Texas on Pace to Pass MCA Bill With Broker Registration Requirement
May 13, 2025
The State of Texas is moving toward passing a “commercial sales-based financing” bill that would impact the merchant cash advance industry. Among the key details is an MCA broker registration requirement that would require brokers to get approved by the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner (OCCC) in order to broker any MCAs to a merchant located in Texas. Brokers would be subject to OCCC oversight and the rules governing transactions with Texas-based merchants would apply regardless of where the broker themselves is located.
Furthermore, The Finance Commission of Texas would have the authority to adopt its own rules “to prohibit certain acts or practices by providers including acts or practices the commission considers unfair.”
The current iteration of the bill, which has already passed the House and is now in the hands of the Senate to confirm, can be found here.
Need a Bank to Fund MCAs? You Can’t Operate Without One
May 12, 2025
“I learned back in the early 2000s when merchant processors started to offer merchant cash advances, that was the first time I ever heard of MCA,” said Christian Sanchez, Relationship Manager for the National Deposits Group of Dime Private & Commercial Bank. Sanchez, who’s been in banking for 25 years, understands MCAs in their current iteration from a unique vantage point in the ecosystem. Dime, for example, is a full‑service commercial bank based in New York that today provides a variety of customers, including MCA funding companies, with services like checking accounts, wire access, and ACHs.
Sanchez worked with his first MCA client in 2021 and immersed himself in their business and the industry. When he got them onboarded and saw how well it worked out, he knew there was something there. By early 2024, he set out to find a place where he could meet many MCA funders at once and attended the deBanked CONNECT MIAMI conference that January. It was almost right afterward that he started a new role at Dime, and he has been actively looking to serve MCA companies ever since.
“Through the connections I made—I attended Broker Fair in New York last May and from there my access to the industry has been great and I continue to meet contacts, and one contact leads me to another,” Sanchez said.
It’s more than just a basic account that Dime is offering to MCA funders.
“Our platform is designed to give you the tools that you need to run your MCA funding company,” he said, “coming in from the standard online banking access, being able to view your accounts, run reports, extract information to your accounting system… We give you access to our ACH platform, which allows you to set up your payment collections, and based on how your deal is structured with the merchant, you can set those up with the different recurring schedules.”
Dime customers can also continue to use their own third‑party ACH processor if they choose.
Banking, believe it or not, can be one of the most overlooked considerations in running a funding company. A bank’s underwriting team has to understand the business, be comfortable with it, approve it, and be prepared to handle the flurry of activity—yet, even when they do, things may not always run smoothly. To that end, Sanchez said that even if someone already has an MCA banking relationship elsewhere and doesn’t want to switch to Dime, being fully onboarded with another bank as a backup is a smart plan. The time‑sensitivity surrounding things like wire deadlines and daily ACHs is critically important in the industry. It’s crucial not to wait until it’s too late for that Plan B, since onboarding and risk underwriting are neither instantaneous nor guaranteed.
“Obviously I would love to be the primary and having the biggest share,” Sanchez said. “But at the end of the day, it’s business. If I can be part of your business and work together, then I fulfill my need.”
Credit facilities, investors, and syndicates may also require an MCA funder to have a backup bank ready to go as a condition of working together. They might even require a Deposit Account Control Agreement (DACA), which Dime is equipped to put in place.
“[A DACA] is a tri‑party agreement between the MCA funder, the lender, and the bank,” Sanchez explained. “And what happens is this is a way for a lender to ensure that the MCA is doing what they say they were going to do…”
Dime customers need not be located in New York, but those who want to drop in on their banker can do so at the Midtown Manhattan branch or set up a meeting with Sanchez himself.
“A lot of times what I can assure you is, if you look for me, you can find me, whether it’s by phone or we might be meeting somewhere but I’m constantly available.”
True to that promise, Sanchez said he will once again attend Broker Fair in person on May 19 in New York City.
