From Merchant Cash Advance to AI Agents: Richard McKellar's Playbook for Funding Shops
5 min read
I’ve spent 15 years in the Merchant Cash Advance industry. I’ve underwritten deals, built brokerages, scaled lending platforms, and watched the industry evolve from fax machines to cloud CRMs. The one thing that hasn’t changed? The amount of manual work that still happens between “deal comes in” and “deal gets funded.”
That’s changing now. AI agents are automating the workflows that funding shops have tolerated for years — and the shops that deploy them first will have a structural advantage.
Where Manual Work Still Lives in MCA
Walk into any MCA shop or brokerage and you’ll find the same patterns:
- Underwriting — manual document review, bank statement analysis, credit checks across multiple systems
- Broker intake — deals arrive via email, phone, and text. Someone manually enters them into the CRM.
- Follow-up — funders chase brokers and borrowers with phone calls and emails. No automation, no sequencing.
- Compliance — KYC/AML checks, UCC filings, contract generation. All manual or half-automated.
- Reporting — portfolio performance tracked in spreadsheets. No real-time dashboards.
Each of these is a workflow that an AI agent can handle — not replacing humans, but automating the repetitive triage phase so underwriters and funders focus on decisions.
The FDE Approach to Funding Shops
As a Fractional FDE, I don’t sell software. I build agents that run on your existing stack. Here’s what that looks like for an MCA shop:
Intelligent Deal Intake
An agent that parses incoming deals from email, SMS, and web forms. It extracts key data (company name, requested amount, time in business, monthly revenue), creates a CRM record, and routes to the right underwriter based on deal size and type.
Result: 3-5 hours/week saved on data entry. Deals processed same-day instead of next-day.
Underwriting Support Agent
An agent that pulls bank statements, analyzes cash flow patterns, flags risk indicators, and generates a preliminary underwriting summary. The underwriter reviews and decides — but skips the 45 minutes of manual analysis per deal.
Result: Underwriting throughput doubles. Risk detection improves because the agent catches patterns humans miss.
Automated Follow-Up Sequences
Agents that trigger follow-up workflows based on deal stage. Broker hasn’t responded in 48 hours? Automated nudge. Borrower approved but hasn’t signed? Escalation alert. Funded deal? Auto-generate review request.
Result: 40-60% reduction in dropped deals. Consistent follow-up without headcount.
Why This Matters for MCA
The MCA industry is competitive. Funders who process deals faster, underwrite more accurately, and follow up more consistently win more volume. AI agents don’t replace your team — they give your team superpowers.
The math is simple: if an agent saves 20 hours/week across your operations, that’s one full-time headcount you don’t need to hire — or one headcount you can redeploy to revenue-generating work.
How to Start
The $999 AI Audit is designed for exactly this. One workflow, one system, 5-7 days. We map your operations, identify the highest-impact automation opportunity, and deliver a findings document with a clear path forward.
Book a 30-minute scoping call and let’s map your funding shop’s AI opportunity.