The purpose is to extract insights so that we can help push the industry forward and improve it.”
Even just two years ago the industry was a much smaller space but has ballooned since, and the Smarter Loans survey has become a one-of-a-kind focus on Canadian fintech markets. Featured with this year’s results is commentary from Canadian industry leaders like the Canadian Lenders Association, and deBanked’s own Sean Murray.
“It’s become a bit of a staple in the lending industry,” Sherbatov said. “Because it’s the only piece of research in Canada that is laser-focused on fintech lending.”
With three years of data to compare, Sherbatov said he could see a significant increase in online activity. Part of this is just due to where the world is heading, as Sherbatov described the younger generations just stepping into the financial world.
“This is something that’s been happening for years; this is a trend that has started a long, long time ago,” Sherbatov said. “For younger generations, the way that they approach financial products and companies is very different from someone in my generation or older. Online is the standard of doing business, on-the-go, and mobile is the standard of managing your financial affairs.”
Fintech in Canada, Sherbatov said, tends to lag behind the growth of the fintech industry in other countries but is on the rise due to the Coronavirus. The digital adoption trend was pushed forward, as some customers that had been reluctant to bank online were forced to do so by necessity. Now, these changes to the way business is transacted are here to stay, Sherbatov said.
Like the surge in eCommerce activity, people are going online to make financial transactions.
“You go to Amazon to buy laundry detergent, and you go online to open up a checking account to pay some bills,” Sherbatov said. “Everybody needs financial services, just like everybody else needs household items; it’s how we’re going about obtaining them. This has changed and has accelerated due to Covid.”
Inform More, Earn More... dale laszig has written a terrific article (http://www.greensheet.com/emagazine.php?article_id=6033) on the green sheet (http://www.greensheet.com/) a... |
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... |
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!!!!... |
Quicksilver... sean murray would have stepped in to stop this but i guess doesnt want to hurt his bottom line... |