How Alexander Klein Took Home the Gold at B2B Finance Expo
November 14, 2025
“I‘ll be honest, I said to one of my co-workers that was there at the conference with us that ‘I’m going to win,'” said Alexander Klein, an ISO Rep at Simply Funding who did in fact win the official B2B Finance Expo 2025 poker tournament. “I said that a little bit facetiously but I think I had a chance.”
Knowing the odds were technically slim and fully cognizant that the annual conference in Las Vegas is really about business in the end, Klein and others made sure to use the opportunity of the poker tournament, at least initially, to socialize with the rest of the table.
“I focused directly on networking with people,” Klein said. “We’re talking sports, talking life, talking business, that was really where it was at the beginning.”
As he started to win some hands and players got knocked out, the tone changed and the table became more quiet and serious. Competitiveness took over. By the end of the night Klein was the last player standing. That made Klein the winner of a 1st place trophy and a B2B gold bracelet. It was his first tournament win and technically the first tournament he’d ever even played in.
Klein learned poker as a teenager and played in a few real games here and there, but that background was apparently enough to beat out some players at the table that played professionally on the side.
“People were immediately coming up to me, saying, ‘wow, I heard you won the poker tournament!’ Guys that were playing, guys that weren’t playing. It definitely got around a little bit and I got some nice connections through it,” Klein said.
And that’s really what it’s all about for someone in his position, the connections made in person.
“Seeing somebody face to face is the most genuine interaction you can possibly have,” Klein said. “You can show somebody that you’re actually serious, that you can actually provide the things that you’re talking about. It’s also just really about building the relationship, and I think you can only do that face to face.”
Klein said that conferences like B2B Finance Expo provide a critical opportunity to meet the right business partners and that it worked well for him and Simply Funding. It was also a good way to get back into the mix considering Klein had taken a hiatus from the industry during Covid and tried a different career path for a few years. Now he’s back. Having worked as a broker previously but working on the funder side these days, he said he appreciates the experience he earned before because he knows what his own ISO clients have to deal with.
One observation he’s made in that regard is that brokers want to see consistency with the funders they work with.
“[Brokers] don’t want to have a deal that is funded in a certain way and then a very similar deal is declined for whatever reason,” Klein said. “They want to see consistency. They want to see consistency in how efficient you are, how fast you respond, and the types of offers they’re getting on certain types of deals, consistency just in all aspects of the job. As long as you stay consistent in this industry, everyone will appreciate what you do, and you’ll also have better relationships and maintain those relationships.”
At Simply Funding, where his job is to bring in new business and work with current partners on deals, he believes they accomplish the consistency element well.
“I just work on helping our ISOs get the best possible deals, best possible offers, make sure everything’s efficient and running smoothly,” Klein said. Speed is also important, he added.
There’s also a mutual respect for the hustle where he says he finds himself and his colleagues working even faster than he had to as a broker to keep up the level of service. And this type of environment is one he wants to stay in for a very long time.
“I have found something that I feel is a great fit for me, that I can do well, and I see myself being able to do this for years to come,” Klein said. “I know there’s a lot of growth opportunity. The industry is only continuously growing, so there’s always more to do. I have that in my mind every single day. There’s always something more I can do. There’s something I can bring to Simply on a daily basis.”
Meanwhile, Klein’s B2B poker trophy currently resides on his desk in Simply Funding’s Jersey City office. He’s confident that it’s just the first of many.
“Shelf is going to go up, and we’re going to hopefully stack [the trophies] up,” Klein said. “That’s the goal.”
Lightspeed Commerce: ‘MCAs a Super Popular Upsell’
November 10, 2025Lightspeed, the point-of-sale an e-commerce platform, has experienced tremendous success with its MCA product. More than $107M of MCAs currently sit on their balance sheet. The company does not sell the receivables to third parties.
“We are using [Lightpeed] Capital to upsell and cross-sell across the base and in the rest of the world portfolio, Capital is one of the products that’s super popular in the upsell to the merchant base,” said Lightspeed President JD Saint-Martin in the company’s Fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call.
Outside of a potential stock buyback, the company’s largest use of cash going forward will be growing its MCA business, the company stated. Experience with this product has also made their underwriting more efficient and they’ve managed to reduce their average payback period to seven months. Revenue on MCAs year-over-year grew by 32%.
Lightspeed’s MCA business also expanded to Switzerland this quarter, the company revealed.
OppFi: ‘Bitty is a Great Partner’
October 29, 2025Bitty generated $1.4 million in equity income for OppFi in Q3. OppFi, publicly traded, owns a 35% stake in Bitty.
