MCC and BizFi Originate $115 Million in Q2
July 20, 2015Merchant Cash and Capital (MCC) and its family of companies including BizFi announced today that they had originated $115 million in deals for the second quarter of 2015. That translates to an average of $38 million per month, much higher than their average of $23 million monthly in 2014.
In their official release they state that the “significant increase in financing originations is in large part due to the launch of Bizfi, a connected online marketplace designed specifically to help small businesses compare funding options from different sources of capital and get funded within days.”
Meanwhile on the New Entrants Showcase panel at AltLend in NYC today, MCC founder Stephen Sheinbaum reiterated his desire for federal regulation of the industry to reduce the complexity of navigating the varying and sometimes obscure laws of 50 separate states.
I’m a little partial to the MCC story since I got my start in the industry there almost 10 years ago. The company is in the all-time top five biggest MCA funding companies.
Less Regulated, Non-bank Lenders? Never Heard of ‘Em
July 20, 2015
Recently, two journalists for the Wall Street Journal sat down with Senator Chris Dodd and former Congressman Barney Frank to ask their thoughts about the Dodd Frank Act five years later.
The WSJ asked Frank specifically, “Do you have concerns that Dodd-Frank rules are driving more activity into the shadow banking system (less-regulated, nonbank lenders), sowing the seeds for a future crisis?”
The response…
Frank: “What activity? The law gives the regulators the power to regulate. When people tell you that activity has been moved to the shadow banking system, ask them what activity because I don’t know exactly what they’re talking about.”
One has to wonder what the awareness level was then when the Dodd Frank lawmakers drafted up Section 1071 to expand the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
Meanwhile, Frank told me personally last year in a walking one-on-one in NYC that he supported transparency in business loan transactions, such that the borrower should be easily able to identify the terms. The premise behind consumer loan protections was that consumers were less sophisticated, he said. He also that he was not in favor of a federal cap on business loan interest rates.
MCA Brokers: Constructing Your Funder Network
July 18, 2015
Progressing forward into the 3rd Quarter of The Year Of The Broker, I wanted to continue our focus on the vital issue of inefficient training that new broker entrants are receiving within our space. In the previous article for deBanked on 6/22/2015, I inquired about if you knew what you were selling in terms of the Merchant Cash Advance product? Within the article, I discussed value points and overcoming the product’s criticism. In this article, I wanted to add to this discussion by deliberating over how to create a quality Funder Network for the Merchant Cash Advance Product.
As a Broker, I believe your job is to be as Jeff Thull from Prime Resource Group explains, which is to be a valued source of business advantage for your prospective and current clientele. In terms of the Merchant Cash Advance Product, you should have access to knowledge, resources, networks, and underwriting criteria that your prospective and current clientele lacks access to, allowing them to see you as a “valued extension” of their organization in terms of the value of your expertise and network. However, too many Brokers are not taking the time to truly be this source of business advantage for their prospective and current clientele, which involves not just continued knowledge, analysis and study over the industry from a “Macro” perspective, but also rounding up the quality relationships to properly serve their clientele on a “Micro” level, such as the creation of a high quality Funder Network. In this article, I wanted to provide some information to assist new Brokers in creating a high quality Funder Network for the Merchant Cash Advance product.
Keeping Things In Perspective
In my first article for deBanked from 5/10/2015, I discussed the importance of Selecting The Right Funders, if you haven’t already done so, please review this article to keep things in perspective going forward. After you have reviewed that article, now you should focus on carefully crafting your Funder Network so that you can fulfill your job as being a source of business advantage to your prospective and current clientele. This creation will be based on understanding industry paper grades, which represent the various situations of your clientele during the underwriting process that determine their approval, risk based pricing, terms and conditions.
Paper Grades
The Paper Grades across the board are pretty much the same, but your job is to make sure you have 1-2 reliable, credible and quality lenders for each of the Paper Grades so that you can properly serve your clientele with tailored pricing, terms and conditions based on their risk based profile.
- A Paper: These are merchants that usually have a 650 plus FICO score, clean bank statements with low NSFs/Overdrafts/Negative Days, healthy bank balances (ending and average), no tax liens, no judgment liens, no recent bankruptcies, and no landlord/mortgage issues. In terms of pricing, this merchant should qualify for premium pricing or what I define as Tier I Pricing.
