PEP Episode 094 — How AI Compliance Controls & A Unified Portal Cut Lending Time In Half with DealHub 360

Tired of chasing documents and updates across spreadsheets, inboxes, and shared drives?

We bring together the creators of DealHub360, Deepika Shahani and Paul Manley, to show how a centralized loan origination portal helps ISOs, lenders, and equipment vendors move faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk without adding headcount.

Paul Manley shares two decades of payments and architecture experience—from ACH roots to international builds—while Topeka Shahani connects the dots from equipment finance to a platform purpose-built for modern lending. We introduce DealHub360, an AI-powered loan origination portal built to replace spreadsheets and scattered emails with a single workflow for ISOs, lenders, and equipment suppliers.

We talk risk, compliance, and how a pilot client helped cut processing time by 50% while setting the roadmap for CRM, servicing, and payments.

• origins in payments, ACH, and equipment finance
• why spreadsheets break at scale for lenders and ISOs
• pilot-driven design with Brad and measurable time savings
• financing beyond equipment: rentals, subscriptions, MCA, SBA
• risk tiers, automation for small tickets, human review for larger
• state-level compliance controls and configurable notices
• AI screening, data gathering, and future RAG agents
• out-of-the-box features, no lock-in, easy onboarding
• security model with roles, encryption, and audit readiness
• roadmap to CRM, collections, and payments under one roof

We dig into the real bottlenecks: fragmented data, slow underwriting handoffs, and state-by-state rules that derail momentum. You’ll hear how a meticulous pilot client helped shape features that matter in the field, from eSign and credit pulls to notifications that keep agents and merchants on track.

The result is a measurable impact: application processing time cut by half and a cleaner path to scale.

We also unpack the shift from traditional leasing to rentals, subscriptions, SBA, and MCA, and why small-ticket automation paired with human review for mid-range deals strikes the right balance between speed and safety. AI plays a targeted role here. Today, the platform screens businesses and personal guarantors, pulling from public sources and surfacing insights an underwriter can act on. Tomorrow, retrieval-augmented search and action-oriented agents will help teams find similar cases, summarize financials, and propose next steps—always with a human in the loop.

Security and governance stay front and center: role-based access, field-level permissions, encryption, audit readiness, and a roadmap that adds CRM, collections, ACH, and payments for a true one-stop shop. If you’re ready to replace manual chaos with a system that adapts to your programs and compliance rules, this conversation shows what’s working now and what’s next. Subscribe, share with a teammate who lives in spreadsheets, and leave a review with the one feature you wish your lending workflow had.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

Transcript

Jeremy Stock (00:00):

… Excited. We’ve got a remote podcast today, but joining us in studio is Christopher Dryden, founding and managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm, as well as our special guests. We got DePika Shahani with DealHub360, as well as Paul Manley. And you can find them at dealhub360.com. You guys, thank you so much for joining us. We’re looking forward to a great conversation today. Welcome.

Paul Manley (00:25):

Yeah, thanks for having us on.

Christopher Dryden (00:27):

Yeah, thanks for coming on. So Paul, I’ve actually just met today, but I’ve emailed with him quite a few times over the years. Just problems

Paul Manley (00:35):

Though. Sorry about that.

Christopher Dryden (00:37):

Yeah. Well, that’s usually what it is is problems, right?

Paul Manley (00:39):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (00:40):

But DePika, I’ve known almost the entire time I’ve been in payments because she comes from the equipment leasing world. And Paul is a software developer that has worked closely with ISOs over the years, including some big ones that have gone through acquisition that have been kind of on the cutting edge a little bit about doing things a little bit differently to grow as the technology has expanded in our space. So it’s great to have you both on and talk about your new venture today, which is Deal Hub 360. But it would be great if each one of you could give a little bit about your background and tell us kind of how you’ve intersected in the payments world over time.

