Born To Borrow
August 26, 2019
Consumer debt has surpassed $4 trillion for the first time, and it’s continuing its ascent into the stratosphere. It’s getting big enough to trigger the next recession, and financial education isn’t changing the underlying consumer behavior.
Personal loan balances shot up $21 billion last year to close 2018 at a record high of $138 billion, according to a TransUnion Industry Insights Report. The average unsecured personal loan debt per borrower was $8,402 as of the end of last year, TransUnion says.
Much of the increase in consumer debt has emerged with the rise of fintechs— such as Personal Capital, Lending Club, Kabbage and Wealthfront—notes Rutger van Faassen, vice president of consumer lending at a U.S. office of London-based Informa Financial Intelligence, a company that advises financial institutions and operates offices in 43 countries.
In fact, Fintech loans now comprise 38% of all unsecured personal loan balances, a larger market share than any of the more traditional institutions, the TransUnion report notes. Banks’ market share has decreased from 40% in 2013 to 28% today, while credit unions’ share has declined from 31% to 21% during the same time period, TransUnion says.
Fintechs are also gaining at the expense of the home- equity market, van Faassen maintains. “They’re eating away at some of the balance that maybe historically was in home-equity loans,” he says. While total debt is increasing, the amount that’s in home equity loans is actually shrinking, he notes.
What’s more, fintechs are changing the way Americans think about credit, van Faassen continues. Until recently, consumers experienced a two step process. First, they identified a need or desire, like a washer and dryer or home renovation. Realizing they didn’t have the cash to fund those dreams, they took the second step by approaching a financial institution for a loan.
If consumers chose a home equity line of credit to procure the cash, they had to wait for something like 40 days from the beginning of the application process to the time they got the money, van Faassen says. “You really had to be sure you wanted something,” or the process wasn’t worth the effort, he says.
Fintechs have removed a lot of the “pain” from that process, van Faassen says. With algorithms helping to assess the risk that an applicant can’t or won’t repay a debt and digitization easing access to financial records, fintechs can quickly evaluate and make a decision on an application. Tech also helps assess applicants with thin or nonexistent credit files, which broadens the clientele while also contributing to total consumer debt.
Meanwhile, mimicking an age old process in the car business, merchants are beginning to make credit available at the point of sale. Walmart, for example, recently signed a deal with Affirm, a Silicon Valley lender, to provide point-of-sale loans of three, six or 12 months to finance purchases ranging from $150 to $2,000. Shoppers apply for the loans by providing basic information on their mobile phones and don’t have to talk to anyone in person about their finances. Affirm’s CEO Max Levchin has called the underwriting process ‘basically instant.”
If that convenience comes at too high a cost, it doesn’t matter much because borrowers can later find another finance vehicle with better terms, van Faassen says. “So if I get the money at the point of sale, which might have been zero for six months and then it steps up to 20-plus percent, there is no problem with refinancing that debt,” he says.
But there’s a downside to the ease of borrowing, van Faassen cautions. It could trigger the next recession, even though unemployment remains low. Despite modest recent gains, wages have remained nearly stagnant for years. That means an increase in interest rates could lessen consumers’ ability to pay off their debts, he says.
Meanwhile, at least some large mortgage lenders have begun running into problems, a situation that bears an eerie resemblance to the beginning of the Great Recession that struck near the end of 2007, notes a report in luckbox magazine, a publication for investors. Stearns Holding, the parent of Sterns Lending, the nation’s 20th largest mortgage lender, filed for bankruptcy protection just after the July 4 holiday, the luckbox article says.
Another worrisome sign with regard to the possibility of recession is emerging as institutional investors buy into the peer to peer lending market. Institutional investors bought batches of sliced and diced home mortgage securities that helped bring about the Great Depression.
Then there’s the nagging notion that the country and the world are becoming ripe for recession simply because no downturns have occurred for a while. Talk to that effect was circulating at the recent LendIt Conference, van Faassen observes. Fintech executives often come from the banking world and thus still find themselves haunted by the specter of the Great Recession. That’s why they’re already beginning to tighten underwriting for consumer credit van Faassen says.
One difference this time around lies in the fact that nothing about the increase in consumer debt appears to be hidden from public view, van Faassen says. Before, investors fell victim to the mistaken impression that risky mortgage-backed securities were rated AAA when they weren’t.
Plus, the increase in peer-to-peer lending could keep the economy going even if big financial institutions freeze the way they did during the Great Recession, van Faassen notes. “Hopefully, with the new structures that are out there, we can keep liquidity going,” he says. That raises key questions for the alternative small- business funding community. The industry came into being partly as a response to banks’ tightened lending policies during the Great Recession, so perhaps a downturn isn’t such a bad thing for the sector. But a downturn for the economy in general could cripple merchants’ ability to pay off debt.
But all bets are off during hard times. In the last recession the conventional wisdom that consumers make their mortgage payment before paying other bills was turned on its head. Instead of making the house payment—because foreclosure would take several months—people were choosing to make their car payments so they could get to work. Nobody really knows ahead of time what will happen in a recession, van Faassen notes.
After all, economics relies to at least some degree upon the often-irrational financial decisions of the general public. And science demonstrates that it’s no easy task to convince consumers to handle their cash, credit and debt responsibly, says Mariel Beasley, principal at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University and Co-Director of the Common Cents Lab (CCL), which works to improve the financial behavior of low- to moderate-income households.
