Business Lending
Funding Circle Co-Founder & Managing Director James Meekings to Step Down
August 8, 2019
Funding Circle’s lackluster business performance has led to a casualty. Co-founder James Meekings, who serves as Managing Director of the UK Business (the company’s primary market), will be transitioning to a non-executive role on the UK board in Q3. He will no longer be MD, the company announced.
Lisa Jacobs, Funding Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer, will take over leadership of the UK business, the company subsequently disclosed.
Funding Circle went public less than 1 year ago on the London Stock Exchange. Since then the share price has plummeted by 75%.
The company has been busy trying to correct course through various maneuvers, one of which has been to cut CEO Samir Desai’s annual compensation.
Michele Romanow on Clearbanc’s Recent $300M Series B
August 7, 2019
Last week Clearbanc announced it had secured $300 million in a Series B. Specializing in the provision of capital to business owners for the purchasing of ads on digital platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, the company operates in an untapped niche. Alternative financing for the acquirement of a highly specific product, this product being the form of advertising that is currently most wide-spread.
And perhaps this is why the Toronto-based company received an investment of such magnitude for their second round of funding. The signs of success are there: high demand; low supply; and as well as this, there’s a celebrity profile attached to Clearbanc, Dragons’ Den’s Michele Romanow.
Having co-founded the company in 2015, Romanow now acts as its President. Speaking to deBanked recently, the celebrity investor explained how Clearbanc works as well as the what it does differently.
Ultimately, it comes down to two intertwined strategies: focusing on unit economics and having good tech.
“Our core is really understanding what your customer acquiring cost and your product costs are, as well as if you’re making money on each transaction,” explains Romanow. Speaking in straight forward calculations, the dragon states that, at a basic level, Clearbanc will check and find that if it takes $10 to make a product, $10 to buy Facebook ads, and that this leads to $50 in sales, then you have positive unit economics. And that this sort of calculation is what their tech does, just on a much more complex scale.
“We built a machine learning model on a fundamental understanding of what the unit economics of a business were.” A range of financial information is plugged in, “thousands of factors” are accounted for, and an algorithmically approved recommendation is prepared for underwriters.
Such reliance on tech and number-crunching has produced an unexpected side-effect for Clearbanc. Strict adherence to positive and negative numerical values has steamrolled two potential biases encountered in the finance raising process: location and gender. Romanow jokes about a report showing that just four states received 80% of venture capital in 2018, and nine raised nothing at all, saying that “it’s impossible that there’d be no good entrepreneurs in nine states of America.” Which is partly why Clearbanc has invested in 43 out of 50 so far, each business being greenlighted by their tech. As well as this, the company has funded eight times more women-led businesses than the industry average for venture capital.
Surprising results aside, Romanow claims that much of her recent ventures are inspired by her time with Dragons’ Den, with the concept for Clearbanc partially stemming from her reflections on the format of the show.
Specifically, the idea struck her after seeing a number of business owners pitch themselves for funding in exchange for equity, when what they were receiving was not worth pawning off part of their company. Believing that a better deal existed, Clearbanc was created with the plan to operate via revenue share agreements, taking a percentage of revenue over an undetermined amount of time until a fixed cost is paid.
As well as this, Clearbanc offers business owners access to its Venture Partner Network, a team of successful investors and high profile entrepreneurs that will offer guidance. Included are the likes of Jason Finger of Seamless, Jack Abraham of Hims, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Romanow herself. Sharing similarities with the setup of Dragons’ Den, in which celebrity investors offer funding and guidance, it seems like Romanow is carrying her experiences along with her.
As to where else she might carry them, Clearbanc is looking to eventually expand. “We’re experimenting in a couple of international territories right now, but we’ll have some announcement about that probably later this year,” she explains tightlippedly. For now she’ll continue to work with tech in North America with the belief that it’s the way forward, “when we use data better, we can drive down prices for everyone. And I think that’s an important part of what the equation is.”
Square Capital Originated $528M in Loans in Q2
August 5, 2019
Square Capital facilitated 78,000 loans for $528M last quarter, according to their recent earnings report, an increase of 36% year-over-year. Thr growth is the exact percentage increase experienced by rival Shopify.
Square says that they continued to see an average loss rate of less than 4% for their core Flex Loan product.
deBanked ranked Square Capital as the 4th largest alternative small business finance company of 2018. The company loaned $1.6B last year. PayPal was #1 at more than $4B. Shopify Capital is on pace to do more than $2B this year.
