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Block: Potential JPM Bank Account Data Access Fees Will Have No Impact to Our ‘Borrow’ Model
Borrow, short-term consumer loan program by Cash App, will not be affected by fees JPMorgan intends to charge fintechs for bank account data access. That’s because Block’s Cash App doesn’t even need the data.
“Across Block we’ve been deliberate in how we’ve built products, leveraging internal data when we can to deliver value to our customers,” the company said in response to the JPM announcement. “For example, to date: the vast majority of Borrow volume has been underwritten using only Cash App data and less than 1% of U.S. BNPL GMV is paid back via ACH. While we can’t comment on the future, historically, our fees paid to data aggregators have been de-minimis.”
View PostJPMorgan Plans to Charge Fees to Fintechs to Get Customer Bank Account Data
After Bloomberg News revealed that JPMorgan was planning to charge fintechs to access their customer bank account data, CEO Jamie Dimon was questioned about this during the bank’s latest quarterly earnings call. Dimon said that this was a customer-driven decision designed to protect them.
“So we think the customer has the right to if they want to share their information. What we ask people to do is do they do they actually know what’s being shared? What is actually being shared? It should be everything. It should be what their customer wants. It should have a time limit because some of these things went on for years. It should not be remarketed or resold to third parties. And so we’re kind of in favor of all that done properly.
And then the payment, it just costs a lot of money to set up the APIs and stuff like that to run the system protection. So we just think it should be done and done right. And that’s the main part. It’s not like you can’t do it. The last thing is a liability shift. I don’t think JPMorgan should be responsible if you’ve given your bank passcodes to third parties who market and do a whole bunch of stuff with it, and then you get scammed or fraud through them, they should be responsible. And we want real clarity about that. And if you see today, lot of these scams and frauds run through third party social media and stuff like that, there should be a little more responsibility on their part so we could all do a better job for the customer. That’s why.
There’s a debate brewing as to whether or not this move is actually designed to serve the customer. The American Fintech Council (AFC), for example, said that it’s actually designed to accomplish the opposite and that it would hurt consumers and borrowers alike.
“Consumers have a right to their own financial data, full stop,” said AFC CEO Phil Goldfeder. “Any effort to restrict or monetize access to consumer-permissioned financial information is a direct threat to responsible innovation, healthy competition, and the progress we’ve made toward a more inclusive financial system.”
Just a few months earlier, Dimon hinted in a bank shareholder letter that such a move would be defensive and that a fight with the fintechs monetizing their data was on the horizon.
“Banks provide fantastic services, and it’s time to defend ourselves – in the public realm or in court if need be,” he said. “Now a new battle is brewing: Third parties want full access to banks’ customer data so they can exploit it for their own purposes and profits.”
View PostHeron Makes Big Splash in Small Business Finance Industry
Heron, a startup using AI to automate workflows, just raised a $16M Series A round. Already a well-known brand in the small business finance industry, the funds will be used to grow their presence, expand into adjacent verticals, and grow their go-to market & and engineering teams.
While Heron serves top tier clientele like insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks, its technology can be utilized at almost any level.
“Our technology is built to serve funders of all sizes from industry leaders like Bitty, Forward, Vox, and CFG to sub-five person shops originating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month,” the company told deBanked. “If a team is receiving 25 or more submission documents per day, Heron can deliver immediate value by automating their document intake and reducing manual review time. Our platform scales to meet volume, and we often see smaller, fast-moving teams who want to scale submissions and originations without scaling headcount benefit the most from Heron.”
Heron noticed that small business lenders were employing teams of underwriting analysts that spend hours on repetitive intake work and created a process to streamline it within seconds. Consequently, they’ve seen that improving efficiencies in this market has had a positive impact on the economy overall.
“At Heron, we believe that SMB lending is the backbone of the American economy — it powers everything from local restaurants to trucking fleets,” the company said. “But outdated, document-heavy processes slow things down. Heron helps lenders move faster and smarter, so they can get capital to the businesses that need it most.”
