I spent more than 25 years as an investment banker raising capital for financial services companies. Specialty finance companies made great clients because they kept coming back to the well for cheaper cash and bigger pools of it. Now I’m on the other side of the table at Percent, providing senior secured credit facilities to specialty finance companies. Percent is usually the first stop for an emerging finance company, and our goal is to help that borrower find the cheaper, bigger source of financing it came looking for. Founders ask me all the time what it takes to get there.
If you want to be taken seriously, have your data and reporting accurate and ready to share before your first call with a lender. Most of the prospects who call me are ready to grow, and plenty of them can’t show it in their data yet. That gap is fixable, and it’s usually what stands between a good borrower and a term sheet.
Some prospects want a debt term sheet to help close an equity round. Others haven’t funded a loan yet and want to learn how asset-based financing works. For anyone with a track record, even a short one, getting organized before financing talks begin is the single most powerful step, in my experience, to speed up terms.
A lot of founders come out of the gate too early. Nobody hands a first-time founder a list of what lenders want to see, so most learn it in the middle of diligence. They’re raising equity and hiring a head of underwriting at the same time, and the financing calls get whatever time is left. Take the time to pull the data together and clean up your financials first. Then build a package you can send the day after a good first call, and keep it current. Mine would have seven things in it:
- Loan-level tape, with the credit characteristics of each of your borrowers and loans, payment history and current status, and your written definitions of delinquent, defaulted and charged off, so a lender can test it as delivered.
- Cash collections by origination vintage, showing what has been repaid and when, laid out so a lender can read the curve without calling you.
- A monthly reconciliation that ties loan-level receipts to activity in your collection account, with exceptions written down. Do it even when the lender controls the cash.
- Company financial statements, current, with the loans receivable balance matching the tape.
- Your underwriting policy in writing, covering who you lend to and how you decide, and the date it last changed.
- Your servicing and collections policy in writing, covering who services the loans, how an account escalates, and when you charge off or modify a loan.
- Your existing debt, with covenants and who holds liens on what, since any new facility has to fit around it.
On a first call I want to understand what you lend against, who you lend to, how you collect and what the book has done so far. A good first call ends with a request list, and how fast and how cleanly that list comes back tells me a lot. When it comes back within a few days, complete and consistent, that prospect gets my attention first.
I’ve been told plenty of times that a data room was ready, then spent weeks chasing what was supposed to be in it. Even with a good book, chasing costs a borrower credibility. When the first tapes are hard to get, I start to wonder how the weekly, monthly and quarterly reporting will go after closing.
I’m not asking anyone to build a new back office. Most of this is data you already have, sitting in the servicing system and a pile of spreadsheets. Usually nobody has asked for it in this form, so nobody has tied it together. When the request comes, I’ve seen prospects scramble for up to two months to produce it while they’re also raising money and growing the book. Data hygiene is what sets one borrower apart from the next.
With a package a lender can test as delivered, diligence moves to how your policies work in practice: how you underwrite, how you collect and what you do in a bad month. If you’ve had one, expect to walk through what happened and what you changed.
You can build all of this yourself, without an investment banker or an advisory firm. If you’re not sure what’s missing, ask a lender what the package still needs. Most of us would rather tell you up front than find out in diligence.
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About the author
Bina Shetty is Chief Commercial Officer of Percent, where she focuses on specialty finance companies. She spent more than 25 years as an investment banker advising financial services companies raising debt and equity capital, including senior positions at boutique advisory firms serving lower-middle-market financial services clients. She began in the Financial Institutions Group at Merrill Lynch and later worked at CIBC World Markets and Canaccord Genuity. ABF Journal named her to its 2026 Top Women list.
Reach Bina’s team at percent.com/lender-financing, or connect with her at linkedin.com/in/binanshetty/.