- B Paper: These are merchants that usually have a 600 – 640 FICO, with a variety of potential profile weaknesses on top of the lower credit scoring. Some of those potential weaknesses include having somewhat clean bank statements, somewhat healthy bank balances, they might have a tax lien or judgment lien on a payment plan (and the judgment is not from a prior MCA Company or based on fraud), they might have had a dismissed/discharged bankruptcy, and/or they might have landlord issues but can be resolved at closing. Note that in terms of these weaknesses, this merchant should really have no more than two of these weaknesses, such as they might have somewhat clean bank statements along with a tax lien on a payment plan. In terms of pricing, this merchant should qualify for Tier II Pricing.
- C Paper: These are merchants that usually have a 540 – 580 FICO, with a variety of actual profile weaknesses that push them into this lower credit grade. Some of these weaknesses include having bank statements with 5 – 10 NSFs/Overdrafts/Negative Days, along with not so healthy bank balances. In addition, they might have a tax lien or judgment lien on a payment plan (and the judgment is not from a prior MCA Company or based on fraud), they might have had a dismissed/discharged bankruptcy, and/or they might have landlord issues but can be resolved at closing. Note that this merchant should really have no more than three of these weaknesses, such as they might have bank statements averaging 10 NSFs a month, a tax lien on a payment plan, and they might be one month behind with their landlord which can be made “whole” at closing. In terms of pricing, this merchant should qualify for Tier III Pricing.
- D/E Paper: These are merchants that are considered high risk and might not even get an approval completed. They usually would have as high as a 520 FICO score, but their FICO score could actually come in lower than 500. In addition, expect a variety of actual profile weaknesses that make their approval difficult, such as over 10 NSFs/Overdrafts/Negative Days a month on their bank statements, along with not so healthy bank balances. Furthermore, they might have a tax lien that’s not on a payment plan, or they could have a judgment lien that’s not on a payment plan or a judgment that included a prior MCA Company. Finally, they might have landlord issues that can’t be resolved at closing. Usually the weaknesses are severe to the point where an approval cannot be generated, however, if an approval is generated it’s usually a very high costing advance along the levels of what I define as Tier IV and Tier V Pricing. This level of pricing is very expensive and it might just be in the best interest of the client to not provide him any funding at the moment, opting to instead allow him time to improve his credit standing so he can at least qualify for C Paper status.
Final Word
Note that many industries are on generic restricted lists of Funders, and while they might be A Paper in terms of general credit standings and profile status, their restricted industry status might lead to an auto-decline or a decrease in their Paper Grade.
When you construct your Lender Network, your job is to get 1 – 2 lenders for each Paper Grade so that you can serve your clients efficiently based on their risk based profile. This process involves researching your prospective lenders, understanding their criteria, underwriting their pricing/terms, and testing out the relationship by sending a couple of deals to see how it goes from a first-hand basis.
Doing this level of work upfront gives you a higher probability of surviving in one of the most competitive landscapes in financial services. Not doing this level of work upfront makes your chances of survival, office profitability and career sustainability (as a broker) less probable.
OnDeck (ONDK) Curiously Flips the Script
July 17, 2015
“The company is now reportedly losing tens of millions of dollars through defaults on its loans,” reads a release put out just hours ago by Robbins Arroyo LLP about OnDeck. Their announcement is a little late because OnDeck just announced a Q2 profit on July 15th.
After nearly eight straight years of losses, OnDeck issued a press release announcing that their Q2 earnings call on August 3rd would reveal GAAP net income of somewhere between $4 million and $5 million.
It’s a stark difference from the guidance issued in their Q1 earnings report which put projected Adjusted EBITDA for Q2 at between a loss of $3 million and a loss of $4 million. Projected GAAP losses were much worse.
2015 was supposed to be another year of carefully planned red ink for the business lender as they continued their unrelenting strategy of growth. So where did this profit come from? And were some of their business decisions in Q2 influenced by unhappy shareholders?
Unlike Lending Club who had some company insiders file notices with the SEC to announce they had sold stock, OnDeck did not experience a rush to the selling exits when the lockup period expired. No insider sales were reported.
I published my theories about the stock’s drop back on June 29th.
And now suddenly we have a profit, but the source of the cash is clearly identified in the release. OnDeck sold off a lot of their loans to institutional investors and booked the revenue.
“In the second quarter, 19% of the loans sold through Marketplace were loans originated prior to the second quarter that were previously designated as loans held for investment,” the release stated. That sale also allowed them to reduce their loan loss reserves, it said.
