Can You Trust the Funder? Are They a “Secure Funder”?

When Aquamark debuted earlier this year, their target demographic was brokers that were tired of being backdoored. The product was a unique watermarking tool that could permanently identify a broker’s claim to having originated a document. Brokers liked that sort of thing and the response that Aquamark received from the industry was overwhelming. But what stood out the most to them was the number of funders that also wanted to get involved.

“Since launching, we’ve had funders that genuinely want to do things the right way, reaching out to us, asking things like, ‘how can we do better? How can we be part of the solution?'” said Christina Duncan, Aquamark’s founder.

On the advice of a solid advisor, Duncan was encouraged to exhibit at the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas this past October. And the trip paid off. A lot of people had heard of her and Aquamark but had not been formally introduced. Now they were finally talking. There were also people there she knew but had never technically met.

“I was able to meet people that for the last 15 years I’ve either communicated with via phone or in like a FaceTime setting, but not in person,” Duncan said. “So I was able to meet people that I’ve known for so long in person for the first time too.”

The experience increased their momentum and now Aquamark is even announcing a second product, Secure Funder.

“There aren’t any clear guidelines around how files should be handled or what actually makes a funding source secure and trusted,” Duncan said. “And so over the last few weeks, we’ve been collaborating with some pretty major funders on defining what those minimum standards should look like.”

The objective is to perform a unique third party certification to determine if a funder is secure and trustworthy. “Secure Funders” that meet guidelines will get a digital badge and be placed in a premium directory of funders.

In an industry where everyone tells brokers to trust them, funders find themselves competing against others that are making the same promises. Now, this new product aims to serve as an independent source of validation.

“The program was developed as a neutral, third-party initiative,” said Duncan in the official release. “We’re not affiliated with any broker, funder, or lead provider. We simply want to see business owners get the capital they need—without having to worry about where their sensitive information ends up.”

Along with the announcement is a batch of name-brand funders that have already signaled their support to be part of it. The hope is that brokers will see the list of who they’ve certified and have actionable information about who they can trust with their files. Aquamark is encouraging other funders to participate as well.

“I think by the end of next year, my hunch is that if you’re not on the list, you’re probably going to start seeing less business,” Duncan said.

The Moment Growth Becomes Risk: Scaling Your MCA Operations Without Losing Control

David Roitblat is the founder and CEO of Better Accounting Solutions, an accounting firm based in New York City, and a leading authority in specialized accounting for merchant cash advance companies.To connect with David or schedule a call about working with Better Accounting Solutions, email david@betteraccountingsolutions.com.

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of every successful merchant cash advance company: the very growth its founders dream of is often what nearly destroys it. This paradox plays out with remarkable consistency. A small team, two or three people working from a modest office, builds something that works. The CRM handles the volume. Spreadsheets track deals and daily payments well enough. Then volume triples, deals close faster, syndicators come calling, and what once felt like a well-oiled machine starts grinding against itself. Reconciliations that took an afternoon now consume days. Syndicator payouts lag behind collections. Team members duplicate each other’s work or, worse, leave critical tasks undone because everyone assumed someone else was handling them. The founders, who used to spend their days funding new deals and building relationships, now spend them firefighting.

This is not failure. It is something more interesting: the natural consequence of success meeting its own limitations. What serves a $5 million portfolio beautifully will buckle under a $50 million one. The difference between companies that plateau and companies that break through to the next level is rarely about talent or ambition. It is almost always about infrastructure.

Consider what actually breaks when MCA companies scale. Most do not collapse because they funded bad deals. They stumble because their internal systems, designed for a simpler era, cannot support a more complex present. The cracks appear in predictable places. Financial reporting is usually the first casualty. Early-stage funders get by on Google Sheets, basic bookkeeping, manual reconciliations. These tools are not wrong; they are merely insufficient at scale. When the number of merchants, syndicators, and advances multiplies, a single missed entry can cascade into inaccurate financial statements, strained relationships with syndicators, and the slow erosion of investor trust. Process control is the second vulnerability. Tasks that were once intuitive, handled by whoever happened to be nearby, now require explicit ownership and documentation. Without clear internal controls (who approves, who reconciles, who verifies), errors slip through unnoticed. Sometimes fraud does too. The third weakness is visibility itself. You cannot manage what you cannot see. When daily cash flow, default rates, and syndicator balances require hours of digging to surface, decisions get made in the dark. And decisions made in the dark have a way of looking foolish in the light.