View PostHeron Raises $16M Series A to Bring the AI Revolution from Silicon Valley to American Businesses
Backed by Insight Partners, Heron automates document-heavy workflows in insurance, lending, and finance — bringing reliable AI to businesses and allowing humans to focus on complex tasks
Heron, a startup using AI to automate workflows in business lending, equipment finance, and insurance, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Y-Combinator, BoxGroup and Flex Capital. The Series A will support Heron’s next phase of expansion, helping the company scale its AI-driven solutions to more segments.
While many AI startups target developers or other technologists, Heron is at the frontier of deploying AI into real-life business operations in traditional industries like lending, banking, and insurance. Heron’s mission is to free up humans to focus on judgment-based work and complex edge cases while software handles the repetitive, monotonous work. Heron focuses on serving companies without large engineering departments, enabling more businesses to reap the rewards of the rapid advances in AI.
Heron’s system can automate time-consuming manual workflows end-to-end, completing tasks automatically or flagging edge cases for human review. That reliability has led many customers to fully offload entire processes to Heron — freeing up their teams to focus on critical work.
For example, SMB lenders employ teams of underwriting analysts that spend hours on repetitive intake work — scanning email inboxes for submissions, downloading and renaming files, checking packet completeness, manually entering data into CRMs, and running basic eligibility checks. Using Heron, these hours of work can be accomplished in seconds, and with higher accuracy, full auditability, and no manual overhead.
This focus on reliability and solving problems end-to-end has attracted more than 150+ customers to Heron, including insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks, and enabled the company to process over 350,000 documents per week. One lender cut submission-to-decision time by 60%, while an insurer used Heron to automate over 80% of its inbound submission triage.
“Anyone who tells you they use AI to automate work with 100% accuracy is probably lying to you. Instead of chasing accuracy, we focus on clearly understanding where our software is successful and where humans still need to review. This allows customers to use Heron in situations where millions of dollars are at stake and reap the rewards of the AI revolution in a reliable fashion that drives business outcomes,” said Johannes Jaeckle, co-founder and CEO of Heron
Founded in 2020 by Dom Kwok, Jamie Parker, and Johannes Jaeckle, Heron launched out of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch, initially building products for financial services companies with earlier generations of AI in the pre-ChatGPT era. The company eventually landed on a core insight: traditional industries weren’t waiting for flashy new tools — they were drowning in unstructured data, and paying millions of dollars a year to deal with it. In 2023, as LLMs matured, Heron pivoted to focus on AI document workflow automation. With minimal outside capital, the team tripled annualized revenue in 2024 and has continued to expand its presence in insurance and specialty finance this year.
“Heron’s AI models with vertical specific context automate the end-to-end data processing workflow, enabling automation and driving competitive differentiation in industries where speed to decisioning is of the essence,” said Philine Huizing, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Heron’s founding team—Johannes, Jamie, and Dom—are an experienced trio that has proven their ability to adapt and execute. We’re thrilled to partner with them and the entire Heron team as they continue to scale up.”
The new capital will be used to scale Heron’s presence in insurance, equipment finance and SMB lending, while expanding into adjacent verticals that have shown demand for Heron’s solution. The company plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams in New York and London, and continues to invest in internal AI Tooling to enable a small team to serve more and more customers.
“We’ve proven we can win in one segment,” said Jaeckle. “Now we’re going workflow by workflow, industry by industry — giving people hours back in their day by eliminating time-intensive manual work.”
About Heron
Heron automates document-based workflows across industries like lending, insurance, and equipment finance. By turning unstructured documents into structured, actionable data, Heron helps companies process information faster, more accurately, and with less manual effort. Heron is based in New York and London, with the team bringing a wealth of experience from top-tier tech companies including Facebook, Spotify, N26, Revolut and Taptap Send.
Learn more at herondata.io
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of December 31, 2024, the firm has over $90B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 800 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.
View Post“Grok, Read My ISO Agreement”
Before having an attorney review an ISO agreement, consider having an intelligent LLM AI take a look at it and alert you to any immediate red flags. After all, some accusations of purported funder improprieties these days are actually rooted in actions well within the rights of the funder in the ISO agreements. D’oh! But if such agreements are too long or too legalese-sounding for you to make an immediate judgment, LLMs like ChatGPT-o3 or Grok4 or Claude or Gemini etc have become so adept at understanding a subject and communicating in a way that the user understands, that perhaps it’s worth having them take a look. (Maybe even at your existing agreements!)
