Hey Guys,

Just wanted to throw something out there and see how the industry feels as whole.

Over the last 6-8 months our team has been getting an increase in horror stories being told by merchants about how people from our industry are doing shady activities from promising a line of credit if they take an offer and pay it back right away at a 1.50 then disconnecting the line or blocking the merchant's number; funding a merchant with 2 or 3 positions within a week or 2 despite the fact that the merchant might have qualified for much larger and better deals; lying about how a reverse works until the merchant only gets a small portion of his approved amount then not answering the phone and keep pushing the weekly deposits on their account, etc. I'm sure there's more BS tactics out there.

I've been in the industry for over a decade and in the past every now and then you'd get a story about it. Now its becoming an uncomfortably common refrain and good business owners with strong revenues and businesses are either defaulting from these tactics or are left with such bad taste that they will never do Revenue Based Financing again despite the fact that with the right capital they would have tremendous growth. Some businesses get it so bad that they go out of business altogether.

Secondly, we are seeing merchants getting called and backdoored after sending a file to large A-B paper funder. Some A paper funders used to have a tight grip on what their teams were doing with their data and they caught, fired or arrested people who backdoored client's information. Now, we are seeing even the larger companies losing that control over the information entrusted to them and clients being called the same day these files go out to them with accurate info.

This brief text wont make any real impact if this is not a reality for most of you, but if it is, we need to start collectively deciding what is allowed to happen in the industry and it can only happen with the real ISO's who are looking to make a difference as well as the funding companies. Does our industry need some regulations? If we dont decide what is acceptable or not we will have a regulatory government body step in eventually. The industry has a lot of money, it is getting bigger and catching the eyes of larger guys in finance who are joining. By allowing all these shady tactics to happen and treating the industry as the wild west, its only a matter of time. Unless we decide how to fix our own industry.

How do we do that? Thats the big question! I wonder what your thoughts are. Anyone have similar thoughts or experience or am I just saying nonsense here?