“For the last 30 years in the U.S. there has been a huge emphasis on increasing financial education, financial literacy,” says Beasley. But it hasn’t really worked. “Content-based financial education classes only accounted for .1 percent variation in financial behavior,” she continues. “We like to joke that it’s not zero but it’s very, very close.” And that’s the average. Online and classroom financial education influenced lower-income people even less.
Lots of other factors influence financial behavior, Beasley notes. How much a person saves, for example, depends upon how much they make, what their bank tells them and what practices they encountered at home as children, she says. The CCL has been finding out some other things, too.
In one example of its findings, it discovered that putting an amount for a minimum payment on a credit card decreases how much consumers pay. That happens because listing a minimum payment amount creates an anchor, and borrowers adjust their payment upward from there, Beasley says. If the card carrier doesn’t specify a minimum, consumers tend to adjust downward from the full amount they owe. “It turns out to be incredibly powerful,” she contends.
It’s the kind of problem that shows financial institutions haven’t devised many systems to reduce consumer debt by speeding up repayment, Beasley maintains. In this example, suggesting higher payments would prompt some consumers to pay off their debt more quickly.
In an exception to standard practice, a credit card company called Petal does exactly that by placing a slider on its website to help borrowers determine the amount of their payment, she notes.
Meanwhile, people tend to base financial decisions on the examples they see other people set, Beasley says. Problems arise with that tendency because they may see one neighbor spending money freely to dine in restaurants but don’t see any of the many neighbors eating at home to save money. They see a neighbor driving a new car but don’t know how much that neighbor is setting aside for retirement.
That’s why most people overestimate how much others spend to dine out in restaurants, Beasley says. When shown the error, most reduce their own spending in restaurants, she notes, but within two weeks their behavior returns to its original level, their newfound knowledge “drowned out by the noise in the world,” she says.
That’s not good for consumers or small businesses, but help is on the way, according to John Thompson, chief program officer of the Financial Health Network, a national nonprofit research and consulting firm that works with financial institutions and other companies to improve consumer financial health.
As part of that mission, the Network has formulated procedures to assess the financial health of individuals and small businesses, Thompson says. It’s too early to say whether the tool will help with loan underwriting, he notes, but financial wellness determines the ability to pay back debt, he notes.
The Network also publishes the U.S. Financial Health Pulse, which recently pronounced just 28% of Americans financially healthy, meaning that they have sufficient income, savings and planning to handle an unexpected expense and act on the decisions they make. About 55% are relegated to various stages of coping, and 17% find themselves in a vulnerable state.
So Americans aren’t feeling financially secure, and they’ve borrowed $4 trillion to reach that unenviable state. They’re borrowing more and learning virtually nothing useful about their financial errors. Thompson has a way of summing up the situation. “It’s crazy,” he says.
Gold Rush: Merchant Cash Advances Are Still Hot
August 18, 2019
Last year, when Kevin Frederick struck out on his own to form his own catering company in Annapolis, the veteran caterer knew that he’d need a food trailer for his business to succeed.
He reckoned that he had a good case for a $50,000 small-business loan. The Annapolis-based entrepreneur boasted stellar personal credit, $30,000 in the bank, and a track record that included 35 years of experience in his chosen profession. More impressively, his newly minted company—Chesapeake Celebrations Catering—was on a trajectory to haul in $350,000 in revenues over just eight months of operations in 2018. And, after paying himself a salary, he cleared $60,000 in pre-tax profit.
But Frederick’s business-credit profile was so thin that no bank or business funder would talk to him. So woeful was his lack of business credit, Frederick reports, that his only financing option was paying a broker a $2,000 finder’s fee for a high-interest loan.
Luckily, he says, everything changed when he discovered Nav, an online, credit-data aggregator and financial matchmaker.
Based in Utah, Nav had him spiff up his business credit with Dun & Bradstreet, a top rating agency and a Nav business partner. This was accomplished with a bankcard issued to Frederick’s business by megabank J.P. Morgan Chase. Soon afterward, he says, Nav steered him to Kapitus (formerly Strategic Funding Source), a New York-based lender and merchant cash advance firm that provided some $23,000 in funding.
“They led me in the right direction,” Frederick says of Nav. “A lady there (at Nav) helped me with my credit, warning me that the credit card I’d been using had an effect on my personal credit. Then she led me to Kapitus, all probably within a week.”
Now, Frederick has his food trailer. He reports that its total cost—$14,000 for the trailer, which came “with a concession window, mill-finished walls, and flooring” plus $43,000 in renovations—amounted to $57,000. Equipped with a full kitchen—including refrigeration, sinks, ovens, and a stove—the food trailer can be towed to weddings, reunions, and the myriad parties he caters in the Delmarva Peninsula. In addition, Frederick can also park the trailer at fairgrounds and serve seafood, barbeque, and other viands to the lucrative festival market.
Meanwhile, the caterer’s funders are happy to have him as their new customer. The people at Kapitus, to whom he is making daily payments (not counting weekends and holidays), are especially grateful. “Nav provides a valuable service,” says Seth Broman, vice-president of business development at Kapitus. “They know how to turn coal into diamonds,”
Nav does not charge small businesses for its services. As it gathers data from credit reporting services with which it has partnerships—Experian, TransUnion, Dun and Bradstreet, Equifax—and employs additional metrics, such as cashflow gleaned from an entrepreneur’s bank accounts, Nav earns fees from credit card issuers, lenders and MCA firms.
