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.
Articles by Sean Murray
Soon, You’ll Be Able to Lend Against Credibly Small Business Loan Pools
May 23, 2026For most people in the small business lending and revenue-based financing industry, news of a billion-dollar securitization barely resonates. It’s too big, too abstract, especially if you’re used to the ground game of syndicating a couple million bucks in deals you handpicked with funders you personally know. Wall Street-level capital markets has always felt like a mysterious private club, where a hundred million here and a billion there changes hands through an old-fashioned system outsiders hardly ever get to see, aside from the press release that later announces a deal happened.
But something recently changed. Capital markets, at least a corner of it, is being democratized. That became obvious when someone told me I could lend a hundred bucks toward a warehouse line of credit for Credibly just to see it for myself.
Me? Somehow involved in a warehouse line for Credibly???
On May 5, Credibly announced a strategic partnership with Figure to “modernize SMB capital markets via blockchain rails.” It sounds like a buzzwordy headline from the 2010s. Not AI, blockchain. In 2026. Though there are certainly AI technologies involved.
Figure is a familiar name, not only because it is publicly traded, but also because I had the honor of sharing a stage with Figure CEO Michael Tannenbaum last fall at the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas for a fireside chat. While I mainly asked him about how small business owners could leverage their home equity to obtain capital, Tannenbaum pivoted at moments to explain how the company was reshaping capital markets by using blockchain. At the time, some of it went over my head.
“Everybody else is trying to use an origination system, and then on the back end figure out where to sell the loan,” said Tannenbaum on Peter Renton’s recently released Fintech One-on-One podcast, “and that figuring out process creates all this back and forth between the lender, the borrower, and the ultimate buyer, and we eliminated that, and we eliminated the people-based approach and standardized it.”
In a nutshell, Figure being in the mortgage game meant it was inevitably tied up in the capital markets game. And they found the capital markets game very old-fashioned. So they made their own capital markets marketplace, with one segment called Democratized Prime, and built it on blockchain rails.
Democratized Prime is essentially like a universal warehouse line, one that is “much easier to borrow and lend against than the arduous process of getting a warehouse line with lots of third-party diligence and legal fees,” Tannenbaum told Renton. It has rapidly become popular for mortgages. If you signed up for the platform today, you would see HELOC pools and their corresponding credit profiles that you could lend against.
Mortgages were just the start. You can also lend against an auto loan pool brought on by Agora. That deal was announced this past February as a landmark moment that kicked off the democratization of new asset classes. Credibly will bring SMBs into the mix next, where the company’s small business loans and revenue-based financing deals will be pooled up and available to lend against with as little as $10 at a time. That means this opportunity is open to just about anybody.
The yield can be determined in one of two ways. One is a Dutch auction, where participants compete to lend into the pool by offering lower rates, which is good for Credibly as the number goes down. If you bid too high or the pool is full, you may have to wait until the next hourly auction to try again. The process resets each hour, with the lowest acceptable bids getting priority, meaning lenders are not just deciding whether they want exposure to the pool, they are also competing on price for the right to put their money to work. The other is a live-rate system where rates change automatically based on utilization. You can exit an auction pool if your funds are not in use or if someone else’s funds are ready to replace yours. For live rates, you can request an exit up to the available liquidity at the time. Credibly is not on the Democratized Prime system just yet. That is supposed to happen this quarter. But HELOC and auto loan pools are already there.
I first tried the platform myself with just a couple hundred bucks. I entered digits into an auction-pool form indicating that I’d be willing to lend at 7.9% APR all-in to a HELOC pool. The pool wasn’t taking any offers for higher than 8% so that’s how I came up with my figure. My funds were accepted, and they’re now earning a return. Not in some magic back room, but visibly on the blockchain.
While you can obviously fund your account with dollars, I dusted off an old stockpile of ETH and sent funds using MetaMask to Figure Markets. Therein lies the only caveat. To lend against the pools, you have to use Figure’s stablecoin, YLDS.
YLDS is an SEC-registered security. It is pegged 1:1 with the U.S. dollar and also earns a return on its own just for holding it, a little over 3% at the time of this writing. Users use their YLDS to lend against the pools and are paid their interest in YLDS (hourly!). This can be swapped back into dollars, Bitcoin, or whatever else one is comfortable with.