The downside is that the perceived risk of the loans themselves at least for now in the public’s mind has not changed. OnDeck is simply transferring the risk to someone else but they can only do that in the future so long as there are buyers. Therefore they need to consider creating an asset that they and their shareholders would be comfortable holding on to and plan for the economic doomsday where there are no buyers, which will inevitably come.
Compass Point analysts Michael Tarkan and Andrew Eskelsen were not impressed by the pre-announcement. In a note to clients, they wrote, “On the surface, results were stronger than expected due to significantly higher gain on sale revenue and lower expenses. However, if we exclude the one-time gains, core revenues came in well below our expectations, suggesting a meaningful deceleration in loan origination growth and/or another decline in yields.”
Notably, OnDeck’s sudden reliance on the OnDeck Marketplace to achieve profit coincides with a U.S. Treasury Department request for public comments on online marketplace lenders.
“Treasury seeks responses that will allow policymakers to study the various business models and products offered by online marketplace lenders, the potential for online marketplace lending to expand access to credit to historically underserved borrowers, and how the financial regulatory framework should evolve to support the safe growth of this industry.”
OnDeck experienced a surge in its stock price the morning following the Q2 forecast. It has since come down a little and closed at $13.45 on July 16th.
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Note: I have never bought or sold OnDeck stock.
Do Bank Statements Matter in Lending? Business Lenders and Consumer Lenders Disagree
July 16, 2015Bank statements. Those in consumer lending argue they’re all but irrelevant because FICO and credit reports do the job of predicting risk just fine, but over in today’s small business lending environment, there’s an entirely different sentiment; Reveal your recent banking history or be declined.
After having bought nearly $60,000 worth of consumer notes on Lending Club and Prosper combined, there’s something I’ve seen a lot of, bounced ACHs.
Lending Club doesn’t reveal borrower bank data to their investors. Sure, anyone can see the credit report, the income level, zip code, and job title, but the borrower could have negative $10,000 in the bank and be living off overdraft protection on day 1 and an investor would never know it.
For all the fanfare surrounding online marketplace consumer lending, access to borrower banking history is oddly absent.
“Welcome to consumer lending, where the rules are different because the game is too,” replied a user to my comment on a peer-to-peer lending forum.
Veteran consumer lenders assumed I was a lost newbie who knew nothing about lending. “I have a feeling if you ask to crawl someone’s bank account, they’ll just go elsewhere,” one user said. “Seems that’d only work on subprime borrowers who have limited bargaining power.”
“I’m assuming you may be new to lending,” he continued. “Making a loan based on deposit balances is rarely a good idea.”
My initial question to them was that without bank statements, how could they ascertain if a borrower’s finances were actually in order at least at the time the loan was issued? It’s really easy to access someone’s banking history for the last 90 days by using common tools like Yodlee or Microbilt, I argued.
Some people sympathized with my logic but others believed requesting bank data would be suicide in today’s competitive environment. And still more wondered if there might be consumer protection laws that prevented lenders from seeing a loan applicant’s banking records (which sounded ridiculous).
A Credit Card Issuer’s Take
Those questions led me to interview an underwriting manager at one of the nation’s largest credit card issuers who would only speak on the condition of total anonymity, including the bank’s name. There, he oversees a department of people that manually assess credit card applicants. There is no algorithmic approval process. In his department, humans underwrite each application, conduct phone interviews with the prospective borrowers, and request additional documents if they feel it’s warranted.
Requesting bank statements is a regular part of the job, explained the manager. “We require proof of income for any line over 25k,” he added. “It’s the main thing we ask for along with proof of address.”
Requesting these documents keeps them compliant with the Bank Secrecy Act, he explained, but the bank statements in particular are their first choice in verifying somebody’s income, even more than pay stubs. And their underwriters aren’t oblivious zombies, he noted. If an applicant has no money in the bank, they’ll decline it.
“The Adverse Action reason [for that] would be ‘sufficiently obligated’,” he stated. “That’s when their bank account shows they can not take on any additional financial obligations.”
The manager shared however that he believed there is a very strong correlation between what’s on the credit report and what to expect in the bank statements. Generally speaking, good credit will show a healthy banking situation, he explained. They’re rarely taken by surprise. Overall, the credit reports and phone interviews are enough for them to feel comfortable and the bank statements are really just there to check off a compliance box.