The company has close ties to financial technology companies that include Kabbage and OnDeck, and also collaborates with MCA funders such as National Funding, Rapid Finance, FundBox, and Kapitus. “We give lenders and funders better-qualified merchants at a lower cost of client acquisition,” says Caton Hanson, Nav’s general counsel and co-founder, adding: “They don’t have to spend as much money on leads.”
As banks have increasingly shunned small-business lending in the decade since the financial crisis, and as the economy has snapped back with a prolonged recovery, alternative funders—particularly unlicensed companies offering lightly regulated, high-cost merchant cash advances (MCAs)—have been piling into the business.
And service companies like Nav—which is funded by nearly $100 million in venture capital and which reports aiding more than 500,000 small businesses since it was founded in 2012—are thriving alongside the booming alternative-funding industry.
Over the past five years, the MCA industry’s financings have been growing by 20% annually, according to 2016 projections by Bryant Park Capital, a Manhattan-based, boutique investment bank. BPC’s specialty finance division handles mergers and acquisitions as well as debt-and-equity capital raising across multiple industries and is one of the few Wall Street firms with an MCA-industry practice. By BPC’s estimates, the MCA industry will have more than doubled its small business funding to $19.2 billion by year- end 2019, up from $8.6 billion in 2014.
Bankrolled by a broad assortment of hedge funds, private equity firms, family offices, and assorted multimillionaire and billionaire investors on the qui vive for outsized returns on their liquid assets, the MCA industry promises a 20%-80% profit rate, reports David Roitblat, president of Better Accounting Solutions, a New York accountancy specializing in the MCA industry. Based on doing the books for some 30 MCA firms, Roitblat reports that the range in profit margins depends on the terms of contracts and a funder’s underwriting skills.
The numerical size and growth of the MCA industry is hard to ascertain, reports Sean Murray, editor of AltFinanceDaily (this publication), which tracks trends in the industry and sponsors several major conferences. “So much is anecdotal,” Murray says.
Even so, the evidence that MCA companies are proliferating—and prospering—is undeniable. Over the past two years, AltFinanceDaily’s events, which experience substantial attendance from the MCA industry, have consistently sold out, requiring the events to be moved to larger venues. In Miami, attendance in January this year topped 400-plus attendees, Murray reports, roughly double the crowd that packed the Gale Hotel in 2018.
Similarly, the May, 2019, Broker Fair in New York at the Roosevelt Hotel drew more than 700 participants compared with the sellout crowd of roughly 400 last year in Brooklyn. (Despite ample notice that this year’s Broker Fair at the Roosevelt was sold out and advance tickets were required, as many as 40-50 latecomers sought entry and, unfortunately, had to be turned away.)
The upsurge of capital and the swelling number of entrants into the MCA business has all the earmarks of a gold rush. “Everybody and his brother is trying to get a piece of the action,” asserts Roitblat, the New York accountant.
And there are two ways to hit paydirt in a gold rush. One way is to prospect for gold. But another way is to sell picks and shovels, tents, food, and supplies to the prospectors. “If you can find a way to service the gold rush, you can make a lot of money,” says Kathryn Rudie Harrigan, a management professor and business-strategy expert at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. “It’s like profiteering in wartime.”
As Professor Harrigan suggests, cashing in on the gold rush by servicing it has parallels across multiple industries. Consider the case of Charles River Laboratories, which has capitalized on the rapid development of the biotechnology industry over the past few decades.
As scientists searched for biologics to battle diseases like cancer and AIDS, the Boston-area company began producing experimental animals known as “transgenic mice.” Informally known as “smart mice,” Charles River’s test animals are specially designed to carry human genes, aiding investigators in their understanding of gene function and genetic responses to diseases and therapeutic interventions. (The smart mouse’s antibodies can also be harvested. “Seven out of the eleven monoclonal antibody drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2006 and 2011,” according to biotechnology.com, “were derived from transgenic mice.”)
In the MCA version of the gold rush, a bevy of law and accounting firms, debt-collection agencies and credit-approval firms, among other service providers, have either sprung to life to undergird the new breed of alternative funder or added expertise to suit the industry’s wants and needs. (This cohort has been joined, moreover, by a superstructure of Washington, D.C.-based trade associations and lobbyists that have been growing like expansion teams in a professional sports league. But their story will have to wait for another day.)
Rather than being exploitative, supporting companies serve as a vital mainstay in an industry’s ecosystem, notes Alfred Watkins, a former World Bank economist and Washington, D.C.-based consultant: “A gold miner can’t mine,” he says, “unless he has a tent and a pickaxe.”
And in the high-risk, high-reward MCA industry, which can have significant default rates depending on the risk model, many funders can’t fund if they don’t have reliable debt collection. Many of the bigger companies, says Paul Boxer, who works on the funding side of the industry, have the capability of collecting on their own. But for many others—particularly the smaller players in the industry—it’s necessary to hire an outside firm.
One of the more widely known collectors for the MCA industry is Kearns, Brinen & Monaghan where Mark LeFevre is president and chief executive. The Dover (Del.)- based firm, LeFevre says, first added MCA funders to its client roster in 2012; but it has only been since 2014 that “business really took off.”