“Bitty is a great partner that we have enjoyed working with and learning from in the SMB space,” said OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz during the company’s Q3 earnings call. “The company shares OppFi’s business principles and corporate values and consistently uses technology to enhance operations and the customer experience. Bitty has identified significant additional growth opportunities and continues to capitalize on the ongoing supply-demand imbalance in the small business revenue-based finance space.”
Overall, OppFi said it had delivered another strong quarter that had outperformed expectations. It raised earnings guidance for the third time this year.
‘Like Family’: How Critical Financing Became One of the Fastest Growing ISOs
October 17, 2025When Farmingdale, Long Island-based Critical Financing (CFI) showed up as the 2,671st fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000 list this year, it was a testament to the company’s many years of hard work. Founded in 2017 by its CEO Brandon Garcia, CFI connects small businesses with a variety of unsecured working capital products.
“[Getting that recognition] was great,” said Garcia. “And I think it’s also a testament to the group that we have. It excites the people that work here too. This is a very stressful job, it’s not easy.”
In CFI’s day-to-day, the sales team finds itself competing against multiple companies on almost every deal that comes across their desks. Small businesses regularly put the pressure on them to get the best rate, the fastest funding, or a combination of both. They say this only increases their drive.
“It has definitely helped us in a way,” Garcia said of it. “I mean who doesn’t want a deal that doesn’t have competition, you can kind of take your time with it, right? But I think when there’s urgency, our guys perform better.”
In the very beginning it was just Garcia himself who had worked in the industry since 2012. He was soon after joined by a former colleague, Robert Menzel, and the two set off to really build up a company. That’s easier said than done, especially in a business where trust is paramount. So they looked within their own circle of friends and family to create a solid foundation.
“I felt it was best that we take care of our own,” Garcia said. “Let’s take care of people that we know that are looking for a new opportunity, and we train them the way that we want them to be trained. We want to give that experience and push it over to them.”
Among those they’ve brought on board to their current headcount of sixteen has been Garcia’s own mother, who works as the company’s head processor. And while they are still actively looking to bring on more people, Garcia said that the number of employees isn’t the ultimate metric of success, but rather the abilities of the ones you do have and the relationships they have with everyone else is the key. On this point, CFI is on pace to surpass $100 million in funding this year. It’s because of their continuous progress and results that they finally got the confidence to apply into the Inc. 5000 and were successful in making it.
“To be able to put that Inc. 5000 sticker in your signature, on the website, it just has a different swag to it,” said Garcia’s partner Menzel, “where it just carries a lot of weight, and even the merchants see that.”
When asked if the end goal was to become a lender themselves, both Menzel and Garcia say they’re happy with what they already do now, which is connect the merchants to the most appropriate source.
“While many competitors chase the close, we lead with transparency and real strategy,” Garcia said. “We act as consultants first. Even if a client doesn’t move forward with us, we want them to walk away smarter and more prepared than when they came in.”
“When you are a lender, you don’t really have that close relationship with other lenders because you’re your own lender,” Menzel said. “You’re not talking to them about deals, how to get deals done, ‘what are they doing? What did they change this month compared to what they’ve been doing, what’s working, what’s not.’ I think having those relationships with the lenders and the lenders’ reps, it’s huge and it makes the job fun, because they’re really all great people that we deal with.”
That closeness is what it’s all about for them.
“We are a group of people who genuinely care about each other,” Garcia said. “We’ve celebrated marriages and welcomed new babies. We hang out on weekends, show up for one another, and create a work environment that doesn’t feel transactional.”
The outcome of that are months where the company is exceeding $10 million a month in funding, and they’re now even more fired up after the Inc. 5000 placement.
“You don’t need this massive shop to be successful in this industry,” Garcia reiterated. “It’s really that simple. You just need the right people. You need to be loyal and just really be truthful with everyone. And good things happen. That’s a big thing for us.”
Revenue Based Financing Continues to Spread at Global Pace
September 30, 2025
Earlier this month, Uber Eats joined the revenue-based financing movement by partnering with Pipe Capital.
Karl Hebert, Vice President of Global Commerce and Financial Services at Uber, said of it, “We are happy to team up with Pipe to bring working capital to Uber Eats. Restaurants are our partners at Uber, and the backbone of our communities, yet many struggle with access to capital.”
It’s an unsurprising step considering rival DoorDash rolled out a merchant cash advance program nearly four years ago, though Uber arguably began experimenting with MCAs nearly ten years ago. And Uber is hardly doing it just to do it. Uber, for example, rolled out Uber Eats Financing, a revenue based financing product in Mexico through a partnership with R2 this past January, which went so well that they also rolled it out in Chile months later.
📢 Announcing a big milestone for R2 & @Uber!