Shopify Issued $93M in MCAs and Loans in Q2, Has Begun Offering Funding to Non-Shopify Payment Customers
August 4, 2019
Shopify, a publicly traded e-commerce platform, is quickly growing its merchant cash advance and loan originations through its Shopify Capital brand. The company issued $93M in Q2, up 36% year-over-year and an increase from the prior quarter of $5.2M. Shopify’s loan product is only available in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
The company also recently began offering funding to merchants who don’t use Shopify Payments but still use the Shopify platform.
On the quarterly earnings call, Shopify CFO Amy Shapero said in doing so “we still have significant visibility into their operations, we see their orders, we see the engagement with the platform. And so, we are very comfortable moving in that direction.” The move provides an opportunity to expand their eligible market by 10%, she added.
Furthermore, Shopify’s deals are performing well, the company claims. Shapero said “we’ve actually managed our loss ratio in a very, very tight range. In fact, it’s lower than the top of the range where we think we could go with this, which says the power of our algorithms are working.”
Shopify Capital has originated more than $180M in 2019 so far, indicating they may be surpass many competitors in the rankings this year. The company originated $277.1M in 2018.
Import/Export SMBs Introduced to Fintech Lending Options
August 2, 2019
Early this week TangoTrade announced its partnership with the online lender Fundation. TangoTrade, which deals primarily in payment assurances for US small business importers and exporters, will now offer alternative financing to SMBs with the help of Fundation.
The development is a reaction to the struggles faced by small businesses who engage in global trade. Sam Hayes, Co-founder and President of TangoTrade, said that “If you’re an SMB and a transaction goes south, it causes major problems for cash flow. There’s very little recourse you can have as a small business.”
Explaining that about one-third of all US imports and exports originate from small businesses (roughly 200,000 small businesses import and 300,000 export), Hayes notes that this is a large portion of the American economy that is potentially at risk. Especially when they are being left out to hang by banks whose debit and credit facilities come attached with lengthy approval wait times and complex application processes that are often too inconvenient for SMB owners.
The partnership with Fundation, which is backed by both Goldman-Sachs and SunTrust Bank, will enable TangoTrade to fund SMBs up to $1 million. As mentioned, TangoTrade also offers payment assurance for importers and exporters, which reduces payment risks by managing the entire payment process for both parties involved and offering imbursement via 130 currencies. As well as this, the option to wire funds globally is available through TangoTrade’s partnership with TempusFX.
These services have been centralized by TangoTrade, being made accessible through the business’s site, a decision that is key to the company’s vision of offering services through a platform, Hayes told deBanked. “We’ve seen innovations in cross-border payments and global sourcing, but not a whole lot in this particular area,” which is why TangoTrade is pushing to incorporate fintech in their dealings.
And this impetus has attracted attention. With a diverse set of investors ranging from Hard Yaka, which has ties to Square, Ripple, and Twitter; to Village Global, a venture capital network that is backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, TangoTrade has links to large names. Such diverse connections are mirrored in the company itself, with their team bringing together experience from MasterCard, Payoneer, NASDAQ, and Oracle.
A cabal of tech heads to be sure, Fundation CEO Sam Graziano says that this approach will “enable small businesses to access low-cost capital through an integrated user-friendly digital experience on their platform.”
Spotlight on deBanked CONNECT Toronto
July 30, 2019
As the heat of the Toronto sun split the stones outside, the crowd inside the Omni King Edward’s seventeenth-floor Crystal Ballroom mingled and munched as part of deBanked’s most recent CONNECT event.
The first of its kind to be held in Toronto, the CONNECT series are half-day events that take place in both San Diego and Miami as well. Despite not being as established as the latter two, Toronto proved just as eventful, with a variety of speakers and topics broached, as well as a host of attendees from differing backgrounds making an appearance. It was par for the course for an inaugural deBanked show with the attendance figures being reminiscent of deBanked’s first ever event in the USA, a market that’s 10x the size.
The day was kicked off by entrepreneur, a dragon on the Canadian Dragons’ Den series, and co-founder of Clearbanc, Michele Romanow, whose anecdotes detailed the adventures that accompany the beginning of a startup. Regaling the audience with the story of Evandale Caviar, Romanow began with telling the room of a post-college venture that saw her working tooth and nail to secure a fishing license, studying YouTube fish gutting tutorials that were exclusively in Russian, and getting her hands dirty with the other co-founders when the time came to put their time spent online to use.
But it wasn’t all blood and glory for Romanow, as the tale shifted from one of youthful expansion to one of reflection and acceptance of the unknown. Speaking on the effect of tech giants in various fields, Romanow explained that “we have no idea of how these industries will shape out.” The likes of Uber and AirBnb never planned change the world, just to change a product and thus solve a problem, and their meteoric rises are unpredictable as a result. Iteration, rather than innovation, is what drives a company forward according to Romanow.