LeFevre won’t say just how many MCA firms have contracted with him, but he estimates that his firm has scaled up its staff 35%-40% over the past five years to meet the additional MCA workload. The industry, LeFevre adds, “is one of the top-growth industries I’ve seen in the 36 years that I’ve been in business.”
He also says, “People in the MCA industry know a lot about where to put money, but collections are not one of their strong points. They need to get a professional. It gives them the free time to make more money while we go in behind them and collect.”
If repeated dunning fails to elicit a satisfactory response, KBM has several collection strategies that strengthen its hand. The big three, LeFevre says, are “negotiation, identifying assets, and litigation.” He adds: “We have a huge database of attorneys who do nothing but file suit on commercial debt internationally. Then we can enforce a judgment. You don’t want someone who just makes a few phone calls.”
Because business has become so competitive, LeFevre says, he won’t discuss his fee schedule. As to KBM’s success rate, he says no tidy figure is available either, but asserts: “Our checks sent to our clients are more than most agencies because of our proprietary collection process.”
Jordan Fein, chief executive at Greenbox Capital in Miami and a KBM client told AltFinanceDaily: “We work with them. They’re organized and communicate well and they know to collect. They’re on the expensive side, though. I’ve got other agencies that I use that are cheaper.”
Debt-collection firm Merel Corp, a spinoff from the Tamir Law Group in New York, might be a lower-cost alternative. Formed in just the past 18 months to service the growing MCA industry, Merel typically takes 15%-25% of whatever “obligation” it can collect, says Levi Ainsworth, co-chief operating officer.
A successful collection, Ainsworth asserts, really begins with the underwriting process and attention to detail by the funders. “Instead of coming in at the end,” he says, “we try to prevent problems at the start of the process.”
For an MCA firm dealing with an excessive number of defaults, Merel sometimes places one of its employees with the funder to handle “pre-defaults,” for which it charges a lower fee. The collections firm has also built a reputation for not relying on a “confession of judgment.” Now that COJs have been outlawed for out-of-state collections in New York State, Merel’s skills could be more in demand.
Better Accounting Solutions, which has its offices on Wall Street, is another service-provider promising to lighten the workload of MCA firms by providing back-office support. The company is headed by Roitblat, a 36-year- old former rabbinical student turned tax-and-accounting entrepreneur. Since he founded the company with two part-time employees in 2011, it’s ballooned to some 70 employees.
Roitblat does not have all of his firm’s eggs in one MCA basket. His firm handles tax, accounting and bookkeeping work for law firms, the fashion industry, restaurants and architectural firms. Even so, he says, thirty MCA clients— or more than half his clientele—rely on the firm’s expertise, three of whom were just added in June. His best month was January, 2018, when six funders contracted for his services. “Growth in the MCA industry has been explosive,” he says.
MCA accounting work has its own vagaries and oddities. For example, because of the industry’s high default rate, Roitblat notes, a 10%-slice of every merchant’s payment is funneled into a “default reserve account.” And when an actual default occurs, credits are moved from the receivables account to the default reserve account.
Roitblat takes pride that his firm’s MCA work has passed audits from respected accounting firms like Friedman, Cohen, Taubman and Marcum LLP. Moreover, he has helped clients uncover internal fraud and, in one instance, spotted costly flaws in a business model. An early MCA client, Roitblat says, had no idea that “he was losing close to $100,000 a month by spending on Google ads.”
Better Accounting also keeps its rates low. The firm typically assigns a junior accountant to handle clients’ accounts while a senior manager oversees his or her work. “He (Roitblat) does a fantastic job,” says David Lax, managing partner of Orange Advance, a Lakewood (N.J.)-based MCA firm. “They understand the MCA business. And even if your business is small, they can set up the infrastructure and do the work more economically and efficiently than you can. You’d have to create the position of comptroller or senior-level accountant,” Lax adds, “to equal their work.”
Top-notch competence and low rates, Lax says, are not the only reasons he often refers Roitblat’s firm to fellow MCA companies. “The only thing better than their work,” he says, “is the people themselves.”
Whether it’s oil and gas, banking and real estate, construction, health care or high-technology—you name it—lawyers have an important role across nearly every industry. So too with the MCA industry where, as has been shown, there is an especially high demand for attorneys skilled at winning debt-collection cases.
To hear Greenbox’s Fein tell it, a skilled lawyer handling debt collection can write his or her own ticket. A talented attorney, he says, not only retrieves lost money and prevents losses, but enables the funder to “offer the product cheaper than the competition.
“We use a ton of attorneys in 35 states in the U.S. and in Canada,” Fein adds, “and you have no idea how many attorneys we go through until we find a good one.”
Until recently, much of the MCA industry’s success has resulted from a hands-off, laissez faire legal and regulatory environment—particularly the legal interpretation that a merchant cash advance is not a loan. The industry has also benefited from the fact that most credit regulation focused on consumer credit and not on business and commercial financings.
But now, as the MCA industry is maturing and showing up on the radar screens of state legislatures, Congress, regulatory agencies, and the courts, there is heightening demand for legal counsel. In just the past 12 months, California passed a truth-in-lending statute requiring MCA firms not only to clearly state their terms, but to translate the short-term funding costs of MCAs into an annual percentage rate. The state of New York, as has been noted, passed legislation restricting the use of COJs.
