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Background
Fortress Funding provides merchant cash advances to small businesses nationwide. As deal volume increased, the leadership team, including COO Eric Gil and Executive Assistant Stephanie, needed a way to process applications and bank statements faster—without hiring additional staff.
With their underwriting running through LendSaaS, Fortress sought a solution that could slot directly into their existing workflow while unlocking greater efficiency and accuracy.
Pain Points
Before Heron, Fortress manually broke down bank statements line by line with an in-person team, manually. An administrative assistant would input the data into LendSaaS, consuming anywhere from 5 minutes to over an hour per file depending on complexity.
This led to:
- Deal bottlenecks that slowed growth.
- Wasted hours on repetitive admin work.
- Risk of errors when handling multi-account files.
“The goal is to increase our volume of deals without having to hire 20 more people. Manual entry was just slowing us down.” — Eric Gil, COO, Fortress Funding
Why Fortress Funding Chose Heron + LendSaaS
Fortress first implemented LendSaaS to streamline underwriting. LendSaaS then recommended Heron to handle the time-intensive process of parsing bank statements and automatically feeding clean data into their system.
Unlike alternatives, Heron offered:
- Fast onboarding (live within a week).
- No IT burden—setup required no internal tech team.
- Native integration with LendSaaS, creating an end-to-end pipeline from submissions to underwriting.
Heron’s Solution
Fortress deployed Heron tightly integrated with LendSaaS to create a seamless workflow:
- Ingest: Automatically captures application files and bank statements from the submissions inbox.
- Classify: Detects document types (bank statements, ISO apps, tax returns) and organizes them in a consistent format.
- Parse: Breaks down bank statements to extract monthly revenue, existing MCA positions, balances, and other critical underwriting data.
- Enrich & Detect: Categorizes transactions, aggregates monthly performance, calculates key metrics (e.g., MTD revenue, DSCR), and applies anomaly scoring to flag potential fraud or altered documents.
- Sync: Pushes validated, enriched data directly into LendSaaS, where underwriting workflows continue without manual entry.
Fortress transformed a complex, multi-step manual process into a fully connected, automated pipeline — where every stage, from submission to underwriting, flows seamlessly through Heron into LendSaaS, enabling faster decisions.
Outcomes
1. Faster Deal Processing
Before Heron, processing a single deal could take anywhere from one to two hours. Each file had to be opened, reviewed line by line, and manually keyed into LendSaaS. Depending on how many bank accounts a customer had, some files could stretch well past an hour.
With Heron in place, that same workflow now takes just 5–10 minutes for straightforward cases and about 30 minutes for more complex ones — an 80% reduction in time. The difference is night and day: what was once a bottleneck is now a smooth, quick handoff.
“The automation is the most valuable part. Heron takes files from our submissions email, breaks them down, and sends them straight into LendSaaS—what used to take hours now takes minutes.”
This shift means the Fortress team can handle a larger volume of deals each day without feeling like they’re racing the clock, giving them room to focus on clients and underwriting rather than getting stuck in spreadsheets.
2. Scale Without Hiring
As Fortress’s deal flow grew, the team faced a clear choice: either bring on more staff to keep up with the workload, or find a smarter way to work. By integrating Heron with LendSaaS, they unlocked the second path. The automation meant files flowed seamlessly into underwriting, allowing Fortress to increase volume without expanding headcount.
“We’ve been able to add ISOs and handle more deals without hiring more staff. That’s exactly what we wanted—to grow without ballooning the team.”
What once looked like a scaling challenge has now become a competitive advantage. Fortress can confidently expand partnerships and add new business without worrying about bottlenecks on the back end.
3. Smarter Underwriting
Beyond saving time, Heron has also made underwriting sharper. By applying anomaly scores to bank statements, the platform surfaces red flags—like altered statements or unusual payment patterns—that might otherwise slip through.
“The anomaly scores on bank statements are great—they flag red flags and help us spot fraud.”
With these insights feeding directly into LendSaaS, Fortress’s underwriters aren’t just working faster—they’re working smarter, with greater confidence in the quality of each file they review.
Heron has helped transform Fortress’s underwriting into a revenue engine, cutting processing times to minutes, giving brokers faster responses, and allowing underwriters to focus on funding deals instead of manual entry.
