Inside iBank.com - an entrepreneurial intern's perspective at the small business loans, equipment leasing, and commercial real estate lead company

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I've been working at iBank.com since the end of May 2008. In the last month and a half I've learned a lot about the company and entrepreneurship at the same time.



To sum up what iBank.com does you have to realize that a lot of what the company is about is based on the CEO's experience as a business owner over the last few years. iBank.com seeks to help the small business owner connect with sources of capital whether that be business loans, equipment financing, or commercial mortgages. In the future they hope to help the small business connect with insurance providers, business coaches, and other services such as lawyers and accountants too. By taking this approach iBank.com is not only able to help the small business but also the individual that they are trying to connect to, providing both accurate information and more valuable leads.



The CEO Tom Markel spoke at my BAEP 453 "Managing New Ventures" entrepreneur class at the University of Southern California last semester (Spring 2008) and I jokingly say that he was one of the only speakers that I stayed awake for. In reality though, his energy and entrepreneurial mind is visible in every conversation he has whether it is with a lowly intern like myself or the CEO of Ein-Sof, Macedonia's largest software company.



Working with Tom is CFO Ron Hardaway, CTO Brooke Kline, and his son & VP Tommy Markel who in turn manage their own departments at the company. The funny thing is that each of these men have a very different style then their leader. Ron seems to be always busy as he is doing everything from helping Tom figure out numbers through working on the company's reverse merger to be publicly traded. Brooke seems to be a more serious individual as he manages the team of developers who keep the innovation at iBank.com flowing, and Tommy has the same fast paced personality as his dad but still manages to keep a little more focused on the task before him.



The cool thing about my internship is that Tom understood when he brought me on that I was an entrepreneur major at USC and so I feel that there are a lot of projects that I get to work on and questions I've been able to ask him that another type of intern would not be able to ask or participate in. In my time here I've been able to see how forward looking iBank.com is as I've sat in on meetings about thier IPO, expansion into China, partnership in Macedonia, strategic planning, the economy, the SBA, user experiences, SEO, SEM, web development, software security, and so much more.



From what I can tell I've picked a good internship for this summer but it makes sense that I would be able to learn a whole lot about entrepreneurship from a company that makes the small business owner a priority.


Robert Moore,
iBank Comm/Tech Team
(714) 549-4226 ex: 135
rmoore@ibank.com
3151 Airway, Building G-3
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Presentation: Why move to a membership model?

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iBank.com - Applying Social Marketing to Your Company

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Social Media has been called the wave of the future. People are relating the use of social media at work to the adoption of personal computers onto all of our desks. The interesting thing about social media however is that there are some companies and industries where it can be applied to huge success. Take nike's social networking site for socer fans joga.com or the Myspace and Facebook pages that most any popular product has these days. Unfortunately the small businesses often don't have any idea how to utilize these new mediums.


Since I was brought on to the iBank.com team I decided to take it upon myself to figure out how social media could become an integral part of the company's marketing. Little did I know that there would be huge other reasons to use social media on top of that. A Forrester report breaks down the application of Social Media into five different categories: research, marketing, sales, support, and development and suggests different social technologies for each.


What research I found I put into a presentation that I gave at a friday meeting. Where we are going from here is to try and apply some of the research I've found to our marketing strategies and see if the industry that iBank.com is in is ready for social media.


When I am done I will post the results but for now here is our gameplan:

1. Introduce the heads of the departments to the technology (LinkedIn Q&A, and Twitter)

2. See if our industry is already using LinkedIn Q&A or Twitter

3. If there seems to be a large enough user base on these technologies that we want to connect to then I will educate each department head on how to do so and educate the appointed person in each department on how these technologies work as well.


Thats it. It is fairly simple and if we have to stop at step 2 because there are no individuals in our industry using these technologies so far, then at the very least we have educated our company to these technologies and concepts so when there is industry adoption we will be poised to be a leader in meeting the individuals in our industry where they are.

Robert Moore,
iBank Comm/Tech Team
(714) 549-4226 ex: 135
rmoore@ibank.com
3151 Airway, Building G-3
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

iBank.com - info on popular finance products - the Merchant Cash Advance

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So we here at iBank.com see a lot of trends in the small business finance products. One of the current trends that we have seen is the popularity in the Merchant Cash Advance category. While we would like to say that we have the best knowledge of this product we figured we might as well not reinvent the wheel and instead repost an article from the merchantcashadvanceinfo.com blog on:




"What is a Merchant Cash Advance?
A Merchant Cash Advance is a flexible alternative to traditional small business financing. It might also be called credit card receivable funding, credit card factoring or a business cash advance, depending on the provider or the person or forum talking about the product. While this might be called many things, a Merchant Cash Advance is the most common reference to this funding product.





In a nutshell, a Merchant Cash Advance is a really unique funding product allowing small business owners to access working capital now by selling their future credit card sales.