Moreover, notes Mark Dabertin, special counsel at Pepper Hamilton, a top national law firm based in Philadelphia, the state of New Jersey is contemplating licensing MCA practitioners. The Minnesota Court of Appeals recently determined in Anderson v. Koch that, because of a “call provision” in a funding contract, a merchant cash advance was actually a loan.
And, Dabertin warns, the Federal Trade Commission, which has the authority to treat a merchant cash advance as a consumer transaction—replete with the full panoply of consumer disclosures and protections—is training its gunsights on the industry. “On May 23,” Dabertin reports in a memo to clients, “the FTC launched an investigation into potentially unfair or deceptive practices in the small business financing industry, including by merchant cash advance providers.”
These pressures from government and the courts will only make doing business more costly and drive up the industry’s barriers to entry. Failing to stay legal, moreover, could not only result in punitive court judgments, but render an MCA firm vulnerable to legal action by their investors.
“It’s inevitable that the industry will evolve,” Dabertin says, and firms in the industry will have to self-police. “They will need to hire counsel and a compliance staff,” he adds. “You can’t just do it by the seat of your pants.”
The 2019 Top Small Business Funders By Revenue
August 14, 2019The below chart ranks several companies in the non-bank small business financing space by revenue over the last 5 years. The data is primarily drawn from reports submitted to the Inc. 5000 list, public earnings statements, or published media reports. It is not comprehensive. Companies for which no data is publicly available are excluded. Want to add your figures? Email Sean@debanked.com
| Company | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 |
| Square | $3,298,177,000 | $2,214,253,000 | $1,708,721,000 | $1,267,118,000 | $850,192,000 |
| OnDeck | $398,376,000 | $350,950,000 | $291,300,000 | $254,700,000 | $158,100,000 |
| Kabbage | $200,000,000+* | $171,784,000 | $97,461,712 | $40,193,000 | |
| Global Lending Services | $232,200,000 | $125,700,000 | |||
| Bankers Healthcare Group | $220,300,000 | $160,300,000 | $93,825,129 | ||
| National Funding | $121,300,000 | $94,500,000 | $75,693,096 | $59,075,878 | $39,048,959 |
| Forward Financing | $75,500,000 | $42,100,000 | $28,305,078 | ||
| ApplePie Capital | $69,700,000 | ||||
| Fora Financial | $68,600,000 | $50,800,000 | $41,590,720 | $33,974,000 | $26,932,581 |
| Reliant Funding | $64,800,000 | $55,400,000 | $51,946,000 | $11,294,044 | $9,723,924 |
| Envision Capital Group | $32,700,000 | ||||
| Expansion Capital Group | $31,300,300 | $23,400,000 | |||
| SmartBiz Loans | $23,600,000 | ||||
| 1 Global Capital | bankruptcy | $22,600,000 | |||
| IOU Financial | $19,200,000 | $17,415,096 | $17,400,527 | $11,971,148 | $6,160,017 |
| Quicksilver Capital | $16,500,000 | ||||
| Channel Partners Capital | $23,000,000 | $14,500,000 | $2,207,927 | $4,013,608 | |
| Lendr | $16,500,000 | $11,800,000 | |||
| Lighter Capital | $16,000,000 | $11,900,000 | $6,364,417 | $4,364,907 | |
| United Capital Source | $9,735,350 | $8,465,260 | $3,917,193 | ||
| Fundera | $15,600,000 | $8,800,000 | |||
| US Business Funding | $14,800,000 | $9,100,000 | $5,794,936 | ||
| Wellen Capital | $12,200,000 | $13,200,000 | $15,984,688 | ||
| PIRS Capital | $11,900,000 | ||||
| Nav | $10,300,000 | $5,900,000 | $2,663,344 | ||
| P2Binvestor | $10,000,000 | ||||
| Seek Business Capital | $8,800,000 | ||||
| Fund&Grow | $7,500,000 | $5,700,000 | $4,082,130 | ||
| Funding Merchant Source | $7,500,000 | ||||
| Shore Funding Solutions | $5,000,000 | $4,300,000 | |||
| StreetShares | $4,967,426 | $3,701,210 | $647,119 | $239,593 | |
| FitSmallBusiness.com | $3,000,000 | ||||
| Eagle Business Credit | $3,600,000 | $2,600,000 | |||
| Everlasting Capital | $2,500,000 | $2,100,000 | |||
| Swift Capital | acquired by PayPal | $88,600,000 | $51,400,000 | $27,540,900 | |
| Blue Bridge Financial | $6,569,714 | $5,470,564 | |||
| Fast Capital 360 | $6,264,924 | ||||
| Cashbloom | $5,404,123 | $4,804,112 | $3,941,819 | ||
| Priority Funding Solutions | $2,599,931 |
Funding Circle Originated $377M of US Loans in First Two Quarters of 2019
August 8, 2019Funding Circle originated $377M of loans in the US in the first six months of 2019, according to their latest public report. The company said that “growth was proactively controlled” and that they tightened higher risk band lending and increased prices. They’ve now loaned more than $2B cumulatively in the US since inception and their growth is being led by “new borrowers” that are being lured away from traditional lenders.
Funding Circle still lags behind PayPal, OnDeck, Kabbage, Square Capital, and Amazon in the US in loan origination volume, according to the AltFinanceDaily small business finance rankings. Its closest competitors by volume are BlueVine, National Funding, and Kapitus.