Paul Manley (01:18):

Yeah. Yeah, sure. So I’m Paul Manley. Boy, I started in payments almost 20 years ago. So I started with a little company at the time called Check Gateway or CheckCommerce. We did ACH processing. And you start out, it was 20 years ago. You don’t know really what you’re doing. You kind of grow to expand and figure it all out. Eventually, I kind of moved through the company. We got from small, like 10 people to about 100. We got purchased. We needed a bunch of technology upgrades during the time. So yeah, CTO of that. And then when I moved to the other company, solution architecture and international payments for Nuvei, which is kind of an interesting ride. Super different. And then we did an acquisition of ZoomIn and I kind of managed that, which is another payments, but that was payments in the supports betting context.

Paul Manley (02:10):

So we’ve kind of done a whole bunch of payments, a lot of bank transfer stuff, a lot of solution architecture and technology. And now we’re moving on to DealHub 360. We want a different track to take, something a little bit more focused on our customer. Yeah. So that’s kind of the overview, big summary. But Dapika, do you want to tell us about yourself?

Deepika Shahani (02:38):

Yeah. My name is Tapika Shahani. I think I was born into payments. I’ve been doing it for many years more than I can count. Right after college, I started for an equipment leasing company and ever since I’ve been in equipment leasing all my life, all the way from like data entry of applications to credit reviews to risk and chargebacks and all of that. And then my last job was at Time Payment where I was the VP of sales where they launched the payments vertical for merchant finance. And that was a really fun experience trying to build a portfolio from scratch in my own business unit in this really big company, but that didn’t last for too long. It lasted for about two and a half years and they just decided to drop out of payment. And I think at that point, I was a little done with just being in payments and I wanted to just explore more options, got an opportunity to build DealHub360 for a really good friend.

Deepika Shahani (03:50):

And we partnered together with Paul Manny as well. And we decided to launch a company called DealHub360 in January of this year, which really offers loan origination software to small and mid-size ISOs and brokers and lenders where they can manage their pipeline and pretty much run their business using their software. So this was, I think, the funnest experience that I’ve had in my entire career and we’re really here today to talk about.

Christopher Dryden (04:25):

Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because we had Darren Ginsburg on a couple weeks ago and Darren’s one of the few people that does finance for ISOs, right? I mean, he’s one of the few people that’s out there that’ll allow you to use your portfolio as collateral because he’s really familiar with the payment space. And I see a lot of times where ISOs will lend out agents money, but it’s not something that they do and it’s not something that they’re really able to manage very well. And so it’s interesting to me that you’ve kind of come into this area, which I think has a lot more application than necessarily the focus that you’ve had in the start of it, but what was the genesis of DealHub 360 for you guys?

Paul Manley (05:08):

Oh yes.

Christopher Dryden (05:10):

What was the need you saw that when you were out in the marketplace and you’re like, “Oh wow, this is an untapped area that really needs something that’s a little more sophisticated.”

Deepika Shahani (05:20):

So what we came across was a lot of these ISOs, vendors, equipment suppliers, brokers, banks, which are lenders, small private banks, were using Excel spreadsheets to manage their application, to manage the status of the application. And they were using their emails and all kinds of ridiculous servers to save all the different documents that they keep receiving on their end, like tax returns, financial statements, bank statements. Everything gets lost somehow, somewhere, when you don’t really have a unique system that can store all your applications, all your documentation, all your email and extra communication all in one place. And that really was missing. We have an Iris out there, we have Salesforce out there, but these are too large, too sophisticated, very expensive for the small and mid-size ISOs and vendors and equipment suppliers to be able to use them. And they have months and months of wait of integration if you ever need to integrate with a bank or a backend company or a credit bureau.

Deepika Shahani (06:36):

So that’s where we saw a real need for a software like Dealer360 that is user friendly, easy to use, can store all your documentation, can do business verification. And we wanted to tap that need in the market that was really visible back then, which was about a year and a half ago when we started building this.

