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
Idea Financial Closed on Their Inaugural $100M Asset-Backed Securitization
September 30, 2026
Idea Financial just closed its inaugural $100 million securitization. The technology-enabled lender offers term loans and lines of credit to small businesses.
“…it’s a deeply personal moment because reaching this milestone for our company, it’s something that we aspired towards since we started the company,” said Larry Bassuk, co-founder and president of Idea Financial, to deBanked. “To get to this point where we have access to the securitization markets, it means that we’ve taken the company to the next level.”
Founded in 2017, Idea Financial has frequently been featured by deBanked for its accomplishments. A decade ago, asset-backed securitizations in this market were still relatively new. Today, they have become more common, though they remain the domain of the market’s most sophisticated, top-performing lenders. Idea now joins that group.
In the two years leading up to the transaction, the company spoke with numerous institutions about the asset class. “I would say that the majority of them are familiar with the space at this point,” said Idea Financial CFO Santiago Rubio.
Idea did more than $300 million in originations in 2025 and has done more than $1.5 billion since inception. The securitization comprises three classes of notes, with the senior Class A notes rated A+ by KBRA. The transaction includes a three-year revolving period, providing committed, long-term funding to support continued growth.
KeyBanc Capital Markets, led by Andrew Yuder, served as sole placement agent, and the notes were placed privately with institutional investors. Idea credits Yuder with helping bring the transaction together.
“He has been working with us for in excess of two years on this, very patiently,” said Justin Leto, co-founder and CEO of Idea. “We were taking our time to make sure that it was the right moment for us, that the rates were in the position that they needed to be, that the spreads were where they needed to be, and he was with us the entire way. That type of partnership is extremely important to us.”
That emphasis on long-term relationships also shapes the company’s approach to its small business customers.
“[Our customers] have an ongoing relationship with us,” said Bassuk. “We still have customers that we work with who we lent money to the first year of our operations. So our retention rates, the satisfaction of our customers, it is by virtue of the relationship that we form with them, the relationships that they have with individuals who work here at the company, who know them, know their businesses.”
With the securitization complete, Idea now has the capacity to do more.
“Now we have a total of three warehouse facilities plus this ABS issuance,” said Rubio. “They’re all expandable. Like really sky’s the limit when it comes to our core product.”
“There’s no guarantee when you start a company like this that you’ll ever even get here,” said Bassuk. “And for us to get here at this very moment, we’ve celebrated as a moment that Idea Financial is now going into a whole other realm of possibilities.”
“For us, it really just shows that Idea Financial now is a true competitor in this market,” said Leto. “And I think it’s really just the beginning of many other milestones that we will achieve.”
An AI Agent Bought a Ticket to B2B Finance Expo
September 28, 2026Well…uh… it happened. An AI agent bought a ticket all by itself to the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas next month in October. The agent was Meta’s Muse. And the prompt was:
“can u buy me a broker ticket to b2b finance expo in vegas in october and just do all the work? i don’t want to deal with anything. plz do it all.”
And then it did it all. All I had to do was click “allow” for my card to be charged. I never even gave it my card info. Whatttt?
Muse hardly knows me. I installed the app on my phone this morning and it asked for my name. I told it the company I work for and my job title in a chat box just like one would converse with any LLM. That was about it. I was pondering a story about agentic commerce and wanted to see how such commerce might work in the future and learned that the future was already happening right this moment. The B2B Finance Expo website had not been programmed to handle AI agents, for example, but that didn’t matter. The agent didn’t care. It went through the whole process on its own without me and checked out. I was floored.
I never went to the event website myself or even looked at it during the process. Instead Muse told me it was buying a Broker ticket for B2B, the price it was paying, and the registrant information it had filled out on its own. It told me that a prompt would appear momentarily to one-tap the purchase. Apparently, I’m signed up already for a service called Link by Stripe, which had all my card info stored so I never had to even give it card info. Ok then…. My only involvement after my prompt was the tap to approve the charge. One tap and that was it, I got an email confirmation that I was attending the conference at the Cosmopolitan on October 20 – 21.