PayPal Begins Offering Business Loans in Canada
July 28, 2019
PayPal has extended its popular working capital business loan program to Canada, according to company CEO Dan Schulman.
“This quarter, we began offering our PayPal business loan product to PayPal merchants in Canada, allowing them to access financing to build and sustain their businesses,” he said during the Q2 conference call. “This follows the expansion of our business financing solutions to Germany in Q4 2018 and in Mexico earlier this year in partnership with Mexican lending platform Konfio.”
AltFinanceDaily ranked PayPal as the leading alternative small business finance company by originations in 2018. They are followed by OnDeck, Kabbage, Square, and Amazon.
Are The Bankers Taking Over Fintech?
June 27, 2019
For Rochelle Gorey, the chief executive and co-founder of SpringFour, a “social impact” fintech company, mingling with industry movers and shakers at this year’s LendIt Fintech Conference was just what the doctor ordered. “I went mainly for the networking opportunities,” Gorey told AltFinanceDaily.
SpringFour, which is headquartered in Chicago, works with banks and financial institutions in the 50 states to get distressed borrowers back on track with their debt payments. It does this by digitally linking debtors with governmental and nonprofit agencies that promote “financial wellness.
The indebted parties—more than a million of whom had referrals that were arranged by Gorey’s tech-savvy company last year—constitute not only household consumers but also commercial borrowers. “Small businesses face the same issues of cash flow as consumers, and their business and personal income are often combined,” she says. “If their financial situation is precarious, it’s super-hard to get credit, a line of credit, or a business loan.”
Although Gorey felt “overwhelmed” at first by the throng of 4,000 conference-goers at Moscone Center West in San Francisco—roughly the same number as attended last year, conference organizers assert— her trepidation was short-lived. It wasn’t too long before she was in circulation and having chance encounters and serendipitous interactions, she says, with “all the right people at the workshops and at the tables in the Expo Hall.”
Armed, moreover, with a “networking app” on her mobile phone, Gorey was able to arrange targeted meetings, scoring roughly a dozen, 15-minute tete-a-tetes during the two-day breakout sessions. These included audiences with community bankers, financial technology companies, and “small-dollar” lenders. “And it went both ways,” she says. “I had people reaching out to me”—just about everyone, it seemed, appeared receptive to “finding ways to boost their customers’ financial health.”
Gorey’s success at networking was precisely the experience that the event’s planners had envisioned, says Peter Renton, chairman and co-founder of the LendIt Fintech Conference. Organizers took pains to make schmoozing one of the key features of this year’s gathering. Not only did LendIt provide attendees with a bespoke networking app, but planners scheduled extra time for meet-ups. “We had around 10,000 meetings set up by the app,” Renton says, “about double the number of last year.”
AltFinanceDaily did not attend the LendIt USA conference on the West Coast this year. But the publication sought out more than a half-dozen attendees—including several financial technology executives, a leading venture capitalist, a regulatory law expert, and the conference’s top administrators—to gather their impressions. While informal and manifestly unscientific, their responses nonetheless yielded up several salient themes.
The popularity—and effectiveness—of networking was a key takeaway. Most seized the opportunity to rub elbows with influential industry players, learn about the hottest startups, compare notes, and catch up on the state of the industry. Most importantly, the event presented a golden opportunity to make the introductions and connections that could generate dealmaking.
“My goal this year was to strike more partnerships with lenders and fintech companies,” says Levi King, chief executive and co-founder at Utah-based Nav, an online, credit-data aggregator and financial matchmaker for small businesses. “We had great meetings with Fiserv, Amazon, Clover Network (a division of First Data), and MasterCard,” he reports, rattling off the names of prominent financial services companies and fintech platforms.
James Garvey, co-founder and chief executive at Self Lender, an Austin-based fintech that builds creditworthiness for “thin file” consumers who have little or no credit history, said his goal at the conference was both to serve on a panel and “meet as many people as I could.”
Self Lender is in its growth stage following a $10 million, series B round of financing in late 2018 from Altos Ventures and Silverton Partners. Garvey reports having meetings with Bank of America and venture capitalist FTV Capital “over coffee” as well as F-Prime Capital, another venture capitalist. “It’s just about building a relationship,” he said of making connections, “so that at some point, if I’m raising money or want to partner, I can make a deal.”
There was a concerted effort to recognize women, as evidenced by a packed “Women in Fintech” (WIF) luncheon that drew roughly 250 persons, 95% of whom were women. (“Many men are big supporters of women in fintech and we didn’t want to exclude them,” Renton says). The luncheon was preceded by a novel event—a 30-minute, ladies-only “speed-networking” session—which attracted 160 participants, reports Joy Schwartz, president of LendIt Fintech and manager of the women’s programs.
At the luncheon, SpringFour’s Gorey says, “it was empowering just to see lot of women who are senior leaders working in financial services, banks and fintechs.” The keynote speech by Valerie Kay, chief capital officer at Lending Club, was another highlight. “She (Kay) talked about taking risks and going to a fintech startup after 23 years at Morgan Stanley,” Gorey reports, adding: “It was inspiring.”
