Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.
Articles by Sean Murray
What the Velocity Capital Group Announcement Revealed
April 21, 2026
Velocity Capital Group has deployed over $1 billion to small businesses, newly unveiled financial stats show, shedding light on the firm’s performance as it enters a new phase of institutional-scale expansion. Across more than 10,000 transactions, VCG reports a 37.1% renewal rate and a sub-10% default rate.
The firm says it operates in all 50 states and is actively preparing to extend its model globally, with origination volumes projected to continue accelerating through 2030. As part of that, VCG has hired Michelle Melo as Director of Financial Operations & Capital Markets.
deBanked has been covering VCG’s expansion since 2018, starting with a profile that captured CEO Jay Avigdor’s rise from solopreneur to a large office on Long Island. At the time, Avigdor told deBanked: “We crawl before we walk before we run.” The company now appears to be in a full sprint as it looks globally.
This past February, Velocity Capital Group’s booth at deBanked CONNECT MIAMI included a surprise guest appearance from NBA All Star Bam Adebayo. Now with its recent big hire of Melo, Avigdor says, “VCG’s tech- and data-powered platform is scaling faster and more efficiently than nearly any peer in our category, and Michelle is here to institutionalize that advantage. She will drive pre-securitization discipline, standardized reporting, and the investor relationships we need to remove scaling friction and enable the next generation of growth. With Michelle on board, VCG is significantly closer to achieving our target of $1 billion in annual originations.”
Speed to Lead, Closing the Deal, and Running an ISO Shop
April 15, 2026
I sat down with Nicole Cruz, CEO of Redline Capital Inc, a brokerage based in in Secaucus, New Jersey. Cruz spilled some of the secret sauce, including what happened when she tried lead sources that her peers and competitors adamantly claimed weren’t good. Cruz started in the industry in 2018 and worked as a sales rep and ISO rep before trying her hand at starting her own company. One of the signature elements of their sales culture is the daily “power hours” they have. When I arrived on site, they were in the middle of one. She explains it all and more in our talk.
You can follow Cruz on her Instagram here.
While we’re posting some short video snippets across social media, you can listen to the full thing on Spotify while you’re on your commute.
Also, make sure you’re registered for Broker Fair, coming up on June 1 in New York City! Brokerfair.org.
Webinar: Important Industry Updates with Greenspoon Marder & deBanked
April 7, 2026Join us for a joint webinar on April 30th. You can register here.
Just the Facts With LendFax
April 1, 2026More than 76% of small business owners who apply for financing through their system do it from a mobile device. That’s the fax from LendFax, a one-stop shop for business owners (and consumers) to be paired with the most appropriate service provider for their needs. The information they submit through the curated intake process is pushed to their partners via API, and then LendFax continues to communicate with those customers to make sure they complete the process with them.
Nick De Jesus, LendFax’s Chief Marketing Officer, says that the process relies on enterprise-grade infrastructure to make it all work and is the culmination of years of in-house development and an obsessive desire to achieve the most optimal outcomes for all parties in the process.
“I’m working non-stop, 12 hours, 13 hours a day on this, 100% passion, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” De Jesus says of his time spent at LendFax.
That he’s there doing this at all is due to a chance intersection in his life. For example, De Jesus had been on an accelerated track in college and was bound for medical school at an extremely young age. His special area of study as a nineteen-year-old was heterotopic ossification and involved researching bone formation from trauma and soft stem cell tissues. And that was the path he had surrendered himself to until one night, a few acquaintances asked for his input on a tech project involving small business financing, thinking his broad knowledge could be insightful. But what De Jesus learned from them had him hooked immediately, and he dropped everything to be a part of it.
“I finished my cell biology exam and the next Monday I was in [their] office,” De Jesus said.
De Jesus says that they’re aware that LendFax isn’t the only operator of their kind in the space, but that by being lean and running efficiently, partners on their platform can get “enterprise infrastucture without the enterprise pricing.” Depending on the relationship setup, partners can get as little as a merchant’s qualified and completed application or as much as the entire deal with full docs, all managed by LendFax and ported into the partner’s CRM in real time.
De Jesus is a regular at the big trade shows and stressed just how important in-person relationships are in this field, but noted that the merchant side is different, that merchants looking for financing have trended toward solutions that produce the least amount of friction and interaction along the way.
“…things are moving definitely more to the digital landscape where people just want to go online, submit information, without even texting or talking or emailing anybody and get an answer,” De Jesus said. “So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with LendFax, is we’re kind of just trying to bring them the offers based on the answer that they select.”
Concerned About The MCA Automatic Debit Law in Texas? This ACH Company Says There’s a Way
March 25, 2026
There may be no need to overcomplicate Merchant Cash Advance compliance in Texas. A key phrase in the MCA prohibition law that went into effect last year specifies that it’s a prohibition on “establishing a mechanism for automatically debiting a recipient’s account” unless a lot of other requirements are met.
One company looked closely at that piece of the language and came up with a simple solution.
“…our approach is to request the payment at each time and capture the authorization at the time of the transaction,” said John Innes, President of the Texas-based and aptly-named ACH Processing Company. “So instead of capturing an authorization at the beginning and embedding that into the documents where you’re going to do a recurring debit transaction to the merchant’s account, you are sending a request saying, ‘Okay, please authorize this payment.’ And so each payment is individually authorized so you don’t need that security interest [component] anymore.”