In the real world, attendees might want to make changes after the fact, like changing the name the ticket is under, and that’s often a point of friction. Not here. I told Muse I wanted to change my last name on the ticket from Murray to deBroker and it just figured out how to do it and did it. Uhhh…thanks Muse.
Muse isn’t like other LLMs. Each user is assigned its own Virtual Machine so that Muse pretty much remembers everything from your history.
“Anyone can use it out of the box, no technical experience required,” Meta says of it. “It can handle tasks, like sending an email or booking travel, and it can take on big audacious goals. For tasks that take more time, Muse keeps working after people close the app, and comes back when something changes or when it needs approval, like before it sends an email or makes a purchase.”
In the earlier years of LLMs, there was a race for fintechs to build their own AIs that consumers and borrowers would interact with. Now the balance is shifting to the other side. Instead of people interacting with hundreds of AI chat bots around the web, they may only need to interact with a single one that knows everything about them, has the power to act on their behalf, and is able to navigate any online scenario, even one its never encountered before. Case in point, you could be using Muse to respond to emails, order your groceries, and to even change the name on your ticket to B2B Finance Expo without ever knowing who you were supposed to contact about changing it. The era of agentic commerce is now.
A Journey Through Collections With Erica Gilerman
September 8, 2026“Within two weeks, I closed my first deal. I just clicked in the industry,” said Erica Gilerman.
Gilerman wasn’t talking about funding a deal. She was talking about collecting on one.
“Closing the deal on our end means that we have a signed, sealed, and delivered stipulation, one that our client is happy with, and one that truly makes sense financially for the merchant as well,” she said.
Conventional wisdom in the small business finance industry has long held that anyone can put money out the door; getting it back is the hard part. Gilerman currently serves as Chief Legal Officer of that hard part, working for Triton Recovery Group in South Florida.
Talk to anyone at Triton and they’ll probably tell you that successful collection begins during the underwriting process, before a deal is ever funded in the first place. In a taped interview deBanked conducted with Triton CEO Leo Vargas in 2024, he said, “The underwriting process to me is the most important piece of getting a deal done in the industry.” Vargas offered examples, saying that it’s critical to know from the outset what merchants plan to use the funds for and that the terms of any deal should be set in accordance with a merchant’s anticipated receivables, not deposits.
Today, Triton has 75 employees. But when Gilerman was being recruited to work there in 2021, the company had only six. Vargas was looking to add an attorney to his then-fledgling traditional commercial collections firm, which was focused entirely on the merchant cash advance industry, and he posted an ad in the New York City market.
“I will never forget… it was very interesting to me because it was in all caps and it said ‘COLLECTIONS ATTORNEY, NEW YORK,'” said Gilerman.
She answered the ad, met Vargas in New York, and received an offer. There was just one catch: She had to spend a month training at Triton’s Miami office to learn its particular niche of collections. That required a significant sacrifice, time away from her family, but she decided to take a chance and then determine whether the job was right for her. She started in July 2021 as the firm’s General Counsel.
“Within two weeks, I closed my first deal. I just clicked in the industry,” she said. “Between my accounting background—I understand how the factor rates work, I understand how businesses operate, I take a very unique approach to everything in the sense that I will collect in a way where I put myself in the debtor’s shoes.”
Gilerman, the daughter of immigrants, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and she attended Madison High School in Brooklyn. She was accepted into the school’s law program, which had been created by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg, herself a Madison graduate, had created the curriculum.
“My love for law really kind of came to play there, and I learned a lot from that program,” Gilerman said, “and that’s why I’m very proud to say I’m a New York City public school graduate, and that’s how I fell into law.”
Gilerman faced a personal family tragedy as she began college at Pace University, around the same time Lehman Brothers collapsed. Pace’s campus in Downtown Manhattan had a front-row seat to the turmoil unfolding across the financial system.
