[ibimage==30256==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]
As the digital media industry is trending towards longer payment terms, FastPay, a Beverly Hills-based financial technology company offers a lifeline to digital businesses by providing loans. With FastPay’s wealth of historical data and strong relationships that it has built with its clients over the past three years, FastPay is poised for an exciting growth phase as it broadens its presence internationally and builds a scalable technical infrastructure.
Aaron Elharar, Head of New Business, said that this growth is bolstered by FastPay’s “knowledge of the media landscape, along with the data we collect, which makes it so we can provide loans to businesses that others deem uncreditworthy, or provide credit in a fraction of the time it would take other lenders.”
By providing more liquidity and financial options for customers in emerging parts of digital media such as video publishers, video seeding companies, and mobile publishers, FastPay has the opportunity to fuel the growth of the digital media industry, while also growing itself.
The company has 30 employees, more than double their headcount from last year, that are highly focused on extending FastPay’s presence. Due to its concentration on media buying and Facebook sales companies, New York-based clients account for about 40 percent of FastPay’s overall client base, and FastPay now has two employees in New York, who focus on sales and relationship management. Additionally, FastPay is expanding internationally, starting with the UK, where there is much media sales overlap with the US, Elharar said.
However, FastPay started here in Los Angeles when founder and CEO Jed Simon, a Dreamworks veteran, realized it was quite uncommon for companies in the digital media industry to be paid promptly; payment cycles are oftentimes long and drawn out. Simon founded FastPay to tackle this problem by providing a solution to this common and large specific digital media industry problem. FastPay has raised more than $40 million from Wells Fargo Capital Finance and SF Finance Group, among others, and attracted more than 100 customers.
Elharar said FastPay “provides simple and easy payment advances to digital businesses that get paid slowly by their clients, customers and partners.” For example, a common scenario is selling display inventory to a media agency managing advertising on behalf of a brand. Based on standard invoicing and reconciliation cycles, the company may not get paid for up to four months. This is where FastPay steps in to provide a payment solution that gives digital media companies the option to obtain commercial loans against accounts receivable; in essence, FastPay provides companies money based on payment these companies are expected to receive in the future.
As the company gears up for more growth, FastPay will be concentrating on building a scalable technical infrastructure that utilizes the knowledge and data they’ve collected over the past three years. As of today, FastPay’s customers have all repaid their loans from FastPay. However, with the company's growth, defaults will inevitably happen, Elharar said.
The trick for FastPay as it continues to grow will be building a sophisticated system that can accurately account for these considerations and enable FastPay to handle more loans and clients, while minimizing the number of loans that FastPay makes that won’t be repaid. This infrastructure will also speed up the financing process, by “allow(ing) customers to get money with a click of a button,” Elharar said.
To achieve this goal, FastPay has hired CTO Francesco Fabbrocino, who was formerly Senior Director of Engineering at ad tech company OpenX, to expand their business. They are also building out their engineering team with developers and data scientists. As FastPay continues on this path of growth, Elharar asserted that FastPay will be “part of a wave of financial technology companies that are disrupting the lending world using technology, data, and specialization.”