Meanwhile, those that speculated requesting bank data would be a death knell competitively might want to talk to Kabbage’s sister company, Karrot. Karrot already crawls bank accounts as part of their consumer loan application program and competes with Lending Club, Prosper, and Avant. Considering Kabbage has funded more than half a billion dollars worth of business loans using this very methodology, it’s safe to say that applicants aren’t flocking to competitors in droves over the perceived injustice or inconvenience of filling out three additional fields on a web application to share their transaction history.
Bounced Payments
Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein offered these comments last year about their underwriting, “A critical aspect of consumer lending is determining the appropriate amount of a payment to collect so that an account doesn’t become overdrawn. Our intelligence accurately predicts how much of a payment to request via ACH so consumers avoid the cost and headache associated with non-sufficient funds.”
I thought about those statements when I noticed that thirty-six of my Lending Club notes carried a Grace Period status the other day. These are borrowers whose payments just recently bounced. Some are only three or four months into a five-year loan. Worse, there are those that are saying they have no money whatsoever to make a payment. How can this be when they just practically got approved?
To the consumer crowd it’s business as usual. “If you got their bank account, you still wouldn’t be able to predict who will default. You can’t predict defaults on any individual borrower,” argued one veteran on a forum.
But it’s not all about the lender’s tolerance for risk. ACH rejects can have consequences that affect a lender’s ability to debit accounts in the future.
“Ultimately, regulatory thresholds set by NACHA will continue to become more and more critical of returns,” said Moe Abusaad of ACH Processing Co, an ACH processor based in Plano, TX. “I think it’s safe to say that there is a positive correlation in considering statements as a component of the underwriting process to the rate of returns incurred,” he added.
And while it’s true that bank data can’t make predictions perfectly on its own, nobody in small business lending or merchant cash advance would consider an approval without it.
Bank Statements or Bust
“There is no substitute for banking information when reviewing a client for approval,” said Andrew Hernandez, a co-founder of Central Diligence Group, a risk management firm that allows business lenders and merchant cash advance companies to outsource their underwriting.
“Money moves fast through these businesses and every business is unique, so a lot more variables come into play than just having to account for the timely monthly payments of credit cards, cars, and mortgages as you find in the consumer world,” he added. “A FICO score along with other information presented in a credit report provide a detailed, historical snapshot of a client’s creditworthiness in consumer lending, and while these are great complementary tools for us to use in our underwriting process, I believe that banking data paints us a picture of its own which is absolutely essential in assessing the risk of a B2B transaction in our space.”
Those underwriting business loan deals have reported seeing applicants with open personal loans from Lending Club, which shows that the exact same borrowers are being underwritten in two different ways.
But Julio Izaguirre, another co-founder of Central Diligence Group added that, “banking transactions are essential in gauging the cash flow of the business by looking at recent and up-to-date bank volume, but it is even more important with businesses that lack historical data and cannot provide financials or other documentation to show and prove their track record.”
Translation: A lack of credit history and formal financial statements can be overcome thanks to in-depth analysis of bank account data.
“When our underwriters look at a bank statement you can get a better understanding of the business cash flow, operational cost and how the owner manages his business,” said Heather Francis, CEO of Gainesville, FL-based Elevate Funding. “The credit score is like a person’s blood pressure reading,” she continued. “It indicates there may be an issue but until lab work is pulled and analyzed you don’t know what that issue is. The bank statement is that lab work and it can tell you more about the issues behind the scenes than a credit score can.”
Greg DeMinco, a Managing Partner of Americas Business Capital based in Cherry Hill, NJ would probably agree. “FICO isn’t everything,” he shared. “Bank statements can tell a great story especially if there is upward momentum month after month, and more importantly a high ratio of deposits to requests for the advance.”
Meanwhile, the manager of the credit card issuer was surprised to hear about the high value placed on bank statements in business lending. I offered him the example of an applicant with good credit that was consistently negative in the bank because of a reliance on overdraft protection as a way to make sure all the bills were being paid. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he commented.
But over in the peer-to-peer lending forum it didn’t sound so crazy at all. “Plenty of Americans are ‘broke’, in the sense that they have negative net worth, yet they’ll continue servicing their debts for… a long time… no matter what it takes,” shared one user.
The argument seems to come full circle, that business lending and consumer lending are just different.