“I will never forget that in that moment I realized I need to find a career that will not keep me into some sort of niche, because 25 years from now I could be one of those people that was carrying boxes,” Gilerman said, “and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and it was a very eerie dynamic being on Wall Street at the time.”
Gilerman initially intended to pursue a career in public accounting as a result but ultimately swerved back toward law. After becoming an attorney, she worked in employment litigation before moving on to collecting medical debt for hospitals in New Jersey.
“You have to have a specific type of personality to be in collections, especially as a woman,” she said. “I would candidly say I would never expect myself to be in collections. That was not my goal in law school, but I would not change it for the world now. This is exactly the niche industry I need to be in.”
Part of that certainty came from finding the right person to work with.
“I will say that I learned most of the MCA space, especially on the front end side, from Leo. He taught me the collections mindset for commercial collections, and we just clicked in a way that it was just a great synergy from the beginning.”
Triton was still quite small at the time. When Gilerman visited the company’s original Miami office, they had to set her up in the break room. By the end of 2021, however, the COVID lockdowns were finally beginning to dissipate nationwide, and the company hit the gas pedal by sponsoring a conference that December in New York: Broker Fair.
“We were able to expand and start hiring more after the very first deBanked [conference] that I attended, which was December of 2021,” Gilerman said.
By then, her mind was fully made up. She and her family moved to Miami two weeks after the conference. Five years and nearly 70 additional employees later, spread across two states (Florida and Texas), she has since become the company’s Chief Legal Officer.
In those early days, Gilerman was still trying to wrap her mind around the financial product Triton’s clients worked with. She said she came to really understand “that without the MCA industry, there is no such thing as a mom and pop shop anywhere in this country and it really changed my perspective of what alternative finance as a whole is.”
Triton’s collection practice handles MCA, commercial loans, and equipment financing on a contingency basis. Ask the team a question about underwriting and they’ll readily offer an opinion. They’re only interested in legally enforceable paper.
The latest frontier in collections includes dealing with merchants who have turned to LLMs to fire off letters, emails, and demands, often containing incorrect information or citations to the wrong statutes. It has become commonplace to see merchants effectively act as their own attorneys with the help of AI, or even claim that AI is representing them.
“I see a lot from ChatGPT and Claude there, and the problem is that they continue to just say the same thing over and over,” she said. “You could tell by the tone because no one’s actually telling them to make it sound like themselves.”
Even on phone calls, merchants may attempt to bring AI agents onto the line with them.
On the flip side, collectors can use AI too. In a recent social media post, Triton CEO Leo Vargas said, “The best agencies will use AI to eliminate repetitive tasks, improve compliance, analyze consumer behavior, optimize account placement and provide collectors with better insights before they ever pick up the phone. Collections has always been about people. AI simply gives those people better tools to succeed.”
Vargas also referenced Gilerman in an email to deBanked. “Five years ago, [Gilerman] took a chance on Triton and joined us during an important stage of our growth,” he said. “Since then, she has grown alongside the company and worked her way to becoming our Chief Legal Officer and a key member of our executive leadership team.”
“Collections, especially the MCA space, this is us playing chess,” Gilerman asserted. “And for us, a checkmate is getting that payment through the door, making our client happy, allowing our client to then redeploy those funds.”
How Mike Rose and Fidelity Funding Group Charged Like a Rhino
August 31, 2026
“We teach our guys to be rhinos: wake up every day, brush your horns, charge after what your heart desires, and don’t take no for an answer,” said Mike Rose, CEO of Fidelity Funding Group, a revenue-based financing brokerage.
This past July, Fidelity funded $24 million. The achievement was announced on Instagram with a splashy graphic declaring a new record and crediting his team, the Rhino Army. Scroll through Rose’s page and you’ll see that the previous record had been set in June—and the record before that in May. The new records just keep coming.
