Articles by deBanked Staff
Funding Circle SME Income Fund to Consider Winding Down
April 6, 2019The Funding Circle SME Income Fund (FCIF), a fund whose objective is to provide shareholders with a sustainable and attractive level of dividend income by lending, both directly and indirectly, to small businesses through Funding Circle’s platform, may soon be winding down. Earlier this week, the fund’s major shareholders expressed a desire to withdraw their capital and a vote will be scheduled to put this plan in motion.
The decision is not a surprise. The fund suffered a sharp decline in Net Asset Value late last year in part due to increasing business loan defaults.
Funding Circle Holdings (FCH), which trades on the London Stock Exchange, announced that a windup of FCIF would not affect the overall company’s 2019 guidance.
FCH CEO Samir Desai said of the news, “A global income fund providing access to a diversified portfolio of Funding Circle small business loans was the right strategy for investors and Funding Circle in 2015. However, there are now more appropriate and varied ways for investors to participate on the platform. We’re pleased to soon introduce two new investor products to the UK market. They will further expand the universe of investors that can access loans on our platform and continue to diversify our sources of funding, in line with the strategy we set out at IPO.”
Indicted Loan Brokers Out On Bond, 1 Still in Custody
April 5, 2019
Four of the five loan brokers indicted in a fake business loan scam that tricked an Ohio resident out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront fees, have been released on bond. Only one, a defendant by the name of Haki Toplica, remains in custody. All of the defendants have entered pleas of not guilty.
In addition to the victim being asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront fees to apply for phony loans, he also signed over the title of 55 vehicles to the defendants to serve as the collateral. The vehicles included a Ford Mustang, several dump trucks, several tractors, several restored classic vehicles, a Freightliner motor home, and trailers.
Toplica was arrested in December and his co-conspirators in March. All of them are New York residents. The condition of one defendant’s release was that she remain working with her present employer. deBanked determined that her most recent employment was ironically that of a business loan broker.
Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Brendan Ross, Direct Lending Investments, and Others
April 2, 2019
A class action lawsuit has been filed in California against Direct Lending Investments, LLC (DLI), Brendan Ross, Bryce Mason, Frank Turner, Rodney Omanoff, and Quarterspot Inc. alleging breach of contract, breaches of fiduciary duty, aiding and abetting breaches of fiduciary duty, and fraudulent inducement.
The claims are drawn from a series of revelations that have come out about the online lending hedge fund, namely that the fund lost nearly 25% of its value through a failed loan to VOIP Guardian Partners I (VOIP) and an SEC complaint that alleged DLI engaged in a scheme to misrepresent performance with the help of an online lender it invested in.
Plaintiffs point out many issues with the VOIP deal but hone in on the fact that the company engaged in risky behavior by taking DLI’s funds and lending out more than 75% of them to just two companies, Najd Technologies Ltd and Telacme Ltd. deBanked previously determined these now-defunct companies were headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. Documents obtained through VOIP’s bankruptcy filing indicate that both companies ceased making payments in October 2018. Despite this, DLI continued to report to investors that they were achieving very favorable monthly returns, the plaintiffs say, and no mention of VOIP’s distress was disclosed.
Bryce Mason and Frank Turner were named as defendants because they sat on DLI’s investment committee with Ross.
The plaintiffs are investment vehicles for a husband and wife that DLI last reported had a combined value of $758,000. They seek class action certification. They had only just begun investing with DLI last year.
On Monday, a judge in the SEC lawsuit ordered that DLI be placed in receivership. Bradley D. Sharp of Development Specialists, Inc. has been appointed to serve as permanent receiver for the fund’s estate.
You can download the full class action lawsuit complaint here.
Online Lender Offering “Incredible” Returns to Investors is Recording Massive Losses
March 29, 2019
StreetShares continues to rack up astronomical losses, according to the company’s recently filed unaudited financial statements. The company recorded a $6.4 million loss for the second half of 2018 on only $1.88 million in operating revenue. As in previous periods, payroll continues to be the largest expense.
StreetShares’ funding comes in part from mom & pop investors that are offered a fixed annual return of 5% regardless of how the company’s underlying loans perform. Advertisements on the website call it “incredible” and trumpet that you can “grow your money like a 2x World War champ” and that “your balance will grow every day.” The offering is called a veteran business bond but it has no government backing and can suffer a total risk of loss, all while the underlying loans may not even be made to veteran-owned businesses.
