Snapchat Acquired Mobile Shopping App Founded By Former MCA Execs
July 2, 2021
A brother and sister team formerly known throughout the merchant cash advance industry have achieved major success in another market altogether, mobile shopping.
Recently, their app was acquired by Snapchat, according to various news outlets, and the tech has since been integrated into the Snapchat app.
Molly and Meir Hurwitz, both original stalwarts of the old Pearl Capital in New York, co-founded Screenshop in 2017, an app that integrated shopping with fashion and social media. Its initial launch received added buzz thanks to Kim Kardashian’s early involvement as an advisor. Notably, Screenshop CEO Mark Fishman was previously a Risk Manager at Pearl Capital, rounding out the former MCA crew.
“We’re No. 5 on the app store category of fashion,” Meir Hurwitz told deBanked in November 2017. “We’re just getting started.”
The success continued.
“Screenshop gives shopping recommendations from hundreds of brands when you Scan a friend’s outfit,” Snapchat wrote in a published announcement this past May.
More than 170 million Snapchatters use scan features every month, the company revealed.
“Screenshop is now a part of ‘Scan’ said Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy during the company’s annual Partner Summit broadcast on May 20. The above screenshot is of Murphy demonstrating the Screenshop technology.
Funding E-Commerce Businesses Helped This Startup Get Acquired Right After They Launched
June 23, 2021
Less than eight months after Yardline announced their launch in the e-commerce financing space, they were acquired by Thrasio. The blazing fast progression from launching to selling the company suggests that Yardline’s niche presents a unique opportunity.
“There are many companies out there that look at e-commerce businesses in the space and say, ‘there’s no barrier for entry to operate in e-commerce, they’re all drop shippers, it’s a hobby, they have no skin in the game,'” said Seth Broman, Chief Revenue Officer of Yardline. “What Yardline does is really unique: One, we obviously have a lot more information and understanding of how they operate their business, and we can really break down on a deal by deal basis, what their margins look like, to get them a more customized offering that meets their needs.”
Yardline will fund Amazon sellers, for example.
Broman said that while most MCA funders know how to look at a merchant’s fixed costs like rent, payroll, taxes, and inventory to provide funding based on a gross revenue, those same funders don’t have a risk tolerance for e-commerce.
Yardline pulls data from digital marketplaces like Amazon and online storefront platforms like Shopify to make better credit decisions, Broman said, and this was a banner year for digital shopping.
“During COVID, you were seeing such an increase of demand for e-commerce goods; Amazon, Shopify, if you look at their stock price over the last 15 months, it’s incredible,” he said. “And the reason being retails closed, everybody’s shopping from home, and the demand for all my goods is through the roof.”
Before everyone was stuck inside, e-commerce already made up 20% of consumer commerce, Broman estimated. Then everything was online-only, and demand became nearly unlimited, he said. Amazon’s third-party sellers transact 60% of all products sold on the site, and Thrasio is one of the largest consolidators of those sellers in the world, Broman said.
Now, Yardline will have access to Thrasio’s international seller network.
“We’re confident in saying that untapped ecosystem can be very profitable for ISOs if they were to start focusing on e-commerce businesses,” Broman said. “There’s less demand for it, less competition, and now they have a home for where they can get these deals done.”
Broman said after the pandemic, typical brick and mortar stores were hit hard and required PPP to keep the doors open while e-commerce flourished.
“It’s not a matter if shopping online is the future; shopping online is the present. People will continue to shop at brick and mortar, people want to eat out, just look at New York City,” Broman said. “If you look at what Amazon offers, what Walmart’s doing, what Target’s doing, what these online marketplaces are doing to make commerce quicker and easier, there’s no doubt that it’s going to continue to grow.”
New York Appellate Division Reaffirms That Merchant Cash Advances Are Not Loans
June 23, 2021A series of eight merchant cash advance agreeements were not loans, said the First Department of the New York Appellate Division.
In Strategic Funding Source, Inc. et al. v. Steenbok Inc. et al, the defendants filed for summary judgment to dismiss the complaint. The Court denied it and defendants appealed, causing the Appellate Division to determine whether or not eight merchant cash agreements between the parties were actually usurious loans.
Per the eight merchant agreements, repayment to plaintiff was contingent on future receivables existing. Accordingly, the cash advance was not a loan and is thus not a usurious transaction (see Champion Auto Sales, LLC v Pearl Beta Funding, LLC, 159 AD3d 507 [1st Dept 2018], lv denied 31 NY3d 910 [2018]).
It may have all been for naught because the parties actually settled the case two weeks prior to the decision, according to the public docket (See Index No: 2021-00877).
The Small Business Finance Industry is BACK
June 21, 2021
The industry is back. I say this while sitting in a Miami hotel, my third such trip to Florida since becoming fully vaccinated against Covid in May.
There’s a lot of action going on. I’ve sat down in multiple broker shops in both New York and Florida and the phones are ringing off the hook.