It’s important to note that, as a bank, there is still a rigorous underwriting process and not every company may be approved.
“It’s absolutely amazing to see how Dime is willing to work with MCAs,” he said. “We have a clear understanding of the industry, the risk that’s involved with it, but the bank has embraced it instead of running away.”
Shopify Continues to Grow its Merchant Funding Business
May 8, 2025“We continue to grow our capital business and have recently introduced several product innovations that give merchants more choice for how they manage their loans, and how they choose among various loan options,” said Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO of Shopify during the Q1 earnings call.
The company had ~$1.4B in business loan & merchant cash advance receivables on its balance sheet as of March 31, 2025. It purchased & originated $805M worth of business loans in Q1, putting it on pace to surpass the $3B total for all of 2024.
“Shopify Capital is a financing program that offers merchant cash advances and loans to eligible businesses based on the store’s location, history, use and interaction with the Shopify platform,” the company states. It is offered in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK.
OppFi: Bitty performed well in Q1 2025
May 7, 2025“Our investment in Bitty continued to perform well in the first quarter of 2025,” said OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz during the earnings call. “The business continued to drive accretive profitability and cash flow to OppFi. We continue to see significant imbalance between supply and demand for working capital among small businesses. We are excited to be part of Bitty’s growth ahead.”
OppFi owns a 35% stake in Bitty.
During the Q&A, Schwartz reiterated that Bitty was well-positioned despite the uncertainty surrounding tariffs in the current environment.
Getting Backdoored? Put Your Mark on the Docs
April 30, 2025Christina Duncan was once working on a renewal as an MCA broker when things turned south. Her client suddenly received so many calls with offers for funding that they had to turn their phone off.
“[The client] eventually reached out to us via email and basically said, ‘Hey I don’t know what’s going on but these people are saying they’re with you and they have my bank statements. I’m really concerned,'” Duncan said.
Duncan’s renewal had been backdoored. It was hardly the first time, and she was hardly the only victim. As many in the industry often complain, it has become a growing trend in which a broker submits a client’s deal and it somehow slips out the back door into the hands of a third party. The broker then ends up competing on their own deal, or they lose out on it completely. And that’s how many brokers see it—as something that happened to them. But there’s also the business owner who is now left wondering how their data ended up in the wrong hands and what to do about it.
In the above example, Duncan tried to help the client learn how an unauthorized party came into possession of those bank statements, but she was simply hung up on and blocked. It was a dead end.
“So those are the situations that we encounter every day and it’s tough to navigate,” she said.
Born in San Jose, CA and based in San Francisco, Duncan has seen it all. She started in equipment financing more than 15 years ago and gradually shifted into brokering MCAs. When complaints about backdooring began to crop up, everyone had their own opinion on the cause.
“I’ve seen people get caught up on just trying to point the finger or use backdooring as an excuse for their lack of success,” Duncan said, “But the reality is that it is very real. I’m a part of the DailyFunder forum. I see people talking about it all the time but there just hasn’t really been an efficient way to deal with it.”
But then she came up with a solution: Aquamark, a defensive watermarking tool that differs from other tactics employed across the industry to reduce the risk of backdooring. It allows brokers to permanently stamp the documents as having originated from them.
With the assistance of AI and a small team, Duncan left the broker world behind to go full-time into developing the technology, which she said can be used on all the documents in the process.
“It’s not just the bank statements, it’s tax returns, your application,” Duncan said. “What’s happening is it’s someone who has access to these submissions, these packages, and it very well could be internal, someone on your team, it could be a lender and the lender doesn’t know that…”
So it’s not only a problem, but one that can happen at multiple levels in the process. The Aquamark tool, still in its early days but already being used by funders and brokers, can apply custom-branded watermarks onto PDF files with ease. On the one hand, she said, the tool had to be designed to prevent AI from removing the watermarks, and on the other hand it had to work with encrypted statements. When she solved both challenges, she knew she had something. Now, brokers simply upload their documents through the portal, and the platform returns them in seconds.
