Industry News
P2P Lending / Former ‘LendAcademy Forum’ Has Moved Again
June 19, 2025deBanked has migrated the old LendAcademy p2p lending forum it acquired in 2021 to DailyFunder. Due to software compatibility issues, it was frequently offline on deBanked’s servers. It has now been moved to DailyFunder whose software was able to integrate the content somewhat successfully.
The LendAcademy forum, launched in 2011, was the most popular p2p lending forum in the US. An unfortunate incident, however, caused the data to be permanently lost in 2021. When that happened, deBanked used proprietary forensic techniques to restore as much of it as possible in a takeover deal it inked with the former operators.
DailyFunder, launched in 2012, is the oldest and most popular small business finance forum in the US. Any issues relating to it going further should be referred to DailyFunder at webmaster@dailyfunder.com.
FundKite, Aquamark Partner on Watermarking Submission Docs
June 17, 2025
As more brokers rush to watermark submission documents to minimize the likelihood of their deals being backdoored, FundKite is codifying the trend into policy by partnering with Aquamark. Aquamark, as readers may recall, was recently spotlighted on deBanked for its defensive watermarking technology which enables brokers to stamp documents in a tamper-resistant manner, marking them as having originated from the broker. If these stamped documents end up in the hands of an unauthorized third party, the watermark reveals their original source. With watermarked submissions on the rise, FundKite will only accept them if they match the originating broker. The company will also encourage brokers to use Aquamark to protect their submissions if they aren’t already doing so.
“At FundKite, we take submissions very seriously and want to ensure that the documents we receive have been originated by the ISO submitting them and were not backdoored, which has been a major issue in the industry,” said Alex Shvarts, CEO of FundKite. “We encourage all our ISO partners to watermark their submissions for this reason. Aquamark provides a seamless and inexpensive process we tested and strongly recommend.”
“This partnership reflects a rapidly growing shift in the industry — brokers are fed up with deal theft, and they’re increasingly aware of how critical compliance will be over the next 12 to 24 months,” said Christina Duncan, Founder of Aquamark. “We’re grateful to partner with Alex at FundKite, who’s stepping up to address these challenges by reducing risk, building trust, and helping preserve the integrity of the space as it evolves.”
Take This Industry Fraud Evaluation Survey
June 11, 2025Fraud is a growing challenge in the alternative lending space, particularly for lenders and funders that serve small businesses. As fraud tactics evolve – from synthetic identities and doctored bank statements to first-party fraud and account takeovers – funders and lenders face heightened risks that can lead to increased defaults, operational losses, and stricter underwriting processes.
MoneyThumb and deBanked have partnered to conduct a survey across lenders, funders, brokers, banks, and the fintech sector to reveal and better understand how fraud is impacting the industry. The goals are to help underscore the problem / shine a spotlight on an increasingly important sector that adversely impacts the industry and provide information on the most common fraud types and the tools strategies lenders are using to mitigate risk.
Your feedback is completely anonymous, and as a thank-you for participating, you’ll receive an exclusive early copy of the full report—plus additional insights not available to the public.
Check out other joint reports deBanked has previously participated in.
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Enova: SMB Loan Demand and Performance Remains Normal
April 29, 2025Enova originated $1.2B in small business loans in Q1, a 27% increase year-over-year.
Despite noise in the media about economic disruptions, Enova CEO David Fisher said during the earnings call that “We are monitoring both demand and portfolio performance even more closely than normal and continue to see the level of demand we would expect while payment performance remains in line or better than our expectations.”
When asked if the company saw a spike in applications in relation to businesses possibly stocking up on inventory ahead of the new tariff policy, Fisher said they hadn’t seen any spike and that demand has mainly tracked typical seasonal patterns.
The company emphasized more than once that if anything were to change, the quick duration of its small business loans would allow it to react and make adjustments very quickly. As always, Enova reiterated that it does not have much competition in the market, hadn’t seen any new competitive threats in the first quarter, and doesn’t expect to see any changes on the competitive side for the rest of the year.
Recent M&A Activity in the Space
April 17, 2025There’s been quite a bit of M&A activity in the small business finance industry over the last 6 months. Here’s a list of some of the more notable deals:
10/25/24 – Kapitus Acquires Ten Oaks Commercial Capital and Launches Equipment Financing Arm
1/7/25 – eCapital Acquires LSQ to Expand Technology Solutions and Strengthen Market Leadership
4/1/25 – NMEF Acquires Pawnee, Marking a Significant Milestone of Growth and Industry Leadership
4/8/25 – Onset Financial Acquires Channel Forming One of the Largest Independent Equipment Finance Lenders
4/15/25 – Pipe Acquires Glean.ai
Broker Fair Preshow Party Info – NYC
March 25, 2025Broker Fair 2025’s preshow party is at JIMMY, located on the rooftop of ModernHaus in SoHo. Sponsored by Lendini, it’s being held on the evening of May 18th. To attend, make sure you add the preshow ticket during online checkout for Broker Fair. Broker Fair’s special pricing room block is also at ModernHaus and you should use this link to book your hotel stay.
Broker Fair is on May 19th in NYC at Tribeca 360 in Tribeca, walking distance from ModernHaus.
OppFi: Bitty to Disrupt the SMB Financing Space
March 5, 2025
OppFi continues to like what they see with its investment in Bitty. During the Q4 earnings call this morning, CEO Todd Schwartz gave the latest update on that relationship.
“As you may recall, Bitty was our first outside investment in the small business financing space,” Schwartz said. “Similar to our consumer business, we continue to see a large supply demand imbalance in the working capital space for small business. Bitty has experienced significant growth and we believe it will continue to provide profitability and cash flow to OppFi in 2025. We are excited to continue working with Bitty as they seek to disrupt the space with best-in-class products, modeling, and servicing.”
OppFi says that with the amount of cash it has on hand, it may decide to make an investment in another company similar to Bitty but that it was currently looking at a menu of options, including the possibility of share buybacks.
Bitty recently updated its logo and website.
Recent Developments at Mulligan Funding
January 9, 2025
Last month, Mulligan Funding announced the closing of a second asset-backed securitization (ABS) totaling $120M and expandable up to $500 million. Business has been great since.
According to a representative of Mulligan, “December was the best month we’ve ever had as a company, capping off our best year since inception. And a large measure of that success is owed to the extraordinary community of ISO partners that we work with – and the incredible relationships we’ve been able to develop with them.”
As part of that, Mulligan Funding has made some changes to continue its success, an explanation of which is quoted here:
“We are continually looking for ways in which to improve our relationships and the level of service we’re able to offer them. And so, in order to continue to improve our level of service and improve the depth of our relationships with our partners, we decided to implement a restructure of our ISO Team and the way in which we manage our partner relationships.
We have established for the first time a regional segmentation of our ISO partners. This has allowed us to rationalize our ISO groupings, and to create smaller, more focused multi-person teams purely dedicated to the relationships in their particular region.
Each team will consist of people with different levels of seniority and very specific roles. Some will be dedicated purely to looking after the relationship at a strategic level; and others will be tasked with handling the transactional details of day-to-day operations.
This regional focus will allow these teams to develop much deeper relationships at all levels of the partner’s business, and to spend more time in front of these partners, developing a better understanding of their needs and wants – something we have historically found challenging, being on the West Coast.”
– Mulligan Funding