The demographic of the average customer in the post-covid recovery seems to vary. Some say the credit quality has gotten better, others have said it’s worse. Some merchants have become used to forgiveable loans and low APR financing while others appear willing to take capital at any price just to keep up with the pace of their growth. It’s one of those things where everyone is just trying to adjust to the new normal, even if there’s little consensus as to what that is.
In New York City, the return of packed bars and overflowing restaurants stands in stark contrast to the rows of abandoned stores and For Lease signs that dot the landscapes around them. And yet if one looks past all that, the only reminder that Covid was ever even there is the requirement that one still wear a mask on the subway even if they’re vaccinated.
In Florida, it’s the opposite. I recently got yelled at by a bus driver for wearing a mask in the first place.
The broker shops I’ve visited still had office space that were filled with teams that were more than happy to be occupying them in person. But at the same time, the industry has become extremely popular with the traditional work-from-home crowd.
Leo Kanell’s 7-day marathon challenge on facebook draws in more eager industry participants than I would’ve ever thought possible, an accomplishment I know to be true because I dropped in on him unannounced late one friday night while he was live.
Similarly, Oz Konar, who I did a livestream interview with in person, has trained more than 3,000 brokers in the industry, many who work for themselves from home.
We’ve also been very busy in the last couple months and have met a lot of brand new entrants on both the funding and broker side.
All this activity is setting the stage well for Broker Fair 2021 on December 6 in New York City. It is perfectly timed to discuss the new disclosure law that goes into effect in New York on Jan 1, 2022, one that is so consequential that at least one company has relocated to New Jersey.
What a time to be in the industry!
CC Splits Still Make Profits, Payments Knowledgeable Funders Benefit
June 15, 2021
Back in its heyday, the MCA industry began as credit card factoring. The original product was simple- purchase future credit card receivables, and collect a percentage of them every day: easy peasy. Then, the industry broadened into ACH, funding businesses that did not have credit card purchases and credit card receivables became less common.
But some funders still work with credit card payments through long-standing payment processor relationships. Cash Buoy is a Chicago-based MCA firm that uses a network of twelve major credit card processors and thousands of representatives from payments ISOs to fund old-fashioned MCAs. Co-Founder and president Sean Feighan would tell you that having connections in payments pays off for both merchants and ISOs.
“The whole point is to add value to their business. By doing split funding remittance,” Feighan said. “It’s a much more comfortable way for the merchant to pay back the advance, it gives them some breathing room on the ebbs and flows of their volume, as opposed to having that hard fixed daily ACH that doesn’t care if they were closed on Monday, are slow on Tuesday, or we’re in a global pandemic.”
Feighan attests that the CC model still works great. He said alongside co-founder Brian Batt, they started Cash Buoy to give ISOs a better option. He boasts a renewal rate of 90% on his CC products, and his default rates for standard MCAs are a “night and day difference” with CC splits.
But operating heavily within the payments realm requires some expertise, something that long-time veterans of the MCA space are fortunate to have accumulated from the era of the product’s origin.
Steven Hunter, a multi-decade industry vet explained where the MCA concept came from. Hunter worked at CAN Capital back in 2000 when it was still was called AdvanceMe when he and the data team developed one of the first credit card factoring products.
“The idea came across to build a credit card-based product, because a lot of the original development team other than myself, were the First Data guys,” Hunter said. “And they said ‘okay well what if we could factor future sales, instead of three invoices or accounts receivable or inventory’, which we all know how to factor those things, that’s been in place since biblical times.”
So they built a model, aiming to fund merchants and take out a small amount of money from their credit card splits. Merchants would never see the money hit their bank, and the product just felt like free investing money paid for off of the increase in future sales.
When restaurants and other merchants shut down during the pandemic or rolled back to 25% capacity, many ACH funders found out their customers could not keep up with the pre-set debits. While defaults were on the rise, Cash Buoy was getting paid back, Feighan said, at an admittedly slower rate but still seeing returns.
Feighan has intentionally shied away from ACH. Cash Buoy is modeled on his and Batts’ connections in the payments space. They founded Cash Buoy after five or six years of experience in on-boarding merchant accounts. Feighan said he tried brokering but became disappointed with the process of working with an outside funder.
“[Other firms] may not have the relationships to get split funding at national processors,” Feighan said. “Maybe they didn’t have enough business or money in the bank when they went through the application process with different processors to get true split funding accommodations.”
Hunter agreed that without payment connections it is hard to factor CCs these days. Shortly after AdvanceMe began CC splits, other firms caught up and began developing similar products, with slightly changed terms like automatic set ACH draws. Eventually, he said this made MCAs more loan-like as opposed to a real variable product.
In 2021, there are many reasons that firms adopt ACH right off the bat, he said.
“Well, several reasons one, not every company takes credit cards,” Hunter said. “The thing is that some credit card processors, I’m not going to name any names, are very hostile to the product and they will not actually help people. They won’t help you manage the remittance, they won’t split for you, because they consider you to be a competitor, afraid you will take a portion away.”