But to Isaac Stern, the CEO of New York-based Yellowstone Capital, the bank statements are not just about financial health. “We are literally underwriting against fraud,” said Stern, who said his office regularly receives applications with doctored statements. “Logging in [to the banks] and verifying those statements are probably the most important part of the process,” he noted.
His logic goes that a consumer that is paid a salary has a predictable stream of income and so that information along with a credit report might be enough for a consumer lender, but business revenue is less predictable and can vary practically day-to-day.
“You can’t just look at a FICO score and say, ‘this is a good a business’,” Stern explained. “The story is in the bank statements.”
Deal Alert: Angelo Gordon Acquires Reliant Funding
July 14, 2015
Angelo, Gordon & Co, a $27 Billion private equity firm has acquired San Diego-based Reliant Funding. Reliant was recognized a year ago as the 385th fastest growing private company in the nation on the Inc. 500 list as well as the 28th fastest growing financial services company.
A person who claims to have worked on the deal and is currently employed by the company shared the news publicly.
The deal is at least the second in the space for the private equity firm, who acquired Long Island-based Merchants Capital Access last year.
An OnDeck (ONDK) Technical Analysis
July 12, 2015For some of us working in the merchant cash advance industry, we saw the IPO of OnDeck (ONDK) as a major stepping stone in getting recognized by main street and receiving overall exposure. Unfortunately it has not been the best representative of us in the stock market. I started monitoring ONDK on the first day it started to trade and after 7 months, it clearly hasn’t looked positive.
I am a student in technical analysis. In layman’s terms, it is the study of price action of a traded financial instrument to make an informed investment decision. The following is my view.
The first thing that pops out when viewing the chart is that the single biggest day of volume (number of shares traded) was the IPO day. The stock has yet to trade in that kind of volume since then.
The other obvious thing that pops out is that the stock has been in downtrend, a series of lower lows and lower highs. As the old Wall Street adage says, “The trend is your friend.” Trying to call a bottom in this stock has been useless as it seems like those that have, are catching a falling knife.
Moving averages are used to determine whether the stock is trending or not. With very few trading days the longer term averages are not able to be rendered. In May the stock met resistance at the 20/50 EMA crossover. Coincidentally this was also the beginning of the latest down leg. It is also worth noting that the stock has not closed above the 20 day EMA since it was breached. There was one failed attempt that resulted in the continuation of the down trend in the middle of May. The stock is currently at the 20 EMA and is testing this level again. A close above this could be an indication of a possible change in trend.
The bottom of the chart has the RSI. This is a measurement of Overbought and Oversold conditions, which is telling us that the stock has been oversold for a couple of months. It recently started moving upward from the oversold condition.
The MACD is another technical indicator used. It measures the momentum of the stock. I like to think of momentum as the thrust/force of the move in a stock. This indicator points two things to me. As the stock has been going lower there hasn’t been a lower low in the indicator. It actually seems there is a slight uptrend in the indicator, which tells me as the stock has gone lower, there hasn’t been the same force/thrust to the move. This is a classic example of divergence, meaning the stock is doing one thing while the momentum indicator is doing another.
The information above points to two possibilities. The first is that the stock is currently taking a breather from its downtrend. This is normal in a stock cycle; after all, stocks do not go up or down in straight lines. The other is that the stock could be in the beginning stages of stabilizing. Stabilizing does not mean that the stock will begin a new uptrend. It means the stock could be range bound for a couple of months.
A Decade of Funding
July 7, 2015Next month is my 9 year anniversary in the merchant cash advance industry, which means I’ll be starting my 10th year. A decade of merchant cash advance… holy shit. I’ve had the opportunity to view it from many different angles and have accrued my fair share of adventures, plenty of which I’ve written about and others I’ll have to take to my grave.
I also launched this very website exactly 5-years ago under its original name MerchantProcessingResource.com. Not many people can say they’ve authored more than 600 stories (yes, seriously) on merchant cash advance, but I can. I’m fortunate to have turned something I merely enjoyed in the beginning into a business of its own.
Looking back now, there weren’t many people keeping a live diary of events as the industry dove headfirst into the financial crisis. Who would’ve bothered to report on an industry that was arguably made up of only a thousand people?
In April 2009, even before deBanked launched, I submitted a story to the only merchant cash advance magazine of its kind. It didn’t have a very clever name, just Merchant Cash Advance Publication. My story, titled, An Underwriter in Salesman’s Clothing, rambled on about the end of the industry’s glory days, the wave of declined deals in the recession, and how funders should be more appreciative of ISOs.