No automatic recurring debits. Instead there’s a Request For Payment that requires merchants to manually authorize debits on a debit-by-debit basis whether that be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on whatever the agreed frequency is.
“I think this was maybe the intent of the law,” Innes continued. “It gives the merchant kind of that control over that debit and it fosters communication between the two parties.”
Innes said there’s various ways that this interaction can be conducted to reduce the friction of this process.
Other options proposed across the industry have focused on another piece of the language, that the prohibition is specifically meant for “commercial sales-based financing providers” and the proposed cure for that is to offer a non-sales-based financing product in the state instead. ACH Processing Company’s solution, however, allows an MCA funder to keep its product suite as-is.
“…you don’t have to break all that,” said Innes. “Continue with the same business plan. ”
Since the Texas law went into effect seven months ago, Innes says that numerous funders have still been in a holding pattern trying to figure out how to approach it. It’s their belief that this solution is a simple way to now get Texas turned back on if they’re ready.
Sales Tips and Closing MCA Deals With Sam Kaye on the deBanked Podcast
March 18, 2026If you’ve seen some clips on Instagram between myself and Sam Kaye on how to sell an MCA on the phone, they come from a much wider two hour conversation/interview where we talked exclusively about selling deals. Kaye trains sales floors in the industry. In this podcast, Kaye gets very specific on how to sell and I open it up by mentioning that if salespeople are going to apply certain strategies, it has to be the same strategies that their bosses want them to apply. I call it alignment. Then we get into the weeds and he shares his ways of doing everything. Embed below and Spotify link here.
If you just want the short clips, we’ll continue to post them in little sound bites, but if you’re in the car or going for a 2-hour walk, this is the full audio.
Richmond Capital Leaves MCA Space With Negative Case Law On the Way Out
February 24, 2026“Substantive unconscionability is clear from the MCAs’ exorbitant and criminally usurious interest rates, among other things.”
– Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, Supreme Court of New York, February 19, 2026
Richmond Capital Group was never part of the mainstream merchant cash advance industry. The company made headlines for years for its alleged connection to Jonathan Braun, who is now back in prison. After landing in the crosshairs of the FTC, a federal court permanently banned the company and its owner from working in the MCA or debt collection industries ever again in June 2022. The New York State Attorney General piled on with its own legal action and secured a $77 million judgment against Richmond and affiliated entities in February 2024.
But the New York judgment was appealed and earlier this month the Appellate Division of the First Department issued its decision, ruling heavily in favor of the Attorney General. Some of its conclusions, while Richmond-circumstance specific, ought to be examined with a wider lens. Snippets of the Court’s rulings are as follows:
On Reconciliations
“Although the MCAs have mandatory reconciliation provisions, no reconciliation was performed in practice, even though it was supposed to be performed on a monthly basis, and daily payments were fixed and did not represent a good faith estimate of receivables; there is no persuasive evidence of any ad hoc incidents of reconciliation (upon a merchants’ request), which were subject to respondents’ “sole discretion,” and there is evidence that such requests were denied; bankruptcy was an express event of default in some of the MCAs, but even where it was not, repeated nonpayment was, as was breach of the MCAs, which was the case where a merchant “interrupt[ed], suspend[ed], dissolve[d] or terminate[d]” its business; and in the event of any of these circumstances, the full uncollected amount became due and respondents were empowered to enforce the personal guarantees they required the merchants to provide.
Usurious intent is also clear as a matter of law, as, absent reconciliation, the usurious interest rates can readily be calculated based on the information provided on the face of the MCAs.”
On Unconscionability
“The MCAs were also procedurally and substantively unconscionable. Substantive unconscionability is clear from the MCAs’ exorbitant and criminally usurious interest rates, among other things. As to procedural unconscionability, it is not dispositive that many, although not all, of the merchants were sophisticated businesspeople and all had prior experience with MCAs, and respondents misrepresented the terms and nature of the MCAs and used other high-pressure tactics.”
deBanked is not a law firm. To understand the implications of this legal decision, consult with attorneys experienced with the subject matter. For example: Hudson Cook, LLP, Murray Legal PLLC, or others listed here.
CAN Capital Adds Major Equipment Finance Division, New Product for Brokers to Offer
February 23, 2026
The synergy between the working capital and equipment finance industries continues to grow with CAN Capital’s latest acquisition. CAN acquired the equipment finance portfolio and platform of Republic Bank Finance and the division will continue to operate under the name of CAN Capital Equipment Finance. A press release announced the deal this morning.
CAN’s broker network and referral partners will be able to able to offer this product alongside CAN’s existing product suite.
“CAN has a large and established network of broker relationships, many of whom are already providing an equipment finance option to their small business customers,” said CAN Capital CEO Ed Siciliano to deBanked. “By adding an equipment finance product, we believe we will deepen our relationships and better serve our valued ISOs, especially those already offering this product.”
The equipment finance industry is massive. Recent valuations put it at $1.3 trillion annually.
In the official release, Siciliano said, “This acquisition is a natural extension of CAN Capital’s long-term growth strategy. We have built CAN Capital to be a scaled, durable platform that can grow both organically and through strategic acquisitions. Adding an equipment finance portfolio and platform enhances our product breadth, strengthens our market position, and allows us to serve more businesses with the right capital at the right time. This transaction reflects the momentum of our business and our continued confidence in the growth trajectory of CAN Capital.”