A simple explanation on the site for how it works is that you just open an account, transfer funds from your bank and then just “watch the interest start piling up.” You can withdraw your money anytime but large withdrawals over $50,000 can take up to 30 days to process, the company states. The attractive terms have allowed StreetShares to take in millions of dollars from everyday people with amounts as small as $25.
Institutional investors can earn even higher returns. Lendit Co-founder Peter Renton recently called StreetShares his “top performing investment by a long way,” beating his investments in Lending Club, Prosper, P2Binvestor, Peerstreet, Yieldstreet, Money360, Fundrise, and even the returns previously and erroneously reported by Direct Lending Investments.
deBanked previously reported that on January 1st, Jesse Cushman, the company’s Chief Business Officer and Principal Financial & Accounting Officer, resigned. However, his name continues to remain on the website’s Leadership page a full 3 months later. The company still has not named a permanent successor. deBanked emailed StreetShares earlier in the week about Cushman’s departure and was told that he left to pursue another opportunity. “Steve Vickrey, has been in place since before he left,” President Mickey Konson responded. Konson has been filling in as acting Principal Accounting Officer in the meantime.
In a press release published by StreetShares on Tuesday about a new credit card offering, StreetShares CEO/co-Founder & Iraq War Veteran Mark L. Rockefeller, said, “Veterans love to help other veterans. StreetShares is a veteran-run company, and the goal of the card is not only to provide a veteran focused payments tool, but also to benefit the veteran community as a whole by funding programs that benefit veteran entrepreneurship.”
Tiny Small Businesses Struggle More Than the Rest
March 28, 2019
The average credit score of the owner of a “mom and pop” shop (a business with four or fewer employees) is 30 points lower than the owner of a larger business, according to a recent study conducted by Lendio. (Lendio defined a “mom and pop” business and having four or fewer employees). Furthermore, the study says that, on average, mom and pop businesses require twice as many interactions with a lending expert, compared to larger small businesses. This is likely because of problems with credit and other financial challenges.
Smaller mom and pop businesses are in greater need of capital, according to the study. These businesses represent 53% of the customers funded through Lendio’s online marketplace. And their loans account for 34% of the total loan volume funded, even though the average size of their loans is smaller. The average loan amount for a “mom and pop” business is less than half that of larger businesses. Specifically, the average loan amount for “mom and pop” businesses is $23,081, while the average loan amount for larger small businesses is $54,188. Of course, a larger company with greater sales can afford to borrow more. But the $54,188 average loan size for larger companies may be a smaller percentage of revenue for those larger companies.
Speaking of revenue, mom and pop businesses’ monthly revenues are on average $35,000 less than their non-mom and pop small business counterparts. The smaller mom and pop shops are also generally younger, according to the Lendio study. Their average time in business is 5.6 years compared to 7.4 years for the larger small businesses.
What Did Direct Lending Investments Invest In?
March 27, 2019
When Bloomberg News reported that Direct Lending Investments (DLI) had lost approximately 25% of its portfolio value from a deal gone bad, some were surprised to learn that it had nothing to do with its core competency of online lending. VOIP Guardian Partners I, which stuck DLI with more than $190 million in unpaid loans, was in the business of lending money to smaller telecoms against their accounts receivables, Bloomberg News reported. VOIP was then supposed to be repaid the money when larger telecom companies paid the smaller ones.
On March 11, VOIP filed for Chapter 7, and limited details behind these telecom borrowers became public.
VOIP’s largest loan default was to a Hong Kong-based company formed in 2015 named Telacme, Ltd. Records indicate that $1 billion overall had been loaned to Telacme through 30-day rolling advances but that they stopped making payments in October 2018, leaving a remaining balance to VOIP and in turn to DLI, of $101.1 million. Telacme’s official website no longer exists and only a holding page by Godaddy indicating that the page has been parked free remains. (Update 4/16/19 – The website has been restored)
The second largest default at $58 million was to a company named Najd Technologies, Ltd, headquartered in the United Arab Emirates. Like Telacme, Najd stopped paying in October 2018 and their website is also no longer accessible. Internet archives show it advertised itself as a global telecom company based in Bangkok, Thailand.