YLDS exists on the Provenance blockchain. You’re assigned a wallet address, and you can trace where your funds went using Provenance’s main block explorer, ZoneScan. That also lets you see a bit of what other users are doing, as well as what Figure is doing. By being on blockchain rails, everything is kind of out there for audit and inspection. I saw my ETH get swapped for YLDS on the block explorer and then saw my funds interact with a corresponding HELOC pool smart contract.
If you think this blockchain stuff is still niche, consider that in 2025, stablecoins processed $28 trillion in real economic volume, according to Chainalysis. By 2035, that number could reach $1.5 quadrillion, surpassing today’s entire cross-border payments market. Those are eye-popping numbers, but even if one discounts the forecast, the broader point is hard to ignore: stablecoins are no longer a fringe experiment.
Of course, this is not risk-free just because it is transparent. Pool performance still matters. Borrower credit quality still matters. Liquidity may depend on whether other participants are ready to replace your funds. And because YLDS is itself a security, participants need to understand what they are holding, how it works, and what risks come with using it. The blockchain may make the mechanics easier to inspect, but it does not make credit risk disappear.
While Democratized Prime can make it easier for lenders to tap into capital, this also is not a solution for everyone. Credibly, for example, has provided access to over $3 billion in working capital to more than 61,000 small businesses, with four completed KBRA-rated securitizations, its most recent one completed in the first quarter of 2026 for $124 million, expandable up to $225 million. That is sort of the baseline quality: true institutional-level assets from an institutional-tier lender. A small funder looking to graduate away from syndication is not going to be an immediate candidate for something like this. One of the HELOC loan pools, for example, has taken in $340M from parties looking to lend their YLDS.
One benefit for Credibly in challenging traditional finance ABS markets and adopting this technology is that greater efficiency and reduced friction should ultimately enable the company to pass savings on to its small business customers.
Would you lend a million dollars against a Credibly business loan and revenue-based financing pool? Before now, you probably wouldn’t ever have had that opportunity. Now Figure is making that possible.
Barney Frank Once Answered My Question About Business Loans
May 20, 2026
Former Congressman Barney Frank has died. He was 86 years-old. While he left Congress in January 2013, his legacy has lived on through the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. Readers may recall that’s the law that gave birth to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and with that a debate that has spanned more than 15 years over how to implement its small business loan data collection mandate.
In any case, I once personally crossed paths with Congressman Frank in a hallway at the Exponential Finance Conference presented by Singularity University and CNBC. It was in 2014 and I had official press credentials. I had limited time so I fired away the first question I could think of and that was “would you be in favor of a federal maximum cap on business loan interest rates?” He said that he would not be.
Talking further about this subject, Frank went on to say that he supported transparency in business loan transactions, such that the borrower should be easily able to identify the terms, but that the premise behind consumer loan protections was that consumers were less sophisticated.
In a second question, I brought up overdraft fees and their tendency to be characterized by critics as short-term loans. Should a loan term of just a single day be required to disclose an annual percentage rate? He believed that they should.
This exchange and a summary of topics discussed at the conference appeared in the July/August 2014 issue of DailyFunder’s periodic trade journal. RIP Congressman Frank.
Got Hit By The IEEPA Tariff? There’s a Company That Will Help Get Your Cash Back From It
May 5, 2026
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Trump Administration could not impose tariffs on imported goods under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). While the President immediately pivoted to enforce tariffs under a different legal basis, many people began to wonder what would happen with the billions of dollars already collected from importers.
Aharon Margolin, the CEO & Founder of Tariff Recovery Group, told deBanked that the court ruling was brought to the Court of International Trade (CIT) to determine next steps, and on March 4 it was decided that all importers would be refunded the IEEPA tariffs. It’s a lot of dough, approximately $166B. $55B of that is attributed to more than 236,000 small businesses that are now due a refund, and by all accounts it seems like the system is working with haste to handle this.
“They’ve actually outlined the process to start facilitating these refunds,” said Margolin, “and they even opened up a portal on the Customs Border Patrol (CPB) Website for importers to start to file their refunds.”
But a portal means paperwork, and a refund comes with the unknown of when it will be received. The CPB, for example, has announced that the first refund will be issued on May 11, which is less than a week from now, but is advising that they’ll generally take 60–90 days from the time a claim is filed. Small businesses have heard such speedy promises before, with the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), for example, and ended up waiting far longer than they ever could have anticipated.