“I have like a 40-page success guide that I give every employee when they start here,” Rose said. “The first seven pages don’t talk about cash advances. It doesn’t mention it. It’s the rhino mentality: how a rhino eats, how a rhino breathes, how a rhino talks, how a rhino conducts themselves, and that’s the culture we instill here in everybody.”
Rose attributes his obsession with rhinos to Rhinoceros Success, a 1980 book by Scott Alexander that argues the key to success is developing a rhinoceros mindset. Rose has become a true believer in the philosophy, and it has helped him grow and manage a sprawling brokerage empire spread across eight office locations.
“I spend about 80% of my time in the Wall, New Jersey office, but I bounce around to all of the locations,” Rose said. “I go down to Florida once every couple of months, I spend time in St. Pete, I spend time in the Plantation office, the three offices that are in Jersey, and the two that are in New York City: Brooklyn and Staten Island, I go to about once every two weeks.”
The system works for him, and there is demand to open even more locations, but Rose doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself.
“I’m capping my growth because I have to control it and make sure that I give the guys the infrastructure and time they need with what I’m building,” Rose said.
Part of maintaining that control means delegating operational responsibility to a manager in each office, with those managers checking in with him every day. Each office specializes in traditional outbound sales, a job spent almost entirely on the phone. It’s a model Rose knows well. In a former life, he owned several AT&T authorized retail stores, and before that, he was cold-calling to sell phone plans when he was just 18 or 19 years old.
“AT&T wanted to go corporate, right? And they started getting rid of a lot of the authorized retailers, so they changed the commission structures,” Rose said.
That shift prompted Rose to explore other options in 2017, when he was introduced to the concept of merchant cash advance.
Rose ended up working at Universal Merchant Funding, where he learned the nuts and bolts of the business from the company’s CEO, Michael Genovese. He started in July 2017, got his feet wet by funding a few deals, and soon became so close with Genovese that Genovese and his wife attended Rose’s wedding that November.
“I would spend the night sitting in his back office there on Buel Avenue, talking with him about the business, just picking his brain, asking him questions,” Rose said. “and annoying him sometimes because I wanted to learn so much about it because I wanted to be good at what I do.”
Meanwhile, Rose, who rarely missed a day of work, had to leave the office on the afternoon of January 24, 2018, after snacking on a co-worker’s almonds and suffering a severe allergic reaction.
“I called Mike at like 6 o’clock, and he’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll see you tomorrow,'” Rose said.
An hour later, Michael Genovese and Carl Clark, a manager at the office, were killed in a double murder that sent shockwaves through Staten Island and the industry in which Rose worked. The perpetrator, who was later convicted, was a former employee and known ex-con whom Genovese had given a chance in an effort to help him turn his life around. He is now serving 30 years to life in prison.
While grieving the loss, Rose explored his options and eventually went to work for another Staten Island-based brokerage. There, he and a partner, Phil, had the opportunity to build an operation of their own out of the basement of a building.
“I think we funded $150,000 our first month, and we thought we were rock stars,” Rose said.
During that experience, he learned how every part of the brokerage business worked, including hiring, training, signing up with funders, submitting deals, cold calling, closing deals, and more.
“I’ve done every role that you could imagine for a broker shop,” Rose said.
The company grew, new locations opened, and financial success followed. Then that company also suffered a personal tragedy, and the situation changed.
“We had 30 people all looking to me and Phil for answers,” Rose said.
So Rose and his partner launched Fidelity Funding Group at the end of 2021. The team went with them.
They were very intentional about the name they chose.
“The definition of fidelity is a group of people or persons all supporting one cause and loyal to one cause,” he explained.
Starting over again, still in Staten Island, Rose and the crew charged forward.
“And we just started funding, and we built up to $2 million a month to $4 million a month,” he shared.
Eventually, that range jumped to $5 million to $7 million a month. As the company continued hiring—and as it became increasingly apparent that many employees were enduring long commutes to Staten Island—Fidelity opened another office in New Jersey.
