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Background on Good Funding
Good Funding started in June 2020 to provide short-term working capital to small and medium-sized businesses.
When Good Funding launched in the middle of the pandemic, they built the underwriting team with an offshore BPO where applications and bank statements went to India for data entry, then into a queue for a human credit decision. That setup worked while volume was low, but as Good Funding scaled and competitors sped up their own underwriting with AI and automation, decision times crept in the wrong direction.
Pain Points
Good Funding gets most of its volume from brokers, who shop deals to several lenders at once, and speed decides who wins: brokers tend to work with whichever lender answers first, so a slow decision means losing the deal to someone faster. Around January of this year, the company’s median time to a decision had climbed to 472 minutes, and getting an actual approval out the door could take close to a thousand minutes.
“It was taking us, this is a thousand minutes, which is an obscene amount of time for us to get an approval out. And as a result, we were losing a lot of business.”
Every deal needed a person to open the background-check report and read it, because Good Funding’s LexisNexis setup could only run keyword-adjacent counts, not identify what a record actually was. That kept a human in the loop on every single deal, and each one sat in a queue behind whatever an analyst was already working through. Across Good Funding’s full volume, those manual reviews added up to hours of decision time a day.
Why Good Funding Chose Heron vs. Sticking with the BPO
Good Funding had tried to solve the problem themselves to push out auto-approvals, but building that logic in-house meant trusting a system to catch every nuance that could sink a deal, and they couldn’t get there: too many things could be missed, and backtracking on an approval already sent to a broker could risk damaging broker relationships.
“In all my years in small-business financing, it was always frustrating meeting with vendors from the outside because it didn’t feel like they really understood our business. But we knew right away: you guys actually get it.”
Rather than bolt Heron onto the old BPO relationship, the team replaced it outright, moving data entry, then background checks, fully onto Heron.
How Heron Powers Good Funding’s Underwriting
Heron fit in the infrastructure that Good Funding already had with Salesforce, not replacing it. What it took over were the two pieces that used to depend on outside vendors and manual review, data entry and background checks, with background checks doing the most work to change what the team is willing to approve automatically.
- Heron’s Parsing — replaced Good Funding’s outsourced BPO, pulling application and bank statement data straight into Salesforce without the queuing delay that came from routing files through a third-party team.
- Heron’s Background Check Product — replaced Good Funding’s LexisNexis integration. Background checks for small-business lending typically pull from a wide net of public records: bankruptcy filings, criminal records, civil judgments, tax and UCC liens, and prior lawsuits, including litigation tied to other small-business loans, plus business registration history. Heron parses the full report and classifies each record, so it’s returned to underwriting as a specific, actionable flag.
- Auto-Decline and Auto-Approval Waterfall — Good Funding’s policies now run automated decisioning logic, routing deals to auto-decline before an analyst opens it, while a clean report lets a qualifying deal move straight to auto-approval instead of sitting in the review queue.
- Heron’s Dashboard — surfaces those flags in one view, so an analyst can spot a red flag on a deal in seconds instead of opening and reading a report line by line.
Outcomes
1. Decision Time Drops 97%, From Hours to Minutes
Good Funding’s median time from application to decision fell from 472 minutes in January to 105 minutes in May and 15 minutes by August, as Heron took over data entry and background checks in full. Gold shared that stickier approvals specifically led to the drop in decision time:
“The real reason the time to decision has dropped as much as it has, and our approvals got stickier, is your ability to actually parse through what the report says.”
Faster answers won broker business outright, and the gains compound daily: shaving two minutes off each of the roughly 40 deals an analyst reviews reclaims more than an hour of work, every day, for every analyst on the team.
2. Background Checks Good Funding Can Actually Trust
Where previous methods risked false positives, Heron’s parsing tells Good Funding exactly what a report contains.
“The parsing mechanism you guys have is so superior to anything we had before that we trust it. We’re going to get the correct decision-making data on the deal the first time, so we can send out the correct approval.”
That confidence lets the team route deals out automatically instead of queuing every background check for manual review. 59% of Good Funding’s approvals are now fully automated, sent out without an analyst opening a report to sign off.
3. Higher-Quality Customers, More Room to Grow
Good Funding’s on-balance-sheet originations grew 30% quarter over quarter between Q1 and Q2, a jump Gold credits directly to working with Heron. That growth has come with higher-demand customers, not just more of them, funded dollars per submission jumped roughly 36% from Q1 to Q2.
“We’re also seeing a better quality customer convert, because the better quality customers are higher competition. By being quick to a decision, we’re able to get in front of those customers and get a better chance of actually getting the fund.”
The strongest borrowers draw the most competing offers, so speed decides who gets a shot at them: answering quickly puts Good Funding in front of that higher-demand group instead of losing them to a faster lender. That same speed has given Good Funding room to work with broker partners on process, something Gold says was harder to do when the company was still working through a backlog.
The Result: Speed Without Sacrificing Confidence
For a funder that competes on being first to answer a broker, the risk of automating decisions has always been getting it wrong faster. Heron let Good Funding do both at once: cut its median decision time by 97% while giving the team enough visibility into background-check data to trust the auto-approvals it sends out.
“You guys have been a great partner, and I hope it’s a partnership that lasts a very long time.”
For Gold, the underwriting overhaul is about more than any one process fix: it gives Good Funding confidence it can keep pace with an industry that moves faster every year, and he’s optimistic the growth of the past two quarters is just the beginning.
