Articles by Sean Murray

See You in Las Vegas

We’ll be in Las Vegas for the inaugural B2B Finance Expo (a deBanked / SBFA collaboration). Tickets are just about sold out so if you haven’t bought one already, check the site to see if registration is still active. It will turn off automatically.

Here’s what you need to know:

Sept 22, Wynn, Las Vegas, 7-10pm: B2B Finance Expo Poker Tournament

• Anyone can attend to watch and network FREE. Cash bar on site.
• Seats to play are limited. Must be done in advance on the registration page. Seats almost sold out. Game is not for cash. $100 entry fee. All entry fees donated to GreenLedger, a new non-profit.
• Winner of the tournament gets a genuine gold B2B engraved championship bracelet.

Sept 23-24, Wynn, Las Vegas: B2B Finance Expo

• See agenda
• LOWER CONVENTION PROMENADE
• Tickets required for entry

Other trade associations with representatives in attendance include the National Private Lenders Association (NPLA) and the Innovative Lending Platform Association (ILPA).

Trade media in attendance will include: deBanked, Coleman Report, and Equipment Finance News.

Please be sure to check out the booths of Kapitus & Rapid Finance (Diamond Sponsors) and Bitty & Lendini (Platinum Sponsors).

They Offered to Reduce My MCA Payments. I Played Along.

It started when I got a cold text that said my merchant cash advances could be reduced by 80%. I didn’t have any advances but was intrigued by the audacity of the offer. REDUCE THEM BY EIGHTY PERCENT!

“Ok,” I thought to myself, “I’ll bite to see where this goes.”

I replied and was assigned a rep via text who introduced himself by name, Mark.

I told Mark I believed his offer to be a scam and sent him a link to an article (that was literally on deBanked) in which someone making similar offers had been arrested by the FBI. I was 100% confident that he would disappear but he was undeterred.

“Those were shady companies,” Mark said, assuring me he had nothing to do with them. I wondered if Mark had caught on to who I was because he seemed eager to convince me he was legit. He told me that I’d still have to pay my advances in full but that he would just get the payments for them reduced. That seemed unusually tame compared to what I’d heard about these type of encounters with “debt relief” companies but Mark kept talking.

By signing up with them I’d be assigned a lawyer who would have “leverage” over my MCA provider due to them likely being in default on their own contract. He explained that they were always in breach for failing to reduce the daily payments (a likely reference to reconciliation clauses). Mark’s fee for helping me take advantage of this, the cost of which was not mentioned, would be included in my new regular payments they’d negotiate for me.

Just as I was beginning to realize that I’d be on the hook for paying them for their service on top of apparently still paying my advances, the messages over texts stopped, and he tried to only continue the conversation by phone, which I avoided.

From there robocalls hit my phone 4-5x per day as they attempted to reel me back in until they eventually tried texts again. When they did the offer had changed from them being able to reduce my payments by 80% to only 50%. Weird. Nevertheless, I wanted to get back to where we had left off, finding out the cost of this service, of which I now learned included legal representation by an attorney and a separate case manager. It sounded like it would be very expensive for me and I let him know my concerns. If Mark had known who he was actually speaking to before, the attempt to play it off now had been forgotten.

“Our program is not designed to cost you any additional money,” Mark said. “We go after unpaid fees and interest. You will never have to pay us out of pocket.”

And so that was the pitch, wordplay designed to make it appear the service was free and I would never have to pay them.

The website they referred me to included obviously fake testimonials with stock photos. They were “Trusted”, “Approved” and had been seen on various TV networks. It promises to stop withdrawals from funding companies and that their “in-house licensed attorneys” based in Florida and New York will take care of everything. The 7 month old website, which lists no business address, also claims the team has a decade of experience while the legal entity itself does not appear to exist, at least not in all the states I checked.

As I attempted to track down anything about this company I could find, a breakthrough led me to an address in Miami, which as fate would have it was home to another debt relief company targeting businesses with merchant cash advances. The website is similar. They are “Trusted”, “Approved” and seen on TV. They can also improve cash flow by up to 80%. What a coincidence. The owner of this one also has a colorful background with the law. Although I was not able to fully confirm that this company is the alter-ego of the other, I learn that this second company was just sued in April for allegedly absconding with a merchant’s funds it claimed was being used to pay off MCAs. In another instance the debt relief company is suing a merchant for the recovery of over $400,000, the sum of which it claims was its fee for trying to reduce a merchant’s MCA payments. It would seem that such work is not so free after all.