Their success attracted attention, and soon much smaller brokerages began reaching out about coming under Fidelity’s umbrella, recognizing the strength that can come with greater scale.
“When you start in this industry, the bigger companies don’t take you seriously…you have to be in business for two years at least to get signed up with these companies,” Rose explained. “And then if you don’t fund volume with them, they cut you off because it’s a waste of their time, energy, and resources.”
An important component of Fidelity’s process is that its brokers conduct their own merchant interviews before the full paperwork is submitted to any funders.
“I want to build a relationship with them. I want to see that they’re not just another name and number on a piece of paper, I’m not shot-gunning it to 10 places and praying for the best,” Rose said. “I also want to know what they’re doing with the money.”
Even in 2026, brokers across the industry continue to tell deBanked that personal human involvement remains a critical element of succeeding in the business. Rose explained the persistence of that phenomenon in the age of AI this way:
“…a lot of business owners want to be able to talk about their business and tell you what they’re doing. Their business is their baby. The same way Fidelity is my baby, and I will talk to anybody who will listen about it. I’ll talk to the guy at the car wash about my business. These business owners do the same thing. They spend more time with the business than they do with the family. They need somebody to talk to.”
These days, after reaching $24 million in funding in a single month, Rose remains heavily involved in the hiring and training process. During this interview, he sat beneath a large painting of a boxing rhinoceros poised in a fighting stance. Its belt reads “Born to Win.”
“There’s two types of animals in the world,” Rose said, referring to his favorite book’s philosophy. “There’s cows, which are lazy animals that eat the grass at their feet and take what the world gives them. That’s 99% of the world, and there’s nothing wrong with that… we teach our guys to be rhinos.”
An SMB Financing Brokerage Experiences Strong Growth in a Changing Digital Marketing Era
August 25, 2026
“You will really have trouble in the long term growing out an SMB financing brokerage if you don’t have a robust digital marketing strategy in place.” That’s what Zack Fiddle, co-founder and CEO of CapFront, told deBanked in early 2023, before the AI revolution swept across the internet. The company has kept up so well, in fact, that it recorded a three-year growth rate of 124%, landing it at No. 2,607 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2026.
“This year we’ve made a big push on strategic partnerships and affiliates for lead acquisition,” Fiddle told deBanked just this month. “If you do some quick Google searches or LLM searches for top business loans and top financing providers, you’ll find us on a lot of those rate comparison chart lists.”
Fiddle said that in previous years, CapFront hadn’t really delved into that style of marketing. More recently, however, the company has gotten into a rhythm of leaning on key relationships with a broader reach than CapFront has on its own—and has been leveraging them with considerable success.
“Obviously AI has come in, it’s really changed the landscape for digital marketing, especially in the SEO space,” he said.
Fiddle is not alone in that observation. Some of the larger online customer aggregators in finance, including publicly traded companies, have reported similar trends over the last 18 months, that traditional online search engines are not as dependable as they used to be.
“Diversification is always really important,” Fiddle said. “We have a number of different strategies beyond affiliate and partnership lead acquisition to try to find the most high quality and diverse leads, and that’s been a main focus for us this year.”
Along the way, they’re using every new technology available.
“Our Claude Cowork bill has definitely increased exponentially over the past few months, but I’ll just say this, I think that it’s allowed us to move significantly faster than we had in prior years,” he said.
For example, a major project initially expected to be completed by the end of the year accelerated to the point that it is now nearly finished.
“Things, are just moving a lot faster and if you have the right people and allocation of resources at your disposal, you can make things happen pretty quickly,” he said.
While there are numerous ways that “AI” is doing “cool and interesting” things at the company, Fiddle volunteered one of the more exotic use cases CapFront has begun rolling out.
“For the sales enablement’s part of it, we’re utilizing our VP of Sales Training’s mind as [a] sales coach.”
It is what it sounds like. They’ve essentially encapsulated a working replica of an employee’s mind into an AI chatbot that anyone at the company can interact with.
