Related Headlines
| 08/05/2025 | LightSpeed: $100M in MCAs on bal. sheet |
| 02/09/2025 | Lightspeed accelerates MCA biz |
| 01/04/2024 | Lightspeed: 'Our MCA biz is growing' |
| 06/21/2023 | Lightspeed expands MCAs to UK, AUS, NZ, QC |
| 02/02/2023 | Lightspeed's MCA business is growing |
Stories
LightSpeed Capital Has Over $100M in MCAs on Balance Sheet
August 5, 2025LightSpeed Capital, the MCA division of LightSpeed Commerce, has over $100M in merchant cash advances on its balance sheet, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings report. The POS company reported that LightSpeed Capital’s revenue grew 34% year-over-year.
The company’s balance-sheet-driven approach has made them relatively conservative and cautious with originations growth. For example, in the preceding quarter, Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani said “There is a lot of opportunity. We can move faster if we wanted to. When we look at our peers, for example, they are giving out 1% of their [Gross Transaction Volume] in merchant cash advance. Lightspeed is well below that. 1% of our GTV would be almost $1 billion in merchant cash advance. So when we think about the opportunity, it’s there. It’s just that in this macro, we want to move carefully on a product like Capital. Like I mentioned earlier, our default rates are in the very low single digits, and we want to keep it there.”
Lightspeed: Potential to do up to $1B in Merchant Cash Advances
June 15, 2025Lightspeed may have only done $45 million in MCAs in FY 2025 but the point-of-sale company is continuing to grow that particular lucrative segment of its business conservatively, and possibly far below its full potential.
“There is a lot of opportunity. We can move faster if we wanted to,” said Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani during the company’s most recent earnings call. “When we look at our peers, for example, they are giving out 1% of their [Gross Transaction Volume] in merchant cash advance. Lightspeed is well below that. 1% of our GTV would be almost $1 billion in merchant cash advance. So when we think about the opportunity, it’s there. It’s just that in this macro, we want to move carefully on a product like Capital. Like I mentioned earlier, our default rates are in the very low single digits, and we want to keep it there.”
Lightspeed estimates its MCA program will grow by 30% in FY 2026. Part of the reason the company has grown its MCA business so conservatively is that it funds 100% of them on balance sheet.
The company advertises that MCA payments are enabled by either split or ACH.
Lightspeed Accelerates Growth of its MCA Business
February 9, 2025Lightspeed Capital accelerated the growth of its principal issued for its merchant cash advance program, the company shared in its latest quarterly earnings report. Normally the company has more to say about this division but its attention was focused on an “executing a full transformation plan.”
As part of its previously-announced strategic review, the Company conducted an in-depth evaluation of its portfolio, including market attractiveness, competitive dynamics, and its right-to-win as well as evaluating the best ownership structure to navigate Lightspeed through a transformation. The Company has already set its transformation plan in motion, focusing on growth in retail in North America and hospitality in Europe, both leading growth engines, with a strategic focus on expanding locations and increasing software and payments ARPU, with the other business areas optimized for efficiency and aimed at driving a maximum profitability for the whole business.
The Company-wide transformation to deliver on the new strategy will focus on:
- Go-to-market: enhancing Lightspeed’s go-to-market strategy with targeted outbound efforts, field sales and local marketing expansion, and verticalized execution to maximize efficiency and improve win rates, including deepening supplier integration in focus verticals and deploying AI-driven customer acquisition across retail in North America;
- Product & Technology: investments focused on key growth areas—enhancing inventory management, forecasting, and supplier integration for retail in North America, while optimizing operations, guest experience, and analytics for hospitality in Europe;
- Capital Allocation: transformation initiatives to free up capital for investment in growth areas; and
- Share Repurchase: a share repurchase program to return up to $400 million in cash to shareholders, including the immediate execution of approximately $100 million3 under our current authorization, plus an additional $300 million, in each case subject to market conditions.
Lightspeed: ‘MCAs continue to be popular’
December 10, 2024
“Lightspeed Capital revenue grew to $9.3 million from $4.2 million in Q2 of last year, up 121% year over year as the program continues to be popular with our customers,”” said Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani. “Lightspeed Capital offers fast access to capital and automatic repayment through Lightspeed Payments.”
“Overall, Lightspeed generated $277M in revenue for FY Q2 2025 of which only $9.3M was attributed to their MCA business (less than 3.5%). Still, the company says the extreme gross margins are creating a material impact for the business.