Let’s start at the beginning.


A Merchant Cash Advance is unique, but it is not hard to understand.If your business accepts credit cards, you might be able to use your future sales to access working capital.





A Merchant Cash Advance is not a loan. It is a purchase and sale…customers sell Merchant Cash Advance providers a portion of their future credit and signature-based debit card sales in exchange for immediate access to business capital.





This is a financial option that can offer many advantages to a small business owner.


You can spend the money for any business purpose. You don’t need personal collateral. There are no checks to write. Everything is automatically handled by the credit card processor. You pay back the balance by processing regular credit and signature-based debit card sales. It is quick and easy when compared to other financial options.





Perhaps the most unique benefit is that there is no set maturity date, no pre-set payment amount. The amount collected aligns with your business’ credit card sales. The more you earn, the higher the payment amount. During slower periods, the amount declines.





Do you know of any other financial obligation that aligns payment amounts with your sales volume? Does your landlord decrease your rent because sales are down this month? Does your bank adjust your loan payment to match your business’ seasonality? No. So you can see how using the flexible structure of a Merchant Cash Advance can be used to help manage your business’ cash flow."




If you feel that this article was insightful be sure to stop over to the original post and check out the followup articles or make a comment on their blog.




Robert Moore,

iBank Comm/Tech Team

(714) 549-4226 ex: 135

rmoore@ibank.com

3151 Airway, Building G-3

Costa Mesa, CA 92626

iBank.com - prosper.com and virginmoney.com - web facilitated personal loans

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So at iBank.com we deal with small business loans quite a bit. We try to be the Ferari of small business loan lead generation by being the be all and end all to the small business seeking financing. The "i-CFO" if you will. Or even the "small business finance information bank."



Since this is our industry we try and pay attention to anything that our small businesses are looking to for money or any other needs for that matter. A couple sites that we wanted to talk about here were the prosper.com and virginmoney.com sites. Both can be shortly described as personal loan facilitating web sites and their slogans are "Lets bank on each other" and "Changing the face of money" respectively.




Both very cool. Prosper.com allows an individual to get a loan based on an amalgamation of individual lenders (who are people, not companies or institutions). This allows someone to lend $50 toward a loan that someone wants $3000 for and all the interest rates that people are willing to offer that particular loan are averaged accross to determine what the final interest rate to the borrower is. Virginmoney.com seems to be a site that wants to be the support for the loan. You have to go out and get the money but they will help draw up loan contracts and payment schedules and the like.




Both of these sites seem very useful and allow borrowing to become personal again.



Robert Moore,
iBank Comm/Tech Team
(714) 549-4226 ex: 135
rmoore@ibank.com
3151 Airway, Building G-3
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

iBank.com - Savvy small businesses can save thousands of dollars on business loans, equipment leases, and commercial mortgages

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Here at iBank.com we spend most of our time connecting the small business with the appropriate business loan, equipment lease, or commercial morgage. This puts us in the particular position of being extremely educated to the ins and outs of the current small business financing trends.

One of our business development managers was telling me the other day about how a particular small business was able to save more than $50,000 over the life of its loan by going with a line of credit instead of a merchant cash advance. The small business was eligible for both types of loans but without the appropriate information the company could have wasted tens of thousands of dollars.

Since we are so knowlegable about this industry we realize how fluid the requirements for all the different loans really are. Equipped with this realization a small business is much more capable of fending for itself if it takes the opportunity to shop around and figure out all of the different types of loans that they qualify for.

Fending for themselves can be daunting however. Just on the iBank.com website we have over 80 loan types listed. Luckily, the iBank.com service takes the risk of changing loan requirements and confusion of loan types and simplifies the process into one application. After the application is filled out the magic really happens, something that could only happen at iBank. The lenders look at each and every business regardless of what one would assume the loan type they would be applying for. This fact alone allows the small business to be offered loans that no one would ever imagine they would qualify for and, even more remarkable, as soon as the qualifications change the small businesses are again being offered the loans that they qualify for. This way there is no lag between the change in qualifications and the small businesses realizing that they can apply for them. All the small business has to do is sit back and compare the offers they get for loans.

The moral of the story is that this industry is under so much flex these days. Even with the exposure our office gets to all of the changes in the loan qualifications there is no one that can truly keep up with all of them. If the small business takes it upon itself to keep seeking the capital there is more and more chance these days that they will find it at companies and loan types that they never expected.

Robert Moore,
iBank Comm/Tech Team
(714) 549-4226 ex: 135
rmoore@ibank.com
3151 Airway, Building G-3
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

New Site Launched!

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We launched the new version of our site this week!

Check it out at www.ibank.com

We were hoping to give it a more updated look and simpler functionality.

Please let us know if you have any feedback.

-The Comm/Tech Team
iBank.com