As my phone continues to ring and ring with offers to reduce my MCA payments, I decide to disengage.

“Sean, how many loans do you have?” Mark resumes. “Sean we will reduce your payments by at least 50%, let’s discuss.”

I ignore him. When he tries me again, he tells me he can reduce the payments by 80%. Then again later by 50%. He never tells me why it changes. His last message more than several months later is a return to the same script.

“Sean, Do you have MCAs hurting your cash flow?”

I’m pretty sure that he can’t be trusted. If your sales drop, you should call your funding company to discuss and stay away from shady pitches like this.

Media and Trade Associations With Representation at B2B Finance Expo

Coming to B2B Finance Expo on September 23-24 in Las Vegas? Here are some of the news publishers and trade associations that will have representatives there! (SEE AGENDA HERE)

Small Business Finance Association

National Private Lenders Association

Innovative Lending Platform Association

Coleman Report

Equipment Finance News

deBanked

Registration is still open at: b2bfinexpo.com

WTF, From Credit Card Processing to Funding Deals

“My first name is William, my son’s name is Torre and he’s my partner, and our last name is Failla, so WTF was the name of the acronym that we came up with.”

WTF Merchant Services, a real name and double entendre that makes it instantly unforgettable to any client that hears it, has an unusual story. Its CEO Will Failla is a veteran professional poker player that has won more than $6.6 million from tournaments over the course of his career according to a site that tracks players. It’s through friends he made at the card tables that he began to learn about a unique business that some of them were involved in, funding merchants based on their credit card processing sales. After a lot of encouragement and advice over the years, Failla was intrigued enough to look into doing it himself.

“I approached my son who was a business major and a finance major out of Hofstra and I said to him, ‘you’re graduating any day now so why don’t we do some diligence, look into this business and see what you think.'”

His son, Torre, who is now the company’s CFO, signaled his approval so long as they paced themselves and mastered the most fundamental component of it first, the credit card processing side of the business. Thus 2021 kickstarted WTF Merchant Services as a shop on Long Island that focused entirely on boarding merchant accounts. They started by approaching their friends, family, and contacts and then expanded it to where they had a referral incentive program and continued to acquire more and more accounts.

The most attractive part of the business to them is the residual revenue component to it. “That’s the greatest. That’s what made us get into it because now we get paid every month. As long as you keep that customer, you get paid every month,” Failla explained.

And keeping those clients means providing great customer service, which he said they’ve placed a strong emphasis on. They’ve also gotten a firsthand look at the financial trends of the various businesses they’ve worked with, something they figured would come in handy for when they were ready to take the next step.

“We didn’t do an MCA deal until the beginning of this year,” Failla said. “We really wanted to learn the business in and out, and then we were just an ISO.”

The evolution from credit card processing to funding is straight out of the old MCA playbook of the mid-2000s, but with a notable difference here, they haven’t abandoned their roots. Unlike many modern funding ISOs who focus entirely on commissions paid out on funding, WTF is requiring their funding clients to switch their merchant accounts to them, assuming it’s a business that processes cards. And if they can do the funding deal on a split of the processing, all the better.

“When you do the split, it’s so much easier because you take, let’s say 15 or 20% or whatever the merchant can handle at the time,” Failla said. “It’s just so much better of a direction to get paid because it doesn’t hit their bank, it doesn’t hurt them as much. When they see it coming out daily like that, it’s a little different. When it comes out of the credit cards it’s just early and it helps a lot. Mindset changes.”

The company’s traditional approach has already attracted the attention of some of their peers in the industry who like the idea of residual income but don’t have the time or the patience to worry about merchant accouts.

“We have different MCA offices that we actually do this with already,” Failla said. “We do all their credit card processing. We handle all the back-end. We handle all the front-end. All they do is give us the referral and they become what we call a referral partner, and they get paid every single month as long as we keep the account.”

Will was sure to give credit to those that have helped shorten his learning curve along the way. He has since discovered that others in the poker scene are also in the same business as he and it’s created a valuable community. WTF even has a poker table in its office as a sort of tribute to his background which he has not actually retired from. The Hendon Mob poker tracker states that Will recently placed 259th out of 10,112 players in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas earlier this month. Meanwhile, the company name itself, a bold strategy, seems to be working out so far.

“If you look under our logo, it says our names right underneath it. William, Torre Failla, and listen there’s going to be some pushback, but the amount of pushback we’ve had is so minimal that I think it’s worth it, and we’re going to stick with it as long as we can.”