“I ran all sorts of tests on this myself and it’s just really cool to see, like I feel like I’m talking to this guy,” Fiddle asserted, as if such capabilities are simply to be expected these days.
The AI VP bot was given access to hundreds of thousands of the company’s sales call transcripts, with the real VP’s feedback and advice on those calls modeled into it. That’s the most basic way to describe it but it’s actually considerably more built out and complex.
“I’m able to do some mental exercises now and spit out some ideas that maybe a couple years ago I had in the back of my mind but I just knew they weren’t really in reach with what we had at our disposal,” Fiddle said. “But now it’s starting to get to the point where I feel like if I can imagine it, I could build it.”
For all the fanfare around technology, Fiddle acknowledges that one thing hasn’t changed: a business owner’s dependence on human interaction to help navigate financing options. CapFront can do everything in its power to make the process as efficient and user-friendly as possible, but there is still a personal side to it.
“You still want to be able to give them access to a human at the end of the day, because human relationships are what drive customer relationships, not self-servicing. I guess for some borrowers, maybe they like that, but I think in my experience, even this year in 2026, the majority of borrowers want to speak to a human.”
From the New Kids on the Block to #668 in the Country
August 21, 2026
“I work 100 hours a week. I’ve been doing that for four years and eight months, and my top sales guys work anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week,” said Frankie DiAntonio, CEO of Lexington Capital Holdings, a small business finance brokerage headquarterd in Port Jefferson Station, Long Island.
It’s a grind that he literally dedicates seven days a week to.
“Every day. I do not miss a day. Even holidays, Christmas. I’m still here. I go see my family, but I make sure that I wake up earlier those days. I’ll be here from like five, six a.m. to like whenever…” he added.
DiAntonio recently turned 27 years old, and he calls the sacrifice—one of total dedication to success—an investment. To his credit, he already has something to show for the effort. His company just placed No. 668 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list after recording a whopping three-year growth rate of 514%. He says he ended up being the second-youngest CEO to make the list.
The earliest mention of DiAntonio on deBanked was recorded in April of 2022, when his company had only been in business for three months and he was still almost completely new to the industry. In a quote he supplied at the time, he called Lexington Capital “the new kids on the block.” Now, with close to a hundred employees and a reputation for being one of the most in-demand brokerage partners in the business, the company can point to its system as a model that yields results.
“There’s like a Lexington way around here, and if you don’t kind of buy into what we’re doing around here, it’s kind of hard for you to succeed,” said DiAntonio. Most of the Lexonites who work there and have bought into the system are 20-somethings like DiAntonio. Part of that means they need to put in the effort to become great at a rapid pace, especially when much of their competition may have more than a decade’s head start in experience.
“The only way to shorten the gap of getting really good at sales very quickly is to work as many hours as humanly possible on your craft,” said DiAntonio. And so those around him go all-in and embrace a lifestyle that’s not always understood by their peers. Outsiders may see sales, long hours, and an industry that moves at lightning speed and subtly preach that they should prepare a backup plan if it doesn’t work out. DiAntonio says there is no backup plan. The plan is Lexington.
“As an entrepreneur, I don’t think that you can have a backup plan because I’ve noticed in life, and not even just my life, but others, that if you don’t have two feet in to do something, you won’t be successful,” said DiAntonio on this subject. “If you always have in the back of your mind that this might not work out, and have an exit plan, an exit strategy, I’ve seen that those people never really seem to work out.”
Less than a year ago, deBanked was invited to cover the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the company’s new 16,000-square-foot office, where some of the old hands who had been with DiAntonio from the beginning, along with new recruits, expressed an unbridled optimism about the work culture there. DiAntonio credited a number of his very first hires as integral to everything that has happened since inception.
“Those first few hires that you have are so key for the future trajectory of your company because they’re going to set the tone and the foundation and the culture for the rest of the company, like Corey [Digi], Ryan [Showe], and my sister [Nicollete DiAntonio] care so much that it makes everyone else care,” he said.
