We’ve asked our Head of Underwriting, Neil, to contribute to our blog by providing some information about underwriting and the underwriting process. We are extremely lucky at Merchant as we have THE BEST underwriting team in the biz, so we thought it would be super valuable for our readers to hear from the actual team that evaluates applications regarding the things they look for, and the things that they want to see in a successful funding. This is Neil’s first blog, and we look forward to hearing more about the underwriting process and how to prepare an application that makes our underwriters hit the fund button…hard.
Scientists estimate that the average adult makes 35,000 choices every day. 35,000! Those choices range from the small ones – Cheerios or Corn Flakes? Netflix or Disney Plus? – to decisions that impact not only our own lives, but the lives of many, many others.
At Merchant Growth, our underwriting team specializes in making those big decisions. Each day, we receive dozens of requests for funding from small businesses across the country. Within each application, there are hundreds of points of data to consider – what are the business’ sales, how long have they been open, what’s their busiest time of year – and by blending the historical performance of our portfolio with their own intuition, our underwriters determine the best possible solutions.
The pandemic, of course, has created a new set of variables to contemplate. There is an instinct, when dealing with the unknown, to bury your head in the sand and wait for it to pass. But, like so many individuals and businesses over these past seven months, Merchant Growth and its underwriting team chose to adapt and move forward. We re-calibrated our analysis industry by industry, we looked beyond the recent lock-out impacted results, and we leaned heavily on that human intuition of our underwriters so that we could continue providing the best possible funding solutions to businesses.
We are excited by the many, many small businesses who have chosen to invest in themselves and move forward, and we are humbled by the opportunity to support them. When you make 35,000 choices a day, it’s tough to be perfect, but when it comes to making funding decisions for our clients, that will always be Merchant Growth’s goal.