The final reason Hunter said is a lot less elegant. He said in order to make this work, as a direct funder, you have to exchange files with every credit card processor you work with every night on every deal you have.
“So you got to send them something out and say, populate this for us. ‘Joe’s Bait Shop, What did they do today? Today they did this much money, your split is 11%, here’s what’s coming to you,'” Hunter said. “Then you import that back into your system and Joe’s Bait Shop’s balance drops by this amount. Right, that’s hard. I mean it’s a pain in the ass to manage, and I have people who do nothing but exchange, you’ve got to have processors who work with you and you’ve got to have the expertise.”
Hunter now works as a consultant, known in the industry as a go-to for MCA funding help. As for Cash Buoy, after the pandemic year, things are only on the up and up. Covid could not have happened at a worse time right after a three-year bull run, Feighan said, but now that things are back, there are “high water funding amounts each month.”
“The biggest thing here in Cash Buoy are our partners, our ISO partners, and processors,” Feighan said. “And if anybody were to say, ‘tell me, what’s the most important thing to you, Cash Buoy,’ it is 100% Our agent partner program. That is number one. The whole point of the company was to be able to provide a ton of value to national processors and ISOs.”
Live Stream With Oz Konar
June 2, 2021I will be speaking with Oz Konar, the founder of Business Lending Blueprint, at 12:15pm ET on deBanked TV.
Konar teaches people how to build successful home-based businesses in the alternative finance industry and has a highly popular youtube channel.
Tune in at 12:15 on deBanked TV.
Irish E-commerce Revenue-Based Funder Raises $76 Million Series A After First Year
May 27, 2021
An Irish revenue-based e-commerce financing platform called Wayflyer raised $76 million in a funding Series A round this past week. It has been a roaring first year for the small fintech, so far funding $150 million to online merchants. The firm just launched its cash advance product 14 months ago and raised $10.2M in a seed round only six months ago.
Wayflyer offers e-commerce sales-based funding, without the need for collateral, from $10k up to $20M. They partner with firms across the UK, including a recent deal with the international athleisure brand Gym+Coffee.
Left Lane Capital led the round with investments from DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest, and Zinal Growth. The successful funding comes after the firm widened its credit facility by $100M to keep up with the demand for capital and a partnership announcement with Adobe Commerce.
The cofounders, Aidan Corbett and Jack Pierse came together in 2019. Back then, Corbett led an online marketing analytics firm called Conjura when Pierse, a former venture capitalist, proposed using analytic tech to underwrite what amounts to digital MCAs.
“Jack came to me and said, ‘You should stop using our marketing analytics engine to do these big enterprise SaaS solutions, and instead use them to underwrite e-commerce businesses for short-term finance,'” Corbett told Tech Crunch. “We just had our heads down and started repurposing the platform for it to be an underwriting platform.”
Launching in April 2020, Wayflyer funded $600,000 in the first month. In March of 2021 alone, the firm did about $36 million in advances.
“So, it’s been a pretty aggressive kind of growth,” Corbett said.
After Funding Millions, Alt Financier Hosts Funding CEO Challenge
May 25, 2021
Leo Kanell, a funder from Utah, runs the 7 Day Funding CEO Challenge, a seven-day marathon video livestream of inspirational and educational funding content.
“So how [the challenge works] is basically, we’re looking for communities, and we’re building a community,” Kanell said. “Our focus is how can we help existing loan brokers, and then how can we help people who are looking for an additional stream of income that they can do from home obviously with the pandemic.”
All the action happens in a livestream on Facebook.
“Everybody kept asking ‘we need some training,’ so we built out a custom website for them so that they can build their funding empire from home,” Kanell said.
Many of the brand new market entrants are sales-minded individuals that are interested in working from home. Kanell has a sales mind and a small business funding background. He grew up in a family of nine from a small town in Utah with a population of only 3,000. He knew he would be a salesman when he turned a summer painting business internship into a $60,000 operation. After college, he tried his hand at real estate, but after 2008 he started looking for another industry.
“I started and went ‘Well, I’m gonna need money for that business,'” Kanell said. “I started looking at the different options to get financing for that next business venture, and it was very difficult, especially for a new business, especially if you’re a pre-revenue business or you don’t have a lot of sales and or collateral.”
He realized SMB funding was the business he should be getting into so he jumped in with both feet. From there he veered into a business education program alongside products like business credit cards.
He soon said that he was doing well, but he heard the funding industry calling his name. “Everything pulled me back into funding,” Kanell said and he decided to combine his education system toward loan broker training programs. He said many brokers don’t realize startups and pre-revenue bushiness can qualify for 0% for up to 15 months.
Now, Kanell hosts an industry podcast that features financial industry guests, and alongside funding, he looks forward to building a community of broker and funder education services.
“We’re going to not only get you the best funding guaranteed, but we’re going to educate you and empower you along the way,” Kanell said. “They can work as direct funders and keep 100% of the commission, and that if they want us to do the work you know, we can do splits.”
