BFS Capital Hires Peter Ng as CRO

Last week BFS Capital announced that it has appointed Peter Ng as Chief Revenue Officer. Coming from BlackBerry, where he served as Senior Director of Global Alliances and Business Development, Ng will be responsible for leading all revenue-related functions as well as overseeing the development of partnerships.

“I’ve had the privilege of working with Peter over the past few years and have always been impressed with his unique ability to drive business growth through new, innovative and diverse channels,” CEO Mark Ruddock said. “BFS continues to develop our executive talent pool as we pursue our mission of reimagining small business financial services, and we are particularly thrilled to have him join our leadership team.”

At BlackBerry, Ng lead the company’s global Independent Software Vendor partnerships program. Here Ng oversaw the creation of new partnerships and revenue streams with the launch of BlackBerry’s ISV Affiliate program as well as the addition of over 120 partners in less than three years. Ng was also instrumental in starting up the BlackBerry World mobile app store. He joined BlackBerry after the Canadian multinational acquired Viigo, where Ng was Vice President of Sales and Services.

“I’m excited to accept the role as Chief Revenue Officer,” Ng said in a statement. “This will be the third opportunity I’ve had to work with Mark Ruddock, who is truly a transformational leader. Having built an app ecosystem from scratch, I see a similar opportunity to create one for the small business owner. I’m looking forward to bringing my extensive global partnership experience and passion for startups to BFS Capital to help grow and diversify sales channels. The BFS Capital platform, combined with a robust partner ecosystem, will unlock exciting new financial products and services for underserved small businesses and drive an unparalleled customer experience.”

BFS Capital Hires New COO

BFS announced this morning that it has hired Brian Simmons as its new Chief Operating Officer. The news come as the company is preparing for the North American launch of its tech platform in December, a move that is part of BFS’s vision to become a more customer-focused business.

This planned “journey,” as CEO Mark Ruddock calls it, has been demonstrated in the past with the hiring of Fred Kauber as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer in May.

“If you’re going to be a successful venture-backed company,” Ruddock explains, “you need to think differently and act differently.” And this approach is manifested in Simmons’ history. Having worked in a diverse set of fields, the new COO has previously worked with Openlane, a B2B digital automotive marketplace; Wonga, the peer-to-peer lender where he was Head of Global Products and where he was introduced to Ruddock; and the IATF, or International Axe Throwing Federation, where he was a Co-founder and board member.

Together these experiences form a patchworked career, highlighting different skills and industries, but Simmons affirms that they’ve molded him to fit into BFS. “I think that the overarching theme has been that I’ve always been drawn by innovation,” Simmons explains, noting that his experience with Wonga provided him with a knowledge of financial services that is crucial to his role at BFS, while his time with the IATF benefitted him by endowing an intimate knowledge of the financial pressures small businesses face.

“What’s spoken to me at each turn is the opportunity to be involved with organizations who are at the bleeding edge of what they are doing and just incredibly innovative in their approach to doing business […] I’ve been really fortunate to work with a number of quite successful organizations at different phases in their life cycle and I think that’s given me an understanding of what works and what doesn’t.”

Going forward, Simmons will be managing the progress of transforming lead-loan operational processes and focusing on the company’s transition to a fully digital-enabled lending platform.

“To transform anything successfully is an exercise of effective change management, and there’s a real art to doing that right,” Simmons notes. “It’s not just doing things better, it’s how you communicate to people, how you do it in the right sequencing, how you get the right team together to affect things in the right way.”

BFS Capital Surpasses $2 Billion in Financing

BFS Capital announced this morning that it has exceeded $2 billion in financing to over 22,000 small businesses across the United States, Canada and the UK.

“This is a major originations milestone,” said Mark Ruddock, CEO of BFS Capital. “We’re incredibly proud to see these investments take root, as BFS Capital continues to solidify its position as a central source for financing small businesses and their everyday capital needs.”

BFS Capital provides business loans and MCA deals from $5,000 to $500,000 to a wide variety of merchants. In 2018, fourth quarter originations were the highest ever in the company’s 17-year history. And third quarter originations also represented the best third quarter in the company’s history.

“In 2018 we enhanced our sales and marketing programs and made significant advances in our underwriting models so that we could better serve small businesses,” Ruddock said.

Ruddock also said that they are constantly thinking of ways to be better partners to the ISOs. He said that they plan to speed up the process from lead to loan by 30% this year, so that, with continued improvements in technology, approvals can take a matter of minutes and eventually happen instantaneously. Currently, they make decisions within a matter of hours.

“We’re also trying to communicate more clearly with [our ISO partners] about what sorts of merchants we are more likely to fund than not, so that they can be more efficient themselves,” Ruddock said.

Apart from accelerating speed in approval time for certain financing, Ruddock said that BFS also excels in serving customers that he calls “diamonds in the rough,” or businesses that sometimes even other alternative lenders will reject because they don’t understand them.

“BFS will very often be in a position to look at a company that perhaps might look complicated to others, and be able to say ‘Yes, this is a deal that we will do,’” Ruddock said.

This process is a little less automated as it requires more creative thinking on the part of their underwriting team, Ruddock said. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Coral Springs, FL, BFS also has offices in New York, California and the UK.