Paul Manley (07:01):

Yeah. We also had a first client that really was a pilot for us that gave us all this great insider knowledge about how his business runs, but what his needs were. And we think, this is Brad, I think him a lot because he really took us from … I’m sure Topeka knows so much about the industry, but Brad’s been doing it, he’s been lending equipment for so long that it really helped us. He showed us exactly what he needed, right? And in him showing us what he needed, we kind of developed the product to suit his needs, but also think about how can this help other people? So we really had a great focus with Brad to showing us exactly the direction that he needed to go and we could take that and kind of run with it.

Christopher Dryden (07:44):

Yeah, because that’s the thing about Brad is he’s very meticulous in his process and he’s very organized, but even at the same time, like he’s not the most technical guy in the world. And we’re talking about Brad Oliver from Azura Leasing and Brad’s been in equipment finance forever and he does it really well. He’s very fair in his offering and he’s very … And like I say, he’s very diligent in his process and how he operates to make sure that … Because leasing has generally had some abilities for people to cut corners, but his record keeping was always good, but it was done in the way that Depeka was describing earlier, which was … Yeah, exactly, like super labor intensive. So it’s awesome that you guys had kind of this beta test case that you could use.

Deepika Shahani (08:40):

Yes. And it really helped his team cut down application processing time by 50%. And I think that’s a really big number in today’s day and age where time is money, right? Like you need your deals approved and funded same day. But if you’re spending hours and hours on due diligence and just like all the manual documentation, well that’s where we come in and we help you cut that processing time by 50%. You scale your business. It allows these ISOs and vendors to go out of the market, scale their business, and do it all in one place, under one umbrella.

Christopher Dryden (09:19):

So, equipment financing was really big when I got into the industry, and then it tapered off quite a bit for a variety of reasons. I mean, a lot of it was just the change in equipment being used. And as we move towards more POS and CRM systems and a little more sophistication, I’m not even sure that people realize that those were items that could be financed, right? I mean, that was something that I don’t even think people thought much about on a merchant level. And then as the adoption kind of took place in all types of businesses, I mean, even our own, it’s the same. Like we’ve got a CRM system that we use and payments has been integrated and like the introduction of the ISV into our sales channel and so all of those things. But how do you see finance working or at least maybe like a resurgence of it in our space?

Deepika Shahani (10:20):

What we have noticed is that it’s not necessarily equipment leasing, it just could be a rental program that an ISO offers in house. It could be financing that the ISO offers in house, but there is still a market for that. We are seeing more and more equipment suppliers, vendors, ISOs, not just in payments, but in all different industries, be able to offer subscription programs and loans and SBA loans, working capital, merchant cash advance, right? It’s really evolving. It’s not just limited to equipment finance. And so our portal can do it all. You’re able to create and adjust as many programs as you want for whatever term length that you want. So if an ISO comes in and wants to just accept like a payment plan from a customer for six months, well, he can do that on a portal and he can track it and he can save all his documentation.

Deepika Shahani (11:29):

So there’s … I think financing is still around in different names and different formats. And the good thing is that our portal can accept all different forms of financing.

Christopher Dryden (11:40):

Yeah. I mean, that’s what I was trying to say. I wasn’t trying to pigeonhole necessarily into just financing because I believe what you said, there’s a form of financing if you want to call it that in all different names, right? I mean, talking about a rental program, it’s really to me the same thing, right? I mean, the nomenclature doesn’t really matter to me. It’s offering something that has value out to a customer, whether it’s your own agent, it’s a merchant, whoever it is, and then being able to track and manage that. I mean, it’s as simple as that. So, that’s what I find fascinating about your software is all the application, right? I mean, there is a ton of application for people that are doing things that they don’t even realize that there’s a tool out there that ultimately could assist you in preventing loss.

Christopher Dryden (12:30):

I mean, and really because it’s all about risk. I don’t care what we’re talking about. All of it’s about risk. So as you look at … The interesting part is I believe that there are less offerings for equipment and small business lending because it has been a difficult thing to manage. You were talking earlier, it was surprising to me that you said even banks were working off spreadsheets and like document repositories that are just antiquated as could be. And totally. And look, the only reason I know anything about technology is because I’ve been forced to do it for my job and it’s because the technology revolution in the payment space has been that. But what do you see as you’ve been in the marketplace where there’s opportunity for the future of small business lending and … I mean, I had somebody contact me today literally for a loan using portfolios collateral, I had three people that I know and every single one of them were like, “Yeah, if they want to sell it, I’m all for it, but I’m not necessarily interested in lending off of it.

