Building and maintaining a lender list

In most shops the lender list starts as one senior rep's memory, then becomes a spreadsheet, then several spreadsheets that disagree. The cost shows up quietly: deals sent to a lender that stopped taking that industry months ago, packages emailed to an address nobody reads, commissions nobody can check because nobody wrote down the agreed points.

A good lender list is the single record everyone submits from. It does not need to be long. Fifteen lenders you know well beat sixty you have never funded with.

• ISO agreementAn ISO agreement is the contract between a broker and a funder that sets commission rates, clawbacks, submission rules and restrictions before any deal is sent.
• ClawbackA clawback is a funder taking back an ISO's commission because the merchant defaulted or stopped paying within a set window after funding, often 30 to 90 days.
• RenewalA renewal is a new advance to a merchant who has paid down an existing one. It pays off the remaining balance, and eligibility usually starts at 40 to 60% paid in.

• The lender's guidelines. Start here, but treat them as the advertised box, not the real one.
• The ISO rep. Ask what they are funding this month and what they are declining.
• Your own results. Approvals, declines and decline reasons are the most honest description of a box. A lender that has declined your last five second-position deals does not take second positions, whatever the sheet says.
• The ISO agreement. Commission, clawback and exclusivity terms come from the signed document, not from memory.

Write down where each criterion came from and when you last confirmed it. "Min revenue $25k, rep email, March" is far more useful than "$25k".

Set a recurring review once a quarter, owned by one person. It takes an afternoon for a list of fifteen to twenty lenders.

The Lenders page in Ferrylend holds each lender's submission email, CC addresses and subject format, contacts, ISO agreement status, default commission, payout speed and clawback days, programs, and criteria. You can import an existing spreadsheet with Import lenders from CSV. The Lender scorecard report under Reports shows approval rates, response times and decline reasons per lender, which is what the quarterly review runs on. See Set up your lenders.