For example, deBanked obtained a 15-page ISO agreement and asked Grok4 a bunch of casual questions. One of them was, “can this funder backdoor my deals?” Surprisingly, it named some weaknesses and loopholes that the broker should be aware of even if they were not easily exploitable. On the other hand, this ISO agreement already had some broker protections built in that the LLM pointed out, such as an in-house funding clause where the broker would be paid the commission if their submitted deal was funded by the funder’s in-house sales team within 30 days of the broker having submitted it. Did you know they had an in-house sales team?!?! Grok4 did!
Grok4 also gave me the heads up that there’s a 30-day clawback period and that my future renewal commissions would be forfeited if I were to be terminated for cause. Ironically, the LLM also gave me some unsolicited advice, telling me to diversify my funders and to watermark my docs “as per the new tool.” When I asked what tool it was even talking about, it specified Aquamark, which appeared on this site just a few months ago. Grok4 also said to use deBanked, lol. Thanks!
Recommendations to Protect Yourself
Operational Steps: Timestamp submissions, watermark docs (as per the new tool), and require written confirmations for all merchant interactions. Diversify funders.
Contract Tweaks: Negotiate for audit rights, higher breach penalties, or tech tracking of merchant contacts. Extend non-interference to 3-5 years (common in MCA).
Industry Tools: Join broker networks or use platforms like deBanked for alerts on shady funders.
Curious what your ISO agreements say? I used Grok4 for this experiment. Of course, you should actually be using a lawyer for a real assessment. Here’s a list of some to get you started.
View PostCA Debt Settlement Bill is Amended to Exclude MCAs, Factoring and Only Include Loans
After deBanked reported on a commercial financing debt settlement bill moving its way through the state legislature in California, a committee promptly revised the whole thing to specify that it should be for commercial loans only. The language was revised to remove its applicability to “accounts receivable purchase transactions, including factoring, asset-based lending transactions, or lease financing transactions.”
The most recent version of the bill can be viewed here.
View PostTroutman Pepper Locke Podcast Talks Biz Financing and Impact of Legislative Changes in Texas and Louisiana
Troutman Pepper Locke attorneys Carlin McCrory, Jason Cover, and Caleb Rosenberg talked small business financing, the recent changes in Texas and Louisiana, and what is likely to come next. The discussion took place prior to the Texas bill being signed by the governor there but provides insights on it that still apply.
You can listen to it here:
Idea Financial Hits Milestone, Will Still Fund in Texas
Idea Financial, a nationwide small business lender, recently surpassed $1 billion in funding since inception.
“This is a historic milestone,” said Larry Bassuk, president and co-founder of Idea Financial. “Only a few years ago, this company was just a concept with potential. Like many of the small businesses we serve, we started with confidence, grit, and the unyielding belief that we would succeed. Today, I can proudly announce that Idea Financial’s impact on the small business lending community is significant and positive. This moment belongs to our team, past and present, whose dedication has gotten us here.”
Because the company does term loans and lines of credit, it is not impacted by the recently-passed sales-based financing legislation in Texas and will continue to fund there like normal.
For background, Bassuk and Idea Financial CEO Justin Leto, actually started out in the legal profession as attorneys before taking a risk in small business lending. When deBanked first interviewed the duo in 2019, they said, “We’re not from the finance space, we’re not from the alternative lending space either, we came at this opportunity with a different approach.”
At that time, Idea had only funded $50 million since inception. Much of Idea’s growth since then can be attributed to their broker business, which it is still growing.
“Brokers and referral partners are critical to Idea’s success,” the company said. “While our borrowers are our clients, we also consider brokers and referral partners as clients by our team. We value their business and have made it a focus to develop close, mutually beneficial relationships with them.”
“We have been so fortunate to work with such a talented team, all of whom have contributed to the incredible growth of Idea,” said Leto. “We identified a problem with small business funding when we embarked on this journey, and we are so proud to have played a role in providing the solution that has fueled so many Main Street success stories.”
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