And this sentiment was brought further along with the following panel, which featured Vlad Sherbatov of Smarter Loans, Paul Pitcher of SharpShooter Funding, and SEO expert Paul Teitelman, speaking on the trials and novelties of the sales and marketing scene. Offering wisdom on various aspects of the field, the three men covered the need to go beyond the traditional forms of advertising, instead looking outward towards unorthodox methods of marketing; the hardships that come with the grind of a sales job; and the role that SEO can play when raising public awareness of your company; respectively.
“It’s a matter of spreading the word,” one conference goer noted when asked about the sales panel afterwards. “Businesses have to know who we are, and we’re working on that.”
Similarly, Martin Fingerhut and Adam Atlas discussed the existing legal topics of note to Canadian alternative financing companies, as well as those incoming rulings that may be worth knowing about. Covering both the English-speaking provinces and Quebec, the duo gave a comprehensive crash course on the legal landscape of the industry, highlighting laws unique to the regions. Aaron Iannello of Top Funding considered the talk to be particularly engaging, commending it for relaying information that might otherwise be unknown to American companies.
Following this, Kevin Clark, President of Lendified, took to the stage to talk about the importance of the Canadian Lenders Association (CLA). Saying that in the absence of a regulatory body, the CLA seeks to offer guidance to those companies who are looking for it. Clark asserted that “it’s a good thing for our industry to have oversight from a regularly body,” and that he looks forward to the day when one is established.
And before wrapping up the speakers for the day, Clark was joined by IOU Financial’s President, Robert Gloer, to discuss contemporary risk management. Covering everything from the next recession to the emergence of AI, the pair, which accumulatively have been in the industry for decades, offered knowledge learnt from years of experience in both the pre- and post-crash eras.
And the prophesizing of what will be the next big episode to shake the industry continued beyond the day’s scheduled agenda as many attendees continued on well into the evening at smaller networking functions offsite.
As the sun started to touchdown on the tips of Toronto’s skyscrapers, the salvo of excited conversation briefly harmonized to produce a singular axiom, that there was an abundance of opportunity in Canada.
California DBO Making Progress On Finalizing Rules Required By The New Disclosure Law
July 29, 2019
Last October, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new commercial finance disclosure bill into law. The bill, SB 1235, was a major source of debate in 2018 because of its tricky language to pressure factors and merchant cash advance providers into stating an Annual Percentage Rate on contracts with California businesses. The final version of the bill, however, delegated the final disclosure format requirements to the State’s primary financial regulator, the Department of Business Oversight (DBO).
The DBO then issued a public invitation to comment on how that format should work. They got 34 responses. Among them were Affirm, ApplePie Capital, Electronic Transactions Association, Commercial Finance Coalition, Fora Financial, Equipment Leasing and Finance Association, Innovative Lending Platform Association, International Factoring Association, Kapitus, OnDeck, PayPal, Rapid Finance, Small Business Finance Association, and Square Capital.
On Friday, the DBO published a draft of its rules along with a public invitation to comment further. The 32-page draft can be downloaded here. The opportunity to comment on this version of the rules ends on Sept 9th.
You can review the comments that companies submitted previously here.
Chase Ends Partnership With OnDeck, OnDeck Stock Tanks On Bucket of Mixed News
July 29, 2019
The market didn’t take too kindly to OnDeck’s Q2 earnings announcement on Monday. The stock price set a new all time intraday low of $3.01, down 24% from Friday’s close.
First, JPM Chase ended their partnership with OnDeck, the company said, bringing a 3-year relationship to a close. “We can’t speak for Chase and their change in priorities,” OnDeck CEO Noah Breslow said during the Q&A with analysts. “I don’t think it was specific to us.”
It was subsequently revealed that the relationship was never a significant moneymaker for their business to begin with. “On a standalone basis, it was a positive contributor,” the company said, but that it was “not a contributor to the bottom line profit.”
Breslow called the Chase deal a one-off that had some costs involved with it, but that they were optimistic about other deals with banks through their subsidiary ODX. “We do believe the drivers of this are not some fundamental readout on the ODX model,” he explained. “Again, we had a product that performs very well from an underwriting perspective. Customers loved it. We can’t speculate on why Chase made this particular decision. We just know it was specific to them.”
OnDeck also announced plans to pursue a bank charter and believed that the timing was right. Although they were “far along in [their] thinking,” they had not actually applied for a charter and they left the door open to possibly acquiring a chartered bank to achieve that goal. “I think the next logical milestone would be to look for some kind of either application for such a charter, but we’re not prepared to talk about a timeframe over which that would occur,” the company said.
Originations shrank to $592M, down from $636M in the previous quarter. “We do expect a return to sequential originations growth in the third quarter,” Breslow said.
The company also plans to buy back up to $50 million worth of stock to boost the share price.
