AdvanceMe Review

AdvanceMe is a merchant cash advance provider that pioneered the business more than 10 years ago. In this review of AdvanceMe, we'll look at the company's history, its management team, and review the financial products it offers to small businesses.

AdvanceMe's Corporate History

AdvanceMe was founded in 1998 as the first merchant cash advance company. Since then, it has supported more than 20,000 business in transactions from all 50 states and involving companies in more than 500 different SIC codes. Here's how AdvanceMe describes its transactions:

Your business sells us a portion of its future credit and debit card sales at a discount. Through an automated process, we retrieve our portion of each credit card sale as it is settled. The percentage we retrieve from each sale is fixed for the life of the funding - we get paid when you get paid.

AdvanceMe's Management Team

Glen Goldman is the Chief Executive Officer of the company. He joined the AdvanceMe in 2001 and has over 15 years experience in the finance industry. Other management team members include:

Tom Burnside, President and Chief Operating Officer. Burnside had 11 years of experience in the credit card processing industry prior to joining the company in 2000 from the Hogan Services Division of First Data Corporation where he was General Manager.

Mark Lorimer, Chief Marketing Officer. Lorimer joined the company in 2006 from Alchemy Business Group, a business services and investment firm he founded, which focuses on business development and organizational alignment strategies.

Rich Ferrante, Chief Financial Officer. Ferrante joined AdvanceMe in 2002, serving as Controller of the company prior to his promotion to CFO in 2003. He is responsible for all accounting, treasury and tax concerns, including Sarbanes-Oxley. He is also the CFO of CAN’s subsidiaries, AdvanceMe and AMI Merchant Solutions.

Franck Fatras, Chief Technology Officer. Fatras joined the company in 2000 and brought AdvanceMe more than 13 years experience in system and network architecture; building network infrastructure and applications for national and global use. He is responsible for directing information technology, information systems, information security and facilities.

Parris Sanz, Esq., Chief Legal Officer. Sanz joined the company in 2004 with more than 11 years of experience as a corporate, securities and transactional attorney. Before joining AdvanceMe, he was a senior executive and General Counsel of a specialty pharmaceutical company, where he was responsible for all legal matters, including securities offerings, corporate transactions, patents/intellectual property and commercial agreements.

AdvanceMe's Merchant Cash Advances

According to its website, a business can qualify for a cash advance if, among other things, it has a minimum monthly volume of $5,000 in credit card transactions. This is required because the cash advance is repaid by directing a certain percentage of credit card sales to AdvanceMe each month. In addition, to qualify a business must have been in operations for at least one year.

Merchant Cash Advance Industry Standards

AdvanceMe has been an advocate for industry standards for some time. In 2007, it published a White Paper calling for the industry to regulate itself, or risk being regulated by others. Much of the paper dealt with the retrieval rate.

The retrieval rate is the percentage of monthly credit card sales paid to the merchant cash advance provider. AdvanceMe advocates a cap on the retrieval rate of 9%. Businesses in the market for a cash advance should pay special attention to the retrieval rate and the circumstances under which the provider can change the retrieval rate.