“By design, I built this in a way that it’s very lightweight and it’s self-service,” Duncan said. “You don’t really need me to do anything and more importantly we’re not storing anything. So essentially you’re uploading your documents and I’m giving it back to you. There’s no logs, there’s no history, none of that is happening behind the scenes.”
The company’s mission statement is a simple one: “Prevent Backdooring. Fund More Deals.”
As Duncan explains, lenders might not even know that a deal they’ve received has been backdoored because the submitting party doesn’t always make it obvious where they got it.
“It’s tough, especially in this environment with all the competition, cost to acquire customers are through the roof, and you lose that,” she said. “It sucks. And honestly it’s so frustrating because aside from it being [how brokers make their money], for the merchants it puts that bad taste in their mouth in the industry. And it’s very real. And so I just wanted to come out with something that—again, the MCA industry gave me a lot and this just feels like a way to give back, as cheesy as that sounds.”
How to Prepare for Outside Syndicators
April 29, 2025David 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, email david@betteraccountingsolutions.com.
There’s a clear gap of knowledge in our industry, and how merchant cash advance businesses need to prepare themselves to receive outside money in investment or syndication.
Whether you’re seeking your first institutional investment or scaling to eight-figure funding rounds, the preparation required isn’t just about having good portfolio performance—it’s about having the financial infrastructure responsible investors need to see before forking over money to you. Not knowing how to prepare that for them can cost you months of delays or even kill promising funding opportunities entirely.
I’ve seen too many MCA shops operating under a misconception. They believe that the impressive Google Sheets presentation showing their advance volume, daily collection rates, and merchant performance will be sufficient when courting serious investors.
Sometimes that’s enough. When you’re looking to raise money from friends and family, you have flexibility. These investors typically accept basic performance reports showing advance volume and collection rates, might not request detailed merchant-level financials, and generally won’t demand formal audits. Basic spreadsheets might suffice at this stage when you’re raising up to about $1 million in capital to fund your advances.
The financial documentation requirements escalate dramatically when you need more than that.
Once you move beyond self-funding or friends and family money into the realm of raising $5-10 million or more, investors won’t accept your homegrown reporting systems or month-end bundle accounting—they want audited financials and proper transaction-level documentation.
Sophisticated syndicators expect a professional CRM system tracking all merchant relationships, detailed default modeling, GAAP-compliant accounting systems that properly account for income recognition on merchant advances, and as investment amounts increase, audited financials become non-negotiable.
Auditors don’t accept shortcuts in the MCA space. They require transaction-level detail with recognized income on each advance, estimated defaults by cohort, and precise documentation of collection performance. They’re specifically looking for attempts to bundle or obscure individual merchant performance – a common practice in some MCA shops that raises immediate concerns with institutional investors.
Here’s what most MCA operators don’t realize: Getting your books audit-ready isn’t a quick fix. It’s a process that can take several months to update historical advance and collection records, 3-4 months for a first-time audit (always longer than subsequent audits), and additional time for any remediation of collection documentation. In total, you’re looking at potentially 9-12 months from financial disarray to audited statements. That’s an eternity in the fast-moving MCA world when a funding opportunity appears.
If you even think you might seek significant outside capital within the next year, start preparing now. Implement proper merchant tracking systems immediately. Ensure all bookkeeping follows GAAP principles for advance recognition. Consider getting audited financials before you need them.
Yes, this requires upfront investment, but put it in perspective: If you’re raising $5 million to fund your advance portfolio (often just the starting point), the cost of proper financial infrastructure is minimal compared to the capital you’ll secure and the acceleration in your timeline.
The most successful capital raises in the MCA industry aren’t just about having a great portfolio performance – they’re about being ready when opportunity knocks. Don’t be the MCA provider explaining to eager investors why they need to wait a year while you get your advance and collection records in order. The most valuable asset in fundraising isn’t just your merchant performance – it’s being prepared to prove it immediately.