But even if all parties move quickly, the Trump Administration has the option to appeal the CIT refund order and potentially cause a stay of the refund process altogether. This kind of delay or any prolonged delay could result in claims eventually getting denied entirely because of normal deadlines to protest tariffs. If businesses don’t file or protest the tariff in a timely manner, for example, the window to get refunded could simply close. Would they let that happen? No one knows for sure.
Similar to previous government programs, not everybody is aware of what is happening, what they’re even supposed to do, or if they’re supposed to do anything at all.
“…a lot of these merchants, I’m sure don’t even know they’re entitled to a refund,” said Margolin. “A lot of them are, and I think specifically the subset of the merchants that are turning to the the alternative funding industry are because they need that help.”
Margolin echoed what the rest of the small business finance industry was saying before the SCOTUS ruling: that applicants were often citing tariffs as being disruptive to their supply chains, generating demand for working capital solutions from a variety of sources, including products like MCAs. Margolin said the easiest cash flow solution would be for businesses to first get the tariff refund money that is actually owed to them. But that’s subject to the 60–90 day wait in a best-case scenario and an unknowable amount of time in a worst-case scenario.
What then if the need is urgent? That’s where Tariff Recovery Group comes in. They assess how much a business is owed in tariff refunds and can then work out a deal to pay the business cash upfront.
“It all depends on the nature of the claim,” Margolin said. “We’re able to liquidate that claim for money upfront right here, which could provide significant cash flow relief and working capital to the business.”
In his experience, many business owners aren’t even aware of exactly how much they paid in IEEPA tariffs. Because of that, they first assess all of their history and, if eligible, give them all the materials, deadlines, and instructions to file a claim. The business could simply stop there and use that as a standalone service or proceed to the next step, which is to sell the refund claim to Tariff Recovery Group.
Given all the moving pieces, certain unknowns, and the benefits of acting swiftly, Margolin’s company is hoping to educate as many people in the small business finance industry as possible, especially those who would normally just pitch loans or other solutions to their clients. They can also offer a tariff refund filing service or turn those refunds into cash upfront by referring those businesses to him.
“There’s a real service that you could be offering them, they could be getting real money back,” Margolin said. “There’s real commission to be made by brokers.”
Brokers can make commissions by referring businesses to go through the assessment with Tariff Recovery Group and file a claim, and then earn another commission if the business owner sells their claim. It’s, at the very least, a tool in the arsenal to provide a helpful service.
“The worst thing to hear is that a small business paid these types of tariffs and is not recovering them, that would just be money left on the table,” Margolin said.
What the Velocity Capital Group Announcement Revealed
April 21, 2026
Velocity Capital Group has deployed over $1 billion to small businesses, newly unveiled financial stats show, shedding light on the firm’s performance as it enters a new phase of institutional-scale expansion. Across more than 10,000 transactions, VCG reports a 37.1% renewal rate and a sub-10% default rate.
The firm says it operates in all 50 states and is actively preparing to extend its model globally, with origination volumes projected to continue accelerating through 2030. As part of that, VCG has hired Michelle Melo as Director of Financial Operations & Capital Markets.
deBanked has been covering VCG’s expansion since 2018, starting with a profile that captured CEO Jay Avigdor’s rise from solopreneur to a large office on Long Island. At the time, Avigdor told deBanked: “We crawl before we walk before we run.” The company now appears to be in a full sprint as it looks globally.
This past February, Velocity Capital Group’s booth at deBanked CONNECT MIAMI included a surprise guest appearance from NBA All Star Bam Adebayo. Now with its recent big hire of Melo, Avigdor says, “VCG’s tech- and data-powered platform is scaling faster and more efficiently than nearly any peer in our category, and Michelle is here to institutionalize that advantage. She will drive pre-securitization discipline, standardized reporting, and the investor relationships we need to remove scaling friction and enable the next generation of growth. With Michelle on board, VCG is significantly closer to achieving our target of $1 billion in annual originations.”
Speed to Lead, Closing the Deal, and Running an ISO Shop
April 15, 2026
I sat down with Nicole Cruz, CEO of Redline Capital Inc, a brokerage based in in Secaucus, New Jersey. Cruz spilled some of the secret sauce, including what happened when she tried lead sources that her peers and competitors adamantly claimed weren’t good. Cruz started in the industry in 2018 and worked as a sales rep and ISO rep before trying her hand at starting her own company. One of the signature elements of their sales culture is the daily “power hours” they have. When I arrived on site, they were in the middle of one. She explains it all and more in our talk.