Following a successful launch in Mexico, we’ve expanded our partnership with Uber Eats to Chile — bringing frictionless access to capital to thousands of merchants across the region. https://t.co/61WgP1ZtHy
— Roger Larach (@rogerlarach) April 30, 2025
In Chile with R2, the service is described as taking place entirely within the Uber Eats Manager App with a 5-minute application process and payments made automatically and deducted by a fixed percentage from sales made using the platform.
In the US with Pipe, it says that the Uber Eats App Manager will show capital offers from Pipe that are customized based on restaurant revenue, cash flow, and business performance.
Uber joins Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Intuit, Stripe, DoorDash, PayPal, Square, GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace and others in offering a revenue-based financing product.
Revenue-based financing as a product type is available in but not limited to the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, and more.
The Great Concession, How the MCA Product Effectively Proved It Was Right All Along
September 26, 2025
There was no greater irony than the State of Texas banning ACH debits from sales-based financing providers at the same time that the State of Washington was celebrating the coming age of sales-based financing. In Texas, for example, the motivation for curbing sales-based financing was built on the premise that “this type of financing has raised significant concerns about predatory lending and that state attorneys general as well as the Federal Trade Commission have obtained high-profile judgments against such financing for predatory practices.” Meanwhile, in Washington, the motivation for the state holding the opposite opinion was that sales-based financing “increases access to capital for small businesses in Washington state, particularly those that have been historically underserved or underbanked.”
How did these states reach the opposite conclusion?
There’s no caveat to how the Washington State program works. The State’s Department of Commerce partnered with Grow America and the operation is backed by a federal grant (SSBCI-21031-0048) to roll out and administer a revenue-based financing program as part of Washington’s State Small Business Credit Initiative. It’s sales-based financing or in this case revenue-based financing (which is the more common phrase these days). Grow America’s revenue-based financing program utters a very familiar phrase in its marketing.
“The months you generate more revenue, you pay a higher amount, when business is slower you pay less,” the company advertises.
This was at one time the signature calling card of a merchant cash advance, but now such features have been repackaged and rebranded into something similar but different, and everybody is doing them.
The Grow America program applies a 20% holdback on adjusted monthly revenue and requires a minimum monthly payment of $1,000 if the 20% holdback does not generate at least $1,000 for the month. Merchants can get approved for anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million. The product is marketed as having a 1.24 factor rate and an estimated 14.27% APR with a 3-year term. As industry participants are aware, increasing sales would translate into increasing payments, which means a rapidly paid off loan could potentially result in a final outcome APR in the triple digits, far and away from the “estimate.”
The irony is that the notable benefits of a similar product, merchant cash advances, which have no minimum monthly payments, no fixed term, and are not absolutely repayable, are eliminated when restructured in this way and presented as “revenue-based financing loans.” Revenue-based financing loans take the underlying structure of MCAs (payments tied to sales) and then strip away the benefits. However, when structured as loans, the argument often goes that they are likely to be cheaper, which may be true on average, but is not always true.
Indeed, Grow America leads specifically with price as for why its product, similar to its privately owned competitors, are the better option:
“There are a lot of online lenders offering revenue-based loans that promise instant approvals, but their terms are intentionally confusing, and the fees are high,” Grow America advertises. “Our lenders aren’t like that. They’re mission driven.”
In Texas, the author of the bill that banned debits from such financing providers “informed the [legislative] committee that commercial sales-based financing has become a popular financing option for small businesses desperate for credit and that, unlike traditional loans, this type of financing is repaid as a percentage of future sales or revenue.”
Indeed, it is very popular. The largest providers or brokers of such financing today whether structured as a purchase or loan, are household names like Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Intuit, Stripe, DoorDash, PayPal, Square, GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace and more. Some structure them as a purchase and call it a merchant cash advance and some structure it as a loan and call it revenue-based financing. In either case, payments are tied to the percentage of future sales or revenue.
In egregious cases of wrongdoing one way or another, such incidents have historically been a result of deceptive marketing or payments from a merchant exceeding the contracted amount. In New York, when transactions are structured as a purchase, courts generally look to make sure that the agreements have a reconciliation provision in the agreement, whether the agreement has a finite term, and whether there is any recourse should the merchant declare bankruptcy. Legally speaking, the products have become pretty well defined and understood in the court system.
Like Washington State, GoDaddy, which recently announced its new merchant cash advance program, markets its product in an almost identical fashion.
“If your sales go up, the MCA will be paid sooner; if the sales are slow, it’ll take longer,” GoDaddy says.
Same message.
Washington State requires merchants to make a minimum payment every month and a balloon payment if not fully repaid within 3 years. GoDaddy, by contrast, advertises no minimum payment amount, no set payment schedule, no penalties, and no late fees. One’s a loan, one’s a purchase.
