For more than 20 years, Paul Schuldiner, executive vice president and chief lending officer at Rosenthal & Rosenthal, and Jennifer Draffkorn, senior vice president and portfolio manager of the firm’s purchase order finance division, have been colleagues, first at Transcap Trade Finance, which was the largest purchase order finance company in the United States before it was ultimately sold to Wells Fargo in 2008. While at Wells Fargo, the duo cultivated a relationship with a client in the apparel industry that is still paying dividends to this day, with Rosenthal recently supplying it with a $12 million purchase order financing facility.
While at Wells Fargo, the duo had structured a deal for this same client that used letters of credit to overseas suppliers to cover the purchase of goods. The facility also covered freight, duty and all logistics costs.
Fast forward to 2022, when the client returned to Schuldiner and Draffkorn via an introduction by a bank-owned factoring company (A/R lender). The client was utilizing the bank’s accounts receivable finance solution and had an inventory facility structured, but it wasn’t enough to cover the volume of sales orders it was starting to get from big box retailers. Working again with the same A/R lender, which they had worked with previously, Schuldiner and Draffkorn closed the $12 million PO financing last January and completed the first fundings in early February. This time, however, the A/R lender couldn’t support the exponential growth the client was experiencing, so based on Draffkorn and Schuldiner’s previous work with the client and Rosenthal’s ongoing relationship with the A/R lender on multiple separate deals, it was only natural for a deal to come together.
“We were familiar with and comfortable working with the former client. We knew the principals and the management team and the deal was similar in size to a program that we’d run with them in the past,” Draffkorn says. “Our PO finance team, including SVP and underwriting manager Megan Flaherty, AVP Rosa Morales and VP Sandra Fisher, had familiarity with the A/R lender and had done deals with them before. Bringing our team into the loop allowed the client to capitalize on those sales that otherwise would have been missed.”
Rosenthal utilized a 100% advance rate on the cost of goods it is helping this client acquire, which is far greater than what some conventional lenders might offer, according to Schuldiner.
“It’s a great tool to help companies that either have a limitation on their facility size by their existing lender or an inventory cap or inventory reliance issue,” Schuldiner says. “We can provide that additional incremental financing as an alternative to raising permanent capital to fill a short-term working capital or bridge finance situation while the A/R lender receives the benefit of increase factored sales without taking the excess inventory risk.”