The women’s luncheon also marked the launch of LendIt’s Women In Fintech mentor program, and presentation of a “Fintech Woman of the Year” award. The recipient was Luvleen Sidhu, president, co-founder and chief strategy officer at BankMobile, a digital division of Customers Bank, based near Philadelphia, which employs 250 persons and boasts two million checking account customers.
I am honored to be the 2019 Fintech Women of the Year and thrilled that @BankMobile won Most Innovative Bank. It’s very exciting to be recognized by @LendIt Fintech with this prestigious award and I congratulate the finalists in all the categories. https://t.co/qjADuKEMrB pic.twitter.com/hFJVFw1fLS
— Luvleen Sidhu (@LuvleenSidhu) April 11, 2019
BankMobile, which also won LendIt’s “Most Innovative Bank” award, has an alliance with Upstart to do consumer lending and a partnership with telecommunications company T-Mobile. Known as T-Mobile Money, the latter service provides T-Mobile customers with access to checking accounts with no minimum balance, no monthly or overdraft fees, and access to 55,000 automated teller machines, also with no fees. (At its website, T-Mobile Money describes itself as a bank and uses the slogan: “Not another bank, a better one.”)
The impressive salute to women notwithstanding, their ranks remained fairly thin: just 733 attendees identified themselves as “female” on their registration forms, LendIt’s Schwartz says, a little more than 18% of total participants. Seventy-five of the 350 total speakers and panelists—or 21%—were female. (Schwartz also reports that another 157 registrants selected “prefer not to say” as their sexual orientation, while 22 checked the box describing themselves as “non-conforming.”)
In LendIt’s defense, AltFinanceDaily, who caters to a similar audience, regularly reviews its readership demographics using several tools. They have consistently indicated that women make up 18% – 23% of the total, in line with what LendIt experienced at its most recent event.
By all accounts, many panels were informative, jampacked and attendees were engaged. King, who moderated a panel on regulatory changes in small business lending, which dealt with such topics as California’s commercial “truth-in-lending” law and controversial “confessions of judgment” laws, says: “They didn’t have to lock the door but the room was pretty full and people seemed to be paying attention. I didn’t see people studying their cellphones.”
The Expo Hall was teeming with budding fintech entrepreneurs, financial services companies and multiple vendors hawking their wares. But as numerous fintechs were angling to forge lucrative symbiotic relationships with banks, some participants—even those who were hailing the conference for its networking and deal-making opportunities—lamented the heavy presence of the establishment.
The banks’ ubiquitousness especially vexed Matthew Burton, a partner at QED Investors, an Arlington, (Va.)-based, venture capital firm and a veteran fintech entrepreneur. Before signing on with QED last year, Burton had been the co-founder of Orchard Platform, an online technology and analytics vendor for fintech and financial services companies which was purchased by fintech lender Kabbage.
Not only did bankers seem to playing a more prominent role at the LendIt conference, Burton notes, but “big four” accounting firm Deloitte had signed on as a major sponsor. “The energy level seemed a bit lower than in past years,” Burton told AltFinanceDaily. “It’s not like people were depressed but it wasn’t bubbling with excitement. A couple of years ago we thought all these new fintechs would replace the banks,” he explains. “Now the discussion is over how to partner and collaborate with banks. It’s not as exciting as when everyone thought banks were dinosaurs.
“I couldn’t really tell if there were more bankers attending this year,” Burton adds, “but it sure felt like it.”
King, the Nav executive, told AltFinanceDaily: “It was a little bit subdued. I don’t know if it was nervousness about the economy or politics, but the subject of risk came up more often in side conversations with venture-backed businesses and banks and alternative fintech lenders. One large bank we deal with,” he adds, “told me it’s spending most of its time working on risk.”
Cornelius Hurley, a Boston University law professor and executive director of the Online Lending Policy Institute who participated in a standing-room-only session on state and federal fintech regulation, declares: “I’ve been to three of their conferences, including one in New York, and I would say that this one did not have as much pizzazz. It may be that the industry is maturing.”
For his part—when asked whether there was a palpable absence of passion this year—LendIt’s Renton told AltFinanceDaily: “I would say that it felt more businesslike. Fintech has had a lot of hype and we have had conferences that were ridiculously over-hyped in 2015 and 2016. And in 2017 (the mood) was much more somber. This one felt optimistic and businesslike.”
There were 750 bankers in attendance, almost one in five participants. “The number of bankers was not up significantly” over last year, Renton says, “but the seniority of the bankers was higher. We worked very hard to get senior bankers to attend this year.”
Renton was bullish on the closer ties developing between nonbank online lenders and banks. That was reflected as well in the several panels exploring ways to develop partnerships between the two sides. He noted that a session called “How Banks are Matching Fintechs on Speed of Funding and User Experience” drew a heavy crowd. “It brought more bankers than we’ve ever had before,” Renton says.
Moderated by Brock Blake, founder and chief executive at the fintech Lendio, the panel was composed of three bankers: Ben Oltman, the Philadelphia-area head of digital lending and partnerships at Citizens Bank; Gina Taylor Cotter, a senior vice-president at American Express (the highest-ranking woman at the company); and Thomas Ferro, a senior marketing manager at Bank of America. “The banks came to LendIt not just to learn but to decide whom they’re going to partner with,” Renton says. “Fintechs need banks and banks need fintechs. That is the narrative you hear on both sides.”
(Asked whether any banks sponsored this year’s conference, Renton replied: “They are not sponsoring yet in any number but we are working on that.”)