It’s worth mentioning that Corey was one of six finalists in deBanked’s Broker Battle in 2024, and Ryan won the entire competition in 2025.
But what’s the secret sauce to funding deals beyond long hours and company culture? When it comes to customer acquisition, they have “a good crossbreed of everything.”
“…cold outreach still works, paid ads still work, cold emailing still works,” he says, while adding that they spend about 20% of their profits trying out different things, including technological enhancements. Some of those efforts involve AI and are designed to move deals from their intake systems to funding with the appropriate partner in the shortest amount of time possible. When merchants find them through social media specifically, they tend to find them on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, in that order. But DiAntonio said Google still dominates the online channel for business owners seeking capital. It helps that when prospective customers find Lexington there, they also see a perfect 5-star rating aggregated from more than 1,100 reviews.
As for the plan from here, DiAntonio said the next milestone they hope to break is $100 million in annual revenue, and to eventually conduct an IPO within five years.
“We got a lot of eyes on us,” DiAntonio said. “There’s a lot of people who want to invest in Lexington at this moment in time.”
Customer Experience, Personalized Service Makes Small Business Finance Brokerage One of the Fastest Growing in the Nation
August 17, 2026
“I would say 90% of all of our interactions we send out a Zoom link, and we do a video call,” said Edward DeAngelis, CEO of QualiFi, “We call it our discovery call. It’s typically a 30 minute, very in depth discovery call with every one of our clients.”
In an era when hyper-growth has become increasingly dependent on automation and AI, QualiFi is finding opportunity by honing in on the human experience. That approach has helped the company generate 658% growth over the past three years and become the ninth-fastest-growing company in Pennsylvania. The Inc. 5000 also ranked QualiFi as the 528th fastest-growing company nationally and second overall among companies that would describe themselves as small business finance brokerages.
QualiFi invests heavily in technology as well, but uses it to make its processes better and more efficient rather than replace crucial elements such as customer service.
“Sometimes if you’re just on a phone call and the business owner’s busy, they got you in one ear and three employees in the other ear, and they might not be paying attention on some of our discovery calls,” DeAngelis said. “We have the CEO on the [Zoom] call. We have their CFO. They might have one of their operations managers. Sometimes we have Zoom calls with three or four members from the business owner’s company. So we feel like it’s much more personable.”
DeAngelis said the objective of the call is to understand clients’ needs and then set a path to meet them, whether immediately or further down the line. From there, the company uses whatever method of communication gets the job done.
“We use all forms of communication after we have a relationship built, it could be a quick text if we just need something, an email, a phone call, there’s definitely several phone calls that happen throughout,” DeAngelis said.
Suffice it to say, Zoom alone has not led to QualiFi’s success. This past June, DeAngelis was on the big stage at Broker Fair, where he presented to hundreds of brokers in New York City about his company’s history and its journey toward 10xing a broker shop. There, he attributed the company’s success to ingredients including company culture, the client experience, proper hiring, onboarding, and training, among other things.
In a clip that circulated across social media from his presentation, DeAngelis said of culture, “It’s not about posters and ping pong tables.”
“Your team’s on the front lines. And if you really take care of your team, your team’s taking care of your clients, and it kind of snowballs if they feel good about their company, they feel good about their leaders, they’re going to feel good about their products and their services that they’re offering,” he told deBanked. “It just trickles down.”
DeAngelis largely credited his team for QualiFi’s Inc. 5000 placement as well. “I have to pass all the credit back to our team that’s in the trenches every day, our management team, our sales reps, our processing team,” he said.
About 60-65% of QualiFi clients’ first transactions are lines of credit. The company offers unsecured and secured financing, term loans, SBA loans, MCAs, and more.
DeAngelis and his business partner, Jason Maury, set out from the beginning to build a $100 million company. While they have not reached that milestone yet, QualiFi has already experienced tremendous growth.
“We’re going to continue every day, ‘1% better every day,’ that’s our motto,” DeAngelis said, “and we’re just going to try to do good in the world and continue to make everything a better place at QualiFi.”
