[Aquila]

Hello Everyone,

This is Taariq Lewis, founder & CEO of Aquila. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. It's great to see clearly what the industry is thinking about what we're doing.

What we've learned: We are the new kids on the daily funding block. We have a long way to go and lots of work ahead of us. We apologize to those who call and don't get an answer, but we are accessible. We are best responsive via email at underwriting@aquilacashflow.com because the phones are always overloaded and we all ship code to our platform everyday.

Who we are: We're a small engineering and datascience team. We care about the brokers in this industry after spending 6 frustrating months as an ISO and learning that the ISO business is a hard one. we are here to help and fund businesses. We are here to unlock the value of bank performance data for the entire daily funder industry.

Thanks to everyone who commented. Here are my responses for those below and those reading.

I received the same promo ad that many of you got from DeBanked from Aquila last month via e-mail.

If you can't see it - it's a computer screen that says "We are unable to offer funding at this time. Please check back the next business day"... Wait what?!

Alan

Alan, we're in San Francisco and we're FinTech. Yes. We're going to fix that page as it's terrible communication about what we do and how we got to that answer.

How we work: We never hard decline a merchant. We always decline to fund immediatley. We are a datascience and data processing company. We analyze all the income and debt on the company to determine whether we can fit. This is why we ask for DecisionLogic upfront. When a merchant account doesn't match the box, we should have a much more clearer explanation and better offer of insight, but we are getting there.

Their claims and offerings were outrageous from the start. I wouldn't bet on a horse that can't get out of the gate.

HDF, those claims are not outrageous and we are paying ISOs those rates.

From their website:

So, essentially, they just have some software they use to "monitor" bank accounts and when they "project" a cash flow issue they send out the file to a funder.

In other words, they are brokers pretending to be funders. And they slickly use "cash flow software" to keep access to merchants' accounts. What a hustle.

We're not pretending WestCoastFunding. We were ISO's before we were funders. We are no longer brokers. We are funders and we do not share/shop our broker merchant accounts. It's much more profitable for us to be funders than brokers and that's why we are funders. No. we are not stealing clients. This is a small industry and you'd see that pretty fast if that was our process.

My understanding of their model is that funds are only released to a merchant once their predictive algorithm detects a cash flow pattern that indicates the merchant can handle the funding. So that could be the day they apply or 2 months later. It's a waiting game. That was the gist of the system as I interpreted their explanation to me. Don't quote me on that though.

Thank you Sean. Yep. That's what we do. If you are an ISO, login http://https://aquilacashflow.com/users/sign_in and check your ISO Dashboard for the column tht says "Available Financing Today". That's a daily column that calculates the amount of additional debt your merchant can carry. We look for a baseline of $5,5000 in additional debt. We track that daily. If you see that number is $120,000 and you don't have a deal with us, then shop that deal and get that merchant funded. We're giving you free daily insights into your merchant credit availability. Does any other funder give you that data for free? Will you make more money if you knew that for all your merchants, everyday?

I don't think you're wrong, but I think it misses part of the benefit to Aquila in the transaction, which is that they are aggregating transaction level data on a broad range of business without taking the credit risk that other actual lenders/funders have to take. That kind of data is very valuable in creating transaction classification and scoring models.

Yes, CreditGuy. And we're giving that data back to the brokers and to the merchants for free.

That data is priceless. These guys are pretty smart if that's what they're really doing.... fundomate, and Syndimate do the same

Thank you David. Congratulations on your leadership at SOS Capital. We are doing that, but we want to bring the value of that data back to the brokers and the merchants on our platform.

The brokers bring us the merchants and their bank accounts. We bring the brokers credit data that they can close more deals with the funders that will move fastest. We compete with other funders for access to the deals we can fund. We do this across 800 merchant accounts everyday. We never throw away a merchant so brokers never lose a deal. We expect that lots of brokers don't have this data.

Are we for every ISO? We may not be for every ISO. We started asking your C - F paper because we wanted to introduce ourselves to the industry by taking on your least "precious" paper. This way, the ISOs here don't feel betrayed as we launched on a rough platform that is still improving. If you have garbage, bring it to us. We shall take great care to monitor and analyze as soon as they are ready for more capital. If it's today, they'll get funded. If it's in 30 days, you'll know and you'll get the points. If it's in 60 days, you'll know and you'll get the points.

Other questions? Please share them here and I'll answer as I check in every few minutes.

Should I sign up to Aquila? YES! Sign up at https://aquilacashflow.com/isos/new and join our platform! It's free for you and your merchants and we fund new deals, everyday.

Thanks again,
Taariq Lewis
Aquila
https://aquilacashflow.com/

[DiamondBL]

Great info- best of luck and looking forward to the growth of the vision