While the best course of action is best left to the merchants, there appears to be a near-universal concession that the underlying nature of how merchant cash advance agreements were contemplated, payments tied to sales, made strong logical business sense all along. Washington State emphasizes this fact.
“We know that your business has its own needs and loans with fixed payment amounts may not be the best option for you,” they advertise. “The revenue-based financing fund offers loans with flexible payback terms so you can grow your business immediately and pay back your loan based on your varying revenue.”
Recent studies also now highlight the benefits of cash-flow-based underwriting.
In Sharpening the Focus: Using Cash-Flow Data to Underwrite Financially Constrained Businesses, “The paper finds that adding cash-flow information substantially increases the predictive signal of models that rely primarily on the business owners’ personal credit scores and firm characteristics.”
There’s also Square, the largest revenue-based financing provider in the US, that has explained why this system just works better. Square says that they can fund more businesses and have higher payment success rates than if they were to follow more conventional methods of underwriting and repayment.
“Square Loans addresses [the credit] gap by using near real-time business data to assess creditworthiness, evaluating metrics such as transaction volume and revenue patterns to offer short-term loans — with repayment on average in 8 months,” Square wrote in a White Paper. “This allows for a more accurate and timely understanding of a business’s capacity to borrow and repay. And loan repayments are higher during periods when business is stronger and reduced when sales are lower.”
What’s the sentiment these days on payments tied to sales revenue? The market has spoken.
Why Lexington Capital Holdings is Expanding Into the Real Estate Business
September 24, 2025Lexington Capital Holdings is expanding beyond small business lending and into real estate, the company recently revealed. Lexington, a Long Island-based financial marketplace and brokerage led by CEO Frankie DiAntonio, is launching Lexington Estates to buy, sell, rehab, and hold properties long term.
According to DiAntonio, deals involving real estate have already been a part of their regular broker product mix for a long time, but when deciding whether or not they wanted to lend against real estate on their own or become the actual buyers and builders, they felt the latter would be more impactful. A syndication fund for these real estate deals, for example, will be open to employees of the firm to participate in. Lexington’s existing operation already has about 50 sales reps. Two from that group will move over to the real estate side to join a number of new hires they’re bringing on board to carry this plan out.
“Business is a team sport and I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without the amazing Lexington team behind me,” DiAntonio said of the company’s success to-date.
Lexington Estates is already closing on its first property on Long Island. While they will make their focus local right out of the gate, they plan to work on deals both residential and commercial throughout the United States within 12 months. DiAntonio cut his teeth on real estate deals by participating in them personally outside of his business and now he’s making it a corporate endeavor. Whether it’s residential, retail, office space, industrial space, or anything else, they plan to evaluate it on the merits of the potential profits.
“I’m looking for deals,” DiAntonio said. “I’m looking for what’s the best bang for our buck.”
DiAntonio views this ambitious plan as one of absolute necessity given the challenges that the younger generation faces with the cost of living going up.
“I strive so hard to put my people in a position where they can make more money than the average American because you can’t even live the average American life and be average anymore,” DiAntonio said. “You actually have to be great just to live an average American life.”
Lexington Estates plans to officially launch on October 12th.
Catching Up With Kalamata
September 18, 2025
Kalamata Capital Group is continuing to fund in Texas through one of its affiliated entities, the company confirms. Kalamata, which recently upsized its 2024 securitization by 25% with notes expandable up to $500 million, offers a variety of funding products to small businesses around the United States. A new law that recently went into effect in Texas has prompted Kalamata and companies like theirs to get the word out to their partners about any applicable adjustments.
More front and center for the company, however, is the introduction and evolution of Kalamata Cash, its in-house proprietary software.
“We went live with everything, including our syndicator profiles and access to the outside world as well, and that’s been a really exciting development for the company,” said Brandon Laks, co-president at Kalamata, “because instead of licensing software, which the software we were on was great before, it gives us the ability to roadmap exactly what we want to do.”
Kalamata, for example, is 100% broker-driven, and they can custom-tailor the process to best suit their relationships.
“Our brokers can come in and see live calculators,” Laks said, “so when they submit a deal and we send an offer, they can get a live view of what steps are outstanding, they can play around with the sliders and choose their offers.”
And there’s a lot more on the horizon that they’re integrating with and adding on.
Guggenheim Securities served as sole structuring advisor and the sole initial purchaser of the notes in the Kalamata securitization deal. At the time of the announcement, Laks said, “The access to additional capital will allow Kalamata to continue supporting Small Businesses and invest more capital in proprietary technology to stay at the forefront of the small business financing industry.”