Here’s a summary of what I wrote more than six years ago:
I was complaining about stacking as far back as 2007 apparently. I addressed it as a merchant problem. Merchants were taking advantage of funders, not the other way around like some frame the argument in 2015.
I left my post as Director of Underwriting in late 2008 because “I wanted the ringing phones, the commotion, the markerboards with stats, the glory, the $20,000 [monthly] checks.”
Funding companies became super conservative during the financial crisis and all my deals were being killed (25 deals declined in a row at one point.)
I had recently charged my first closing fee, felt bad about it, and got in trouble for it.
I said 1.40 factor rates wouldn’t last (I was wrong about this!)
I bitched about algorithmic declines (I apparently thought computers underwriting files was a good way to upset ISOs.)
I acknowledged my own hypocrisy when I realized how hard it was to be a sales rep after thinking sales reps were overpaid and overrated in my previous years as an underwriter.
I continued on as a sales rep for another two and a half years after I wrote that. That means that in 2010 when I started deBanked, I was still calling UCCs, closing deals and boarding merchant accounts while sitting in a windowless room rented by a startup ISO.
But what was there to blog about in 2010? Oh little stuff like who the biggest funding companies were at the time by checking UCC filings since almost everyone filed UCCs back then. Notably, the third largest merchant cash advance company of 2010, First Funds, is no longer in business.
I also wrote about shopping deals around and the impact that might have on a merchant’s credit report. That was the day-to-day stuff though, information I was just putting out there hoping someone on the Internet might see it. What got everyone excited was the 2010 New York State leaderboard which eventually prompted me to spend my nights and weekends investigating the industry on a wider level.
I began talking to people at other funding companies about their monthly numbers. It wasn’t that hard to get information as an industry insider, especially if you had deals to send somebody’s way. I also spent money to acquire secured party lists to count the number of UCC filings by funders in all 50 states rather than just look at one free state like I did with New York originally. I think I was the only person in the industry at the time running up their personal credit card bill to conduct such research. I had also been in the industry for four years at that point and had a great network of contacts who could clue me in on their volume.
While I said that I also looked at census records and department of labor records, I’ll admit that data wasn’t extremely useful. The end result was a best guess estimate that in 2010, there were approximately 21,000 merchant cash advances transacted for $524 million.
My data would go on to be republished in ISO&Agent Magazine, The Scotsman Guide, and Leasing News, and also end up in many other places I didn’t expect, like in the business plans of merchant cash advance companies that were looking to raise capital. In fact, in a private meeting I had with an MCA company months later in South Florida, the CEO let me take a peek at the docs they had just submitted to a bank for a credit facility. Included was a printout of these numbers with my name on it and all. Apparently there was something to this writing thing…
My last day as a sales rep was in the Fall of 2011. I left the commission-only life (oh what, you 2015 pansy closers actually get a base salary?) for something even more risky, an entrepreneurial life. For a couple years, I played underwriting consultant to a handful of merchant cash advance companies and industry expert to institutional investors interested in the space. I learned how to code in my spare time and spent more than a year in online lead generation.
I never stopped writing.
Along the way I’ve visited the offices of dozens of ISOs and funders, syndicated in deals, and test-drove new technology.
None of this makes me particularly special, especially when I hear about how much some of my old sales buddies are making these days on deals. “Are you SURE you don’t want to come back?” they ask. It’s enticing no doubt. A part of me wants to grab the phone out of their hand and attempt to shatter their record on the markerboard this month even though I’m pretty sure I’m rusty as hell.
One thing noticeable between now and 9-years ago is that my hair turned grey. This industry will do that to you (or at least it did to me.) And I still get a kick out of meeting folks who got into the industry years before I did. The 90s/early 2000s AdvanceMe crowd likes to tell me that they were funding merchants while I was still in diapers. They are practically right.
As I enter my own tenth year in the biz however, it’s exciting to think that the industry is just now getting started. OnDeck was the first IPO in the space and the general public is learning about short term business funding for the first time. There’s no shortage of news to report and that keeps me plenty busy these days.
And so even after a decade of MCA, it’s never too late to put on your Funded pants. Opportunity awaits and I hope you’ll continue to ride the wave with me. Thanks for reading since 2010!