“We’re definitely seeing an impact from Lightspeed Capital,” Bakshani said. “I mean when we think about the numbers, and you’ll see them in our disclosure docs, we’re looking at high single digits per quarter in revenue. But because that comes in at 95% plus gross margins, it definitely has an impact already in offsetting both the residuals moving over to payments and also just more, more of our revenue coming in at Lightspeed Payments gross margin.”
Lightspeed is a publicly traded retail POS company with a current market cap of $3.68B CAD and $105M in MCAs on its balance sheet.
Lightspeed: MCAs continue to grow with healthy margins
August 1, 2024
Lightspeed Commerce, a global e-commerce platform for merchants, once again talked about its MCA business in the latest quarterly earnings call despite it only accounting for 3% of the company’s overall revenue.
“[Lightspeed] Capital continues to grow with healthy margins,” said CFO Asha Bakshani. She added that it was very popular with customers but that it was still a nascent product offering for them. They’ve consistently said over the last couple years that they intend to grow this business cautiously, which they have done. The company currently holds $87.5M worth of MCAs on its balance sheet.
“Lightspeed capital offers fast access to capital and an automatic repayment method to Lightspeed Payments,” Bakshani said. “Merchants are leveraging this offering to finance inventory purchases, upgrade equipment, and expand their overall business.”
Lightspeed: ‘We plan to grow our MCA business cautiously’
June 6, 2024Global e-commerce platform Lightspeed continues to see a lot of potential in the merchant cash advance space. It more than doubled the cash expended to originate MCAs quarter-on-quarter to $18.5M up from $8.3M.
“I’ll start by saying that when we look at our peers that are doing capital and have been doing capital for a long time as a part of their business, they’re giving out about 1% of their GTV (Gross Transaction Value) in merchant cash advance,” said Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani in the Q4 2024 FY earnings call. “If we were to do 1% of our GTV, that’s almost $1 billion in merchant cash advance. So, definitely a ton of growth potential for this business.”
Bakshani continued by saying:
What we plan on doing is growing this business very cautiously given the macro. As we’ve said before, we are in the perfect position to underwrite our customers for capital, determine the creditworthiness of our customers and how much they should be underwritten for, and we’ve had great success with the business so far, but again, growing it in a very steady and cautious manner. We don’t expect that we would use our balance sheet for several hundred million of merchant cash advances underwritten.
We’re already in talks with partners. There are lots of interested parties because they recognize that Lightspeed is in a great spot to underwrite customers. So, we’re already in talks with partners today. We have at any given point in time, $50 million to $60 million outstanding from this merchant cash advance business, and that may go up to $100 million, but we’re not planning to leverage our balance sheet for much more than that.
Lightspeed’s Merchant Cash Advance Business is Accelerating
February 8, 2024“Our capital business has grown—it’s doubled from over a year ago and we expect that trajectory to continue. And capital revenue comes in at a 95% gross margin,” said Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani in the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call.
Although Lightspeed is more widely known as a global e-commerce platform, analysts have been encouraging the company to ramp up its merchant cash advance business because of the considerable margins it produces. As such Lightspeed through Lightspeed Capital has been doing just that. And not just in the US. “We launched Lightspeed Capital in France, the Netherlands and Belgium this quarter, and Germany shortly after the quarter, expanding our global footprint for this high-margin offering,” said company CEO Jean Paul Chauvet.
Origination growth has been slow, however, because the company has been concerned with the potential impact it will have on its own available operating cash. This fear seems slightly overblown as Lightspeed reported having $750M in cash as of the close of the most recent quarter and said that merchant cash advance originations were responsible for using up only $8.3M in cash during the quarter.
Lightspeed Capital: ‘we intend to grow our MCA business’
January 4, 2024After facing criticism from stock analysts for not doing enough merchant cash advances, Lightspeed CFO Asha Bakshani said that the POS company intends to grow its MCA business. The comment came during the company’s fiscal Q2 2024 earnings call, where it revealed that it had originated $10.1M in MCAs for the quarter.
Bakshani noted, however, that by doing these deals on balance sheet, it has to balance its origination goals with its available working capital. Revenue on its MCAs were up 120% YoY.
One interesting detail is that the company revealed that its gross margin on MCAs is 95%.
Lightspeed is publicly traded on the NYSE under LSPD.
See Post... lightspeed.... |
See Post... lightspeed's lps, (regardless of whether or not they care about sexual harassment per se)-- directly suffered a material financial loss (2% of stitch $7 billion ipo) due to the ac... |
See Post... lightspeed. i met him when he was at bain years ago. his brother was at a consumer focused pe shop at the time. i have spoken with harris, but never met him. the lps must be barking pretty hard on ... |
