Value Capital Funding review.

Our verdict

Read the category label before anything else: Value Capital Funding does not settle debt. It arranges refinancing of merchant cash advances into structured bank and credit-union paper at 13% to 22% APR, replacing several daily debits with one monthly payment. For the right business that is a better outcome than any settlement on this list.

The right business is a narrow one. You have to actually qualify, which means revenue and credit strong enough for an FDIC lender to underwrite you, and if you are already carrying three stacked positions and a defaulted advance, you almost certainly do not. Consolidation is the answer for the business that caught the problem early. By the time most owners find a page like this, that window has shut.

Know what you trade away. Refinancing converts a disputed obligation into a clean bank loan you have now personally reaffirmed, and it extinguishes the defenses settlement runs on. The reconciliation clause the funder never honored, the usury framing, the defective UCC-1, all of it disappears the moment the advance is paid off. If your contracts have real defects, you may be buying your way out of a fight you would have won.

On disclosure we have to mark them down, and we want to be precise about why. We searched Florida’s Office of Financial Regulation licensee data, all eighteen lists and 289,295 records, and found no license of any type under this company’s name, phone numbers, or principals. New York’s Department of Financial Services register returned nothing either. We could not check NMLS, whose terms prohibit automated access, so treat NMLS as unchecked rather than clear. None of that means a license was required: a firm that arranges bank loans rather than making them may not need one, and this company describes itself as arranging. What we can say flatly is that the site publishes no license number, no NMLS ID, and no lending disclosure of any kind, and that in a category this heavily regulated the absence is worth a question on the first call.

One smaller thing, from the same afternoon’s reading. The homepage claims over $100 million refinanced or restructured. The team page says over $150 million. Both cannot be right, and a company that cannot keep its own headline number straight across two pages is telling you something about how closely anything else is checked.

And one much larger thing, which we want to state carefully because the distinction matters. Value Capital Funding has no litigation against it that we could find, and it is not a party to the case we are about to describe. Its name appears nowhere in that docket. But two of the three principals named on the company’s own team page, Barry Kornfeld and Ferne Kornfeld, consented to final judgments entered January 10, 2019 in SEC v. Kornfeld, 1:18-cv-23369 in the Southern District of Florida. The SEC alleged they acted as unregistered brokers selling unregistered securities in the Woodbridge offering, which the agency has described as a Ponzi scheme. The judgments were entered on consent, in the standard form that resolves these matters without an admission. The SEC filed that case in August 2018, the same year this company was founded.

None of that is a finding about Value Capital Funding, and we are not going to pretend it is. It concerns two individuals and a prior business of theirs. It is also the sort of thing an owner about to hand over full financials would want to know, it took us a docket search to find because the company does not mention it, and it sits alongside a site that publishes no license number at all. Ask about it on the first call and judge the answer.