OnDeck, a top-tier fintech lender to small-businesses in the U.S., which has been making forays abroad to Australian and Canadian markets, is an enthusiastic champion of the fintech-bank union. So much so that it claimed LendIt’s “Most Promising Partnership” award for the cooperative relationship it struck with Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank, which uses OnDeck’s platform to make small business loans. (Among the partnerships that OnDeck-PNC beat out: Gorey’s SpringFour, which was named a finalist in the competition for its association with BMO Harris Bank.)
“We were the first fintech lender to strike a true platform relationship with a bank,” Jim Larkin, head of corporate communications at OnDeck says, noting that the PNC deal follows on the New York-based fintech’s similar, innovative arrangement with J.P. Morgan Chase. “Others may do referrals,” he explains. “What we do is actually provide the underlying platform to accelerate a bank’s online lending capabilities. We deliver the software and expertise to construct the right type of online lending engine.”
Meanwhile, there was avid interest about the stock performance of publicly traded fintechs—for example, Square and GreenSky—both of which had seen their share prices tumble and then recover.
Burton noted that, among venture-backed firms, the most excitement seemed to be coming from Latin America. “Everyone was very bullish on a Mexican company, Credijusto, an alternative small business lender that was written up the in the Wall Street Journal,” he says. “It’s not going public yet but it had a large debt-and-equity raise of $100 million from Goldman Sachs. And SoftBank Group announced a $5 billion Latin American tech fund.
“There was a lot of talk,” he adds, “about how money was flowing into Mexico and Brazil.”
BFS Capital Joins ILPA
May 23, 2019
The Innovation Lending Platform Association (ILPA), a group of online small business financing and service companies, announced today the addition of BFS Capital. ILPA is known for creating the Straightforward Metrics Around Rate and Total Cost (SMART) Box.
“We believe that transparency matters,” Ruddock told AltFinanceDaily.
“BFS Capital is committed to being both a responsible and an innovative lender,” Ruddock said. “Our membership in the ILPA allows us to work with industry leaders who are dedicated to advancing standards and best practices in the critical small business lending marketplace… [and] we believe that clarity and transparency is critical in helping [small businesses] make educated and informed financial decisions.”
As a new member of ILPA, BFS will join current members including OnDeck, Kabbage, BlueVine and 6th Avenue Capital.
“We applaud Mulligan Funding and BFS Capital for committing to adopt fair and transparent disclosure best practices to ensure small businesses are well informed when seeking funding,” said ILPA CEO Scott Stewart. (ILPA announced that Mulligan Funding has joined the association as well).
BFS is also a member of the Small Business Finance Association (SBFA) and Ruddock told AltFinanceDaily that BFS will remain a member of that trade association as well.
Separately, BFS announced today that it has named Fred Kauber as the company’s new Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer. Kauber was previously with fintech marketplace platform CAIS Group and he served in senior roles at First Data, Dun & Bradstreet and IBM.
“I’m confident that Fred is the right person to advance both our vision and our capabilities [at BFS,]” Ruddock said.
Amazon Now Among The Top Online Small Business Lenders in The United States
May 8, 2019
Amazon has joined PayPal, OnDeck, Kabbage, and Square as being among the largest online small business lenders. On Tuesday, Amazon revealed that it had made more than $1 billion in small business loans to US-based merchants in 2018. Amazon says the capital is used to build inventory and support their Amazon stores.
By selling on Amazon, “SMBs do not need to invest in a physical store or the costs of customer discovery, acquisition, and driving customer traffic to their branded websites,” the company says. Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon’s stores now account for 58 percent of Amazon’s sales. More than 200,000 SMBs exceeded $100,000 in sales on Amazon in 2018 and more than 25,000 surpassed $1 million.
You can view the full report they published here.
| Company Name | 2018 Originations | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | |
| PayPal | $4,000,000,000* | $750,000,000* | ||||
| OnDeck | $2,484,000,000 | $2,114,663,000 | $2,400,000,000 | $1,900,000,000 | $1,200,000,000 | |
| Kabbage | $2,000,000,000 | $1,500,000,000 | $1,220,000,000 | $900,000,000 | $350,000,000 | |
| Square Capital | $1,600,000,000 | $1,177,000,000 | $798,000,000 | $400,000,000 | $100,000,000 | |
| Amazon | $1,000,000,000 | |||||
| Funding Circle (USA only) | $792,000,000 | $514,000,000 | $281,000,000 | |||
| BlueVine | $500,000,000* | $200,000,000* | ||||
| National Funding | $494,000,000 | $427,000,000 | $350,000,000 | $293,000,000 | ||
| Kapitus | $393,000,000 | $375,000,000 | $375,000,000 | $280,000,000 | ||
| BFS Capital | $300,000,000 | $300,000,000 | $300,000,000 | |||
| RapidFinance | $260,000,000 | $280,000,000 | $195,000,000 | |||
| Credibly | $290,000,000 | $180,000,000 | $150,000,000 | $95,000,000 | $55,000,000 | |
| Shopify | $277,100,000 | $140,000,000 | ||||
| Forward Financing | $210,000,000 | $125,000,000 | ||||
| IOU Financial | $125,000,000 | $91,300,000 | $107,600,000 | $146,400,000 | $100,000,000 | |
| Yalber | $65,000,000 |