How Scammers Could Defeat Your Time-In-Business Underwriting Requirements
August 5, 2026
The TIB checked out on the application and with the Secretary of State (SOS). The company had been in business for almost exactly five years—comfortably beyond the minimum underwriting guidelines. But its online footprint looked much weaker, almost as if the business had opened yesterday. Maybe it had. Or maybe the business did not actually exist at all, and the validated corporate records were simply part of a sophisticated fraud designed to slip past the gatekeepers.
But if something were really wrong, how could one explain the SOS-verified TIB?
“Ever heard of a Shelf Company?”
That was a question posed by Jamie Parker, CRO and co-founder of Heron Data.
A shelf company, or shelf corporation, is a legal entity that is formed, registered, and then placed “on the shelf” to age. At some point in the future, the entity may be sold, potentially allowing the buyer’s company to appear older than it actually is. Online forums such as Reddit, BiggerPockets, and CreditBoards contain years of discussion on the topic, including strategies, success stories, and failures.
According to Parker, there is a perception online that an older entity can provide a shortcut to obtaining business credit that a party might not otherwise qualify for. Anyone who follows the rabbit hole of shelf-company discussions will inevitably find websites that sell them.
Parker found himself on one such site. It listed the names of entities available for purchase along with their respective ages, and he became curious about what he could do with the information.
“I looked at that and so I went through all the archives, the Wayback Machine, I looked at all of the ones that had been sold in the last, like, five years,” Parker said.
He ran a test, searching Wayback Machine to determine which entities had been sold and whether any had later surfaced in the State courts as a defendant in a lawsuit with an MCA funder. He quickly found one: a business using a shelf entity that had received funding, defaulted, and was being publicly sued for breach of contract by three different funders.
“Time in Business, pretty much everyone has some policies,” Parker said. “The source of truth for Time in Business is considered to be the Secretary of State.”
Parker said that information alone may not be enough, given how freely advice about circumventing company-age requirements is proliferating online. It can be important to go one step further.
“So in the Secretary of State it will give you some information like when the business was formed, when control changed,” Parker said. “If whatever owner changed or the offices changed three months ago, that’s a flag. But you really have to get into the weeds for that.”
That is particularly true when underwriting teams perform every review manually. Parker noted that Heron’s technology can already retrieve that pertinent information as part of its system, however.
“…maybe you compare your Time-In-Business check with when the office has changed, and if the office has changed less than a year ago, that you’re probably not going to auto-decline, but you are going to want to just make sure that there hasn’t been like a significant change in control of the business,” he said.
Shelf companies are not a new phenomenon. In Parker’s view, however, the pace of underwriting in the small-business finance industry is rapidly approaching the speed of consumer lending. As automation begins to replace certain manual processes, seemingly minor tricks employed by applicants could derail the entire model.
For example, the buyer of a shelf corporation could use it to open a bank account and season that account with circular deposits and withdrawals over several months, creating the appearance of legitimate sales and expenses. In that scenario, there is a real legal entity with real bank statements, resulting in a more sophisticated form of fraud.
“You’re making faster and faster offers, you have less time for humans to look at stuff. This is the kind of thing that you’re going to get caught by,” Parker said.
In a social media post about the topic, Parker said, “Compare the transactions with the industry – if it’s a restaurant with only ATM deposits and checks, it merits further investigation. If you see lots of card deposits, that’s more likely to be safe. Look for signs of business activity – Facebook, Yelp, SAFER, whatever you would expect given the industry.”
Parker said Heron can automate those checks as well.
When it comes to company age, most scammers already understand that a corporation that does not exist—or one that was formed the night before—is unlikely to make it past the starting line.
“[Criminals] know funders care about Time In Business, they know funders care about revenue quality or whatever, and gaming that system,” Parker said. “So… you’ve got to be more proactive if you want to kind of keep up, because automation opens the door to more of this fraud.”