You can follow Cruz on her Instagram here.
While we’re posting some short video snippets across social media, you can listen to the full thing on Spotify while you’re on your commute.
Also, make sure you’re registered for Broker Fair, coming up on June 1 in New York City! Brokerfair.org.
Webinar: Important Industry Updates with Greenspoon Marder & deBanked
April 7, 2026Join us for a joint webinar on April 30th. You can register here.
Just the Facts With LendFax
April 1, 2026More than 76% of small business owners who apply for financing through their system do it from a mobile device. That’s the fax from LendFax, a one-stop shop for business owners (and consumers) to be paired with the most appropriate service provider for their needs. The information they submit through the curated intake process is pushed to their partners via API, and then LendFax continues to communicate with those customers to make sure they complete the process with them.
Nick De Jesus, LendFax’s Chief Marketing Officer, says that the process relies on enterprise-grade infrastructure to make it all work and is the culmination of years of in-house development and an obsessive desire to achieve the most optimal outcomes for all parties in the process.
“I’m working non-stop, 12 hours, 13 hours a day on this, 100% passion, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” De Jesus says of his time spent at LendFax.
That he’s there doing this at all is due to a chance intersection in his life. For example, De Jesus had been on an accelerated track in college and was bound for medical school at an extremely young age. His special area of study as a nineteen-year-old was heterotopic ossification and involved researching bone formation from trauma and soft stem cell tissues. And that was the path he had surrendered himself to until one night, a few acquaintances asked for his input on a tech project involving small business financing, thinking his broad knowledge could be insightful. But what De Jesus learned from them had him hooked immediately, and he dropped everything to be a part of it.
“I finished my cell biology exam and the next Monday I was in [their] office,” De Jesus said.
De Jesus says that they’re aware that LendFax isn’t the only operator of their kind in the space, but that by being lean and running efficiently, partners on their platform can get “enterprise infrastucture without the enterprise pricing.” Depending on the relationship setup, partners can get as little as a merchant’s qualified and completed application or as much as the entire deal with full docs, all managed by LendFax and ported into the partner’s CRM in real time.
De Jesus is a regular at the big trade shows and stressed just how important in-person relationships are in this field, but noted that the merchant side is different, that merchants looking for financing have trended toward solutions that produce the least amount of friction and interaction along the way.
“…things are moving definitely more to the digital landscape where people just want to go online, submit information, without even texting or talking or emailing anybody and get an answer,” De Jesus said. “So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with LendFax, is we’re kind of just trying to bring them the offers based on the answer that they select.”
Concerned About The MCA Automatic Debit Law in Texas? This ACH Company Says There’s a Way
March 25, 2026
There may be no need to overcomplicate Merchant Cash Advance compliance in Texas. A key phrase in the MCA prohibition law that went into effect last year specifies that it’s a prohibition on “establishing a mechanism for automatically debiting a recipient’s account” unless a lot of other requirements are met.
One company looked closely at that piece of the language and came up with a simple solution.
“…our approach is to request the payment at each time and capture the authorization at the time of the transaction,” said John Innes, President of the Texas-based and aptly-named ACH Processing Company. “So instead of capturing an authorization at the beginning and embedding that into the documents where you’re going to do a recurring debit transaction to the merchant’s account, you are sending a request saying, ‘Okay, please authorize this payment.’ And so each payment is individually authorized so you don’t need that security interest [component] anymore.”
No automatic recurring debits. Instead there’s a Request For Payment that requires merchants to manually authorize debits on a debit-by-debit basis whether that be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on whatever the agreed frequency is.
“I think this was maybe the intent of the law,” Innes continued. “It gives the merchant kind of that control over that debit and it fosters communication between the two parties.”
Innes said there’s various ways that this interaction can be conducted to reduce the friction of this process.
Other options proposed across the industry have focused on another piece of the language, that the prohibition is specifically meant for “commercial sales-based financing providers” and the proposed cure for that is to offer a non-sales-based financing product in the state instead. ACH Processing Company’s solution, however, allows an MCA funder to keep its product suite as-is.
“…you don’t have to break all that,” said Innes. “Continue with the same business plan. ”
Since the Texas law went into effect seven months ago, Innes says that numerous funders have still been in a holding pattern trying to figure out how to approach it. It’s their belief that this solution is a simple way to now get Texas turned back on if they’re ready.