At Better Accounting Solutions, we encounter these challenges constantly in companies that are, by most measures, thriving. Talented people, profitable operations, genuine momentum. Their systems simply have not kept pace with their ambition. The encouraging news is that this moment of strain, properly recognized, can become a turning point rather than a dead end.

The solution is not to work harder at what you have been doing. It is to change how you operate. Standardization, for instance, sounds dull until you realize it is the foundation of everything else. In the early days, flexibility is a genuine advantage. As you scale, consistency becomes more valuable. Standardize your chart of accounts, your naming conventions, your reconciliation methods, your reporting cadence. Everyone working from the same playbook beats everyone improvising their own. Separating duties matters more than most founders initially appreciate. No single person should control every part of a transaction. One staff member initiates payments; another reconciles them. One prepares financial statements; another reviews and approves. These boundaries are not bureaucracy for its own sake. They prevent honest mistakes and protect against dishonest ones. Automation, done intelligently, amplifies what your people can do. Integrated systems connecting your CRM, accounting software, and ACH processors mean that daily payments, collections, and RTR updates align automatically. Manual uploads disappear. Your staff can spend time on analysis instead of data entry. And perhaps most importantly, you must learn to forecast cash flow rather than simply record it. Fast-growing MCA operations fall into reactive mode with alarming ease, forever chasing yesterday’s numbers. True scaling requires financial models that look forward, anticipating capital needs weeks or months ahead. That visibility keeps you agile. It keeps you investor-ready.

When volume surges, clarity becomes everything. Strong internal reporting is not just about compliance, though compliance matters. It is about how you steer the ship. An MCA operation’s financial heartbeat depends on knowing, at any moment, where money is flowing, what capital remains deployed, how repayment behavior is shifting. The faster you spot trends forming, the faster you can respond: adjusting advance sizes, tightening collections policies, rebalancing syndication exposure before small problems become large ones. Firms that lack this visibility find themselves perpetually reacting. They learn about performance only in hindsight, after shortfalls or liquidity squeezes have already hit. The companies that scale effectively build systems where accuracy and timeliness become reflexive, not heroic.

There is another dimension to all this that founders sometimes underestimate: credibility. As portfolios expand, scrutiny from investors, auditors, and potential acquirers intensifies. Documentation that once seemed optional (signed syndicator agreements, precise RTR recognition, clear merchant performance records) becomes the foundation of trust. If you ever want to attract institutional funding, that trust must be demonstrable on paper. Clean, GAAP-compliant books do not just protect you from trouble. They make you more valuable. Audits go faster. Valuations strengthen. Investor onboarding smooths out. Many firms discover that once their accounting achieves proper structure, opportunities begin materializing that were previously out of reach: new lines of credit, stronger partnerships, greater confidence from the very funders who once kept them at arm’s length.

There comes a moment in every MCA company’s evolution when hustle alone stops being enough. Processes must replace instincts. Systems must replace improvisation. This is not a loss of the entrepreneurial spirit that built the company. It is the necessary evolution from founder-driven to professionally managed. Think of it this way: scaling is not about building a bigger engine. It is about tuning the engine so it can run at higher speeds without burning out.

Growth should be exciting, not exhausting. When your systems are sound, your reports reliable, your finances transparent, growth need not mean chaos. It can mean confidence. The difference between an MCA company that peaks early and one that scales sustainably often comes down to a single question: readiness. Are your systems built for the volume you are chasing? Are your reports investor-ready? Can your team process ten times more transactions without losing accuracy or visibility? If the honest answer is “not yet,” then now is the time to prepare. The stronger your financial foundation, the smoother your next phase of growth will be. Success, after all, is not just about closing more deals. It is about building an operation strong enough to handle them all.

Lightspeed Commerce: ‘MCAs a Super Popular Upsell’

Lightspeed, 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.