The other remaining telecom loan issues spanned companies all across Europe.
A lawsuit filed against DLI in 2017 complained that DLI falsely represented to investors that it typically made loans that ranged between $5,000 and $100,000 when in fact DLI had been financing multi-million dollar telecom deals as far back as 2014. The plaintiffs went so far as to claim that at one point up to 50% of DLI’s portfolio was invested in telecom receivables.
But the claims were removed in a subsequent amended version of the lawsuit after the judge ordered them stricken because the plaintiffs themselves were not aggrieved investors, but instead unhappy former business partners alleging violations of a non-compete.
“I don’t understand why it’s in the complaint,” the judge said. “Particularly, when [DLI] says it is impacting their ability to raise money.”
The decision was prescient as DLI would not only go on to raise more money but also lose more than $190 million of investor money in telecom deals that weren’t overtly advertised.
A March 2017 DLI investor presentation obtained by deBanked touts its focus on underserved Main Street USA businesses. There is no mention of international telecom lending, nor any plans to finance telecom businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars, let alone do so in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
In VOIP’s bankruptcy filing, DLI is the primary secured creditor. DLI’s chief executive recently resigned and the fund has been sued by the Securities & Exchange Commission for issues unrelated to VOIP and is being placed under receivership.
The 2017 lawsuit against DLI and VOIP can be found under Index #650973/2017 In the New York Supreme Court.
Yalber Announces $20 Million Credit Facility
March 26, 2019
Yalber announced today that they have obtained a new $20 million credit facility from Park Cities Asset Management. Brean Capital served as exclusive financial advisor to Yalber on the transaction. This follows an earlier $20 million credit facility in December 2018 from a different investment fund.
“The small business funding space has drastically changed in the past two years,” said Yalber CEO Amir Landsman. “We see more and more sophisticated players in the space and to me, it’s a sign that the industry is on the right track to be the major funding source of businesses in America. Being able to close two facilities within 15 months is strong evidence that Yalber has a lot to offer.”
Yalber provides American small businesses with royalty-based investments. They can fund small businesses with up to $500,000. Founded in 2007, the company is an early player in the alternative lending space and is unique in that it generates 90 percent of its business in-house. Less than 10 percent of their leads come from ISOs, although they do look to build relationships with high quality ISOs, according to Yalber COO Amotz Segal.
Segal said that, aside from business with ISOs, all of their marketing efforts are internal and span from social media to local advertising on radio, TV and in newspapers. Yalber does not use direct mail and does not pay for leads.
“It makes the job for our salespeople a little easier because they’re not making cold calls,” Segal told deBanked. “We [mostly] get incoming calls.”
As of the beginning of last year, Yalber had funded more than 5,000 business with over $300 million, and Segal said that they had funded approximately $65 million in 2018. On the subject of regulation, Segal said that they remain very aware of regulatory changes and they don’t necessarily see regulations as a negative thing.
Headquartered in New York, Yalber employs about 25 people and has two very small offices in Dallas and Los Angeles.
Direct Lending Investments Charged With Fraud by the SEC
March 25, 2019
Update: DLI has agreed to the appointment of a receiver to marshal and preserve the assets of Direct Lending and the funds. The SEC has also published a press release on the matter.
One of the biggest online lending hedge funds has been accused of fraud by the SEC. On Friday, the SEC sued Direct Lending Investments (DLI) with perpetrating a multi-year fraud that misrepresented the value of loans in a segment of its portfolio.
A DLI employee told the SEC that CEO Brendan Ross helped engineer loans to be valued at par when they should’ve been valued at zero. Emails between Ross and the online loan platform suggest that this was intentional, the SEC argued. The effect of this was that between 2014 and 2017, DLI overstated the valuation of one of its loan portfolio positions by approximately $53 million and misrepresented the fund’s performance by about 2-3% annually.
The SEC seeks a preliminary injunction and appointment of a permanent receiver; permanent injunctions; disgorgement with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties.
You can download the full SEC complaint here.
Below: DLI’s stated monthly returns 2013-2016
A 2017 DLI investor presentation touted “double-digit returns with no down months since inception” and a portfolio that has “exhibited little volatility.”
