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{{kevin-richardson}}
Background on Splash Advance
Splash Advance provides small-business financing to SMBs across the United States — term loans, equipment financing, and a broker program that connects independent brokers to Splash's funder network. The team is lean, roughly 20-25 employees. After more than a decade in the space, Splash had built a deep funder network, but the operational layer underneath hadn't kept up.
Pain Points
To keep up with submission volume, Splash had spent three to four years routing every deal through a back-office scrubbing team of five to ten processors based in Albania. The team worked 3 PM to 11 PM local — leaving Splash's U.S. desk uncovered through the back half of every business day. Every submission still had to be hand-keyed into Splash's CRM and then re-entered into each funder's portal, and processing a single deal could take 45 minutes to an hour.
The other half of the problem was funder integrations. Splash works with dozens of funding partners, each with their own portal or API. Standing up a new integration in-house took one to two months — and the homegrown portal-by-portal system Splash had built broke constantly. By the time their team got an issue fixed, the deal was usually dead.
"There were probably about 20 breaking points throughout that process where we should have pulled the trigger. We should have stayed ahead of the curve."
Why Splash Chose Heron
Splash needed a partner that could collapse the submission workflow into one system — talking to every funder, regardless of whether that funder accepted deals by email, API, or portal upload.
That's exactly what Heron Funder Submissions does. From a single dashboard, Splash sends a deal to its full funder stack in one click per funder, and Heron handles the actual delivery — email, API call, or portal fill — populated automatically from data Heron extracted from the ISO app and bank statements. Every API and portal integration Heron builds for one customer is reusable across every other customer working with that funder, so adding new funders to Splash's stack stopped being a multi-month engineering project.
How Heron Funder Submissions Powers Splash's Workflow
Splash deployed Heron Funder Submissions as the system of record for every deal that leaves the building.
- One-click submissions across email, API, and portal — Splash picks the funders for a deal and hits send. Heron does the rest, with all intake fields auto-populated from data already extracted on the broker side.
- Reusable funder integrations — adding a new funding partner is no longer a 1-2-month engineering project. If Heron is already integrated with that funder, Splash is live the same day.
- Back-end access for fast fixes — when a field needs adjusting before a deal goes out, Splash can edit directly in Heron and re-submit, no offshore team required.
Outcomes
1. From 45-Minute Deals to Deals in Minutes
Before Heron, processing a single deal — extracting the data, keying it into the CRM, and pushing it out to each funder's portal — took 45 minutes to an hour. Today, the same work happens automatically through Heron Funder Submissions, in minutes.
"We can get it out within minutes. We get approvals back sooner. We're able to work the deals. A lot of the boys here on the teams have more time to put into other things."
That's hours of work redirected from data entry into selling, every single day — operational leverage that lets Splash grow the brokerage book without growing the team.
2. Sunsetting a 5–10 Person Offshore Back-Office
The biggest line-item change was structural. Splash replaced its Albania-based processing team — five to ten people, three to four years of headcount — entirely with Heron Funder Submissions. Costs down, volume up, same lean U.S. team running the whole operation.
"It's definitely cut down our costs on the people side, and our numbers are up on both sides of the business — the funding and the brokerage side."
It's a permanent change to Splash's cost structure: an entire layer of headcount eliminated, with funding and brokerage volume both climbing on top of the savings.
3. Same-Day Offers — and the Confidence to Promise Them
For a small business looking for capital, speed is the deal. Splash's brokers now operate with the confidence that a merchant applying at 2 PM gets a funder offer back the same day.
"I feel pretty confident that I can get it done — meaning I can have him fill out an application, send it out to our funding partners, get an offer back within 45 minutes to an hour. I don't think I would feel the same way a year ago."
In a market where merchants comparison-shop offers within hours, that turnaround is the difference between winning the deal and losing it to a faster broker.
4. Implementation in a Day
Heron's team came on-site, watched how Splash actually moved deals, and stood up the system in a single day — with operations manager Erica as the only non-engineer running point. When a small issue surfaced on launch day, support fixed it within the hour. That responsiveness is the inverse of Splash's pre-Heron experience, when debug cycles on the homegrown API system ran into weeks and deals died waiting.
"Within one day, they were able to take our system and just completely run with it, and get everything done without asking too many questions. Anytime I had a question, everyone was super self-explanatory."
Time-to-value was measured in hours, not quarters — and the same support velocity that got Splash live is what keeps live deals from cooling whenever something needs a quick fix.
What's Next: Growing on the Tech Side
For Splash, the next chapter is growth on both sides of the business — same lean team, more deals, more revenue. Kevin sees that growth running through tech, not headcount. As Splash scales, every new funder integration Heron ships becomes an instant capacity unlock, and every new Heron product layer is more revenue Splash can capture.
About Splash Advance
Splash Advance provides small-business financing solutions to SMBs across the United States, including term loans, equipment financing, and a broker program connecting independent brokers to Splash's funder network.
