Sean Murray: Datamerch.com is a database of essentially the
deals that have gone bad. These are small business finance
deals, could be an MCA, could be a business loan, one or the
other and what people do is that, if you're a member, you
can submit deals that defaulted. Typically, if they breached the
contract or committed fraud, I don't think it's for deals that
just naturally, you know, like, didn't perform. But if there was
some type of, you know, breach of the agreement, or some type
of fraud or something like that, you can actually submit that
that data to Datamerch.com if you're a member of it, and the
benefit of that, is that other members are doing the same
thing. Yeah. And that, before you fund any deal, you can type
in some information, and it will tell you if anything bad
happened with another member. Yeah. And DataMerch has now
amassed 50,000 records in their in their database. Yeah.
Johny Fernandez: That's a lot. It's cool. And it's also good to
know, because if, you know, just generally doing business, with
people in the industry, people in business, etc, you sometimes
you don't know, you know, you have to do your due diligence to
really know who you're really doing business with. So
sometimes Google doesn't give you the exact, you know,
information that you need the google.com. And, you know, I
think a website like this is definitely something useful,
cause it's definitely, you know, it'll give you insight that
maybe not everyone else has, and things that you can't always
find online.
Sean Murray: Yeah, yeah, I think there are pros and cons to
certain products. And one of the cons, technically, for funders
in the small business finance industry is that deals that
don't perform or defaulted, go bad, or breach or fraud or
whatever, they don't necessarily get reported to a credit bureau.
So if you're checking someone's credit, you're like, oh, they
have good credit. But you might not have known that they
defrauded a competitor, like there's nowhere to there was
nowhere to search for that prior. So you're kind of acting
on some kind of leap of faith, by double checking all the
information that you have, without being able to without
being able to know how they performed with somebody else.
When you're dealing with like consumer credit, you can check
the credit report and say, you know, they're six months
delinquent on their Bank of America credit card, right. And
not only is it reflected in the score, but you could actually
see the credit line and see that they're a certain amount of time
behind on payments. But you can't do that in small business
finance, for the most part, loans can be reported to
business credit bureau, not everyone is really checking the,
you know, business credit reports. And so DataMerch has
really provided a very valuable service. They're not the first
people or the first company to come up with that type of that
type of idea. Prior to data, DataMerch, there was an
organization called the Small Business Finance Association,
it's still around, actually. And they had their own database. And
if you were a member of that the trade association, if you were a
member of the trade association, or if you are a member of a
trade association, you get access to a database of
defaulted deals, and it works the same way, members of that
association could submit deals that defaulted. And other
members can check it, you know, before they fund the business to
find out if this is somebody who has defaulted on somebody else,
but it's limited to people who are members of that trade group.
And so if you're not a member of the trade group, you know, you
miss out and so DataMerch, even though it costs money to be a
member, it is it is open to a wider audience. You don't have
to be a member of a trade group. But yeah, it's it's it's amazing
to see how much they've grown. They started like, five, six
years ago. And to think that, to think that they now have 50,000
bad deals on file. Yeah. That's a pretty big number.
Johny Fernandez: That is a big number. And I think, you know,
we've talked about before, especially for people that are
new to the industry and you know, are trying to figure out
how to do deals and make sure they do deals correctly and do
their due diligence. This is definitely a smart investment. I
would think, you know, when you're trying to find just who
you're working with, so