SBA Places Restrictions on Use of Proceeds to Refinance Merchant Cash Advances and Factoring Agreements
April 22, 2025The Small Business Administration has made some notable changes to its Standard Operating Procedures that go into effect on June 1. For instance, the new guidance specifically says that “merchant cash advances and factoring agreements are not eligible for refinancing” for Standard 7(a) loans, 7(a) Small loans, SBA Express loans, Export Express loans, and International Trade loans.
The new SOP is here. This was the previous SOP that did not mention MCAs.
Going All In: How Joe Sasson Saw the Opportunity of Being a Broker Early On
April 7, 2025
“For me, the biggest approach to the industry that I took was honoring integrity and transparency to our clients more than anything else.” That’s what Joe Sasson, Chief Sales Officer at Advance Funds Network (AFN), attributes his success to in the small business finance industry. Sasson saw the vision and the potential of this business at a younger age than most of his peers. That’s because he started as a summer intern for AFN right before his freshman year of college at George Washington University, when he was only 18.
“I said I could use some money, obviously, going into school being a freshman, so why not?” Sasson explained. “And then I really enjoyed it that summer. I kind of discovered that sales is kind of a knack for me, and correlates well with the way I like to operate, the way I like to do things. So it kind of just stuck with me.”
The company had a mutually good feeling about his abilities, and they agreed to extend the arrangement, which consisted mostly of making sales calls, even while he was in school. By the time summer rolled around again, they handed him the reins for the entire internship program. The student was now the teacher for 20-25 eager high school juniors and seniors hoping to learn the ropes, an experience he recalls fondly. That was in 2019, and its impact is still felt today since some of those interns are still with AFN. But it was a crossroads for Sasson because his college curriculum required him to be in Washington, D.C., but AFN’s office was in New York. Ultimately, he said his eyes had been opened to the opportunity.
“I saw that our company really had the right values and the right approach to the way we do things,” Sasson said. “Thank G-d I was I was able to kind of recognize that early and that I was working with really good people.”
Sasson transferred to Baruch in New York, a school much closer to AFN. It was a move that paid off since he’s risen up to become part of the C-suite. His day-to-day is managing new business, overseeing dozens of agents, and helping them out wherever he can. That means at any given moment he could be giving advice, helping an agent finish a deal, or on the phone with a lender. Knowing a lender’s box is only part of it, as he says that relationships play an important role in AFN’s success.
Last year, when AFN’s Chief Revenue Officer, Irving Betesh, had earned a spot as one of six finalists to compete in the live inaugural Broker Battle at deBanked CONNECT Miami, it was Sasson who roleplayed with him to practice beforehand, which they did in front of the whole company as both a teaching experience and entertainment. As fate would have it, the roles reversed because it was Sasson himself who ended up on stage in person for Broker Battle 2 this past February, where he secured the runner-up position in a strong matchup after he made it to the championship.
Roleplaying and practice are important at AFN. Sasson said that the company is really good at training new talent, regularly conducts fun motivational contests, and even hosts an annual retreat to get the team out of the office and away from the grind, though sometimes they find themselves having to handle a deal or two on the beach, an unavoidable part of the business even though they definitely try to wind down.
As someone who’s been in the business since before the Covid era, he’s seen a remarkable amount of change. In his opinion, less expensive options, more creative options, and quicker options are now more widely available than when he started. That means he and others have to constantly stay on top of what’s changing and be able to deliver to their clients. That also means knowing what all their lenders are doing, staying on top of AI, monitoring the tariff situation, and more.
Through it all, doing good business with good people seems to be a recurring theme, whether that be the internal team or partners they work with.
“I’ve been doing this for a while now, quite well,” Sasson said. “And I would say, since I started seven years ago, we do a lot of business with a lot of the same people still. So for us, the relationships really do matter more than anything else.”