Christopher Dryden (13:40):

” And this guy will pay the cost of money, which is interesting to me, but they go out into the marketplace looking for this because most like the reason Super G is around and will continue to be around or something like it is because the small lenders, whoever it is, it doesn’t matter what it is, a finance company, lender, to me, it doesn’t matter the word that you use. What I see more than anything is nobody wants to play in the pool between zero and $500,000. And I don’t know the exact reasons for that. I mean, some of it could be that there’s a lack of assets or collateral that exist to back it, but if you got a PG, it’s no different than giving somebody a merchant account and letting them run $500,000 a month in volume. So as far as I’m concerned, we’re talking about the exact same thing.

Christopher Dryden (14:39):

Where do you see the opportunities? What does the future look like to you as you’ve kind of delved into developing the software?

Paul Manley (14:48):

Well, I think about kind of how you said zero to 500,000 is kind of an interesting range. We’re actually seeing a lot of people going to go smaller range because it’s safer, right? So zero to 10,000, because you’re not going to break the bank if you have a little bit of fraud, right? But you get a little bit bigger and it becomes a little bit more of an issue. So yeah, risk is really the name of the game, right? So we offer in the portal, credit pulls, we offer screening for consumers, all kinds of stuff to kind of help immediate that risk. But it’s interesting, you have those ranges where you kind of want to almost automate things, then you get a little bit past where you think you should, and maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore, but you really do need a more person to person connection before you can offer those kind of services.

Paul Manley (15:37):

Some of our clients have longstanding relationships with their clientele where they’ve been offering $2 million loans or SBA financing. These are people that they know well. Whereas the smaller range, you don’t know those people so well because someone starting a coffee shop, they need a few terminals. That’s a small potatoes, small risk, right? So that’s where we do well in kind of vetting them. But yeah, no, you’re totally right on kind of, that’s an interesting range to think of the say zero to 10,000, but then say 50,000 to 500,000 is a different ball game.

Christopher Dryden (16:15):

Well, I find it interesting because as we do these podcasts, everything you guys say to me just pops questions into my head. So one of the things, because we work in the lending space and we work in, and most of it has looked at like collections litigation. That’s what we’ve done historically, and then that pushed us into doing contract drafting for loans, but more for cash advance and receivable factoring and getting into that world and seeing where it was intersecting with compliance. One of the things that I think scares people off related to this subject matter is compliance, right? I mean, one, it’s not standardized. Being in commercial helps. In my personal opinion, because consumer scares the shit out of me, there’s so much compliance that you have to jump, like hoops that you have to jump through, that it’s almost overwhelming and it has to be worth the dollar amount at some point, I would think.

Christopher Dryden (17:13):

But what Paul was saying about automation and then like automating offers for the actual consumer, whether it’s the merchant even doing it on like a small basis and figuring out if there’s a margin that’s worthwhile in there to offer it to your regular customer. And I’m not talking about a coffee shop necessarily, maybe more B2B transactions or something along those lines, but it has always kind of scared me to be in the consumer space. But even recently, because we’re in California, Topeka and I are and we’re the most heavy regulated state in the union. If you want to do anything over $5,000 in the financing world, you need a license here, or up to $500,000 as an upper threshold, but you can’t do too much in this space without running into some sort of regulatory obligation. Have you guys seen

Paul Manley (18:06):

Anything like that? Oh, it’s even different

Christopher Dryden (18:07):

State for state. We’ve gotten feedback from clients or potential clients about what that looks like and how has it worked in sort of the architecture of what you’ve built?

Paul Manley (18:18):

And yeah, we have state limitations built in because that’s a big deal, right? So you’re right, California can be more heavily regulated than maybe some of our clients don’t want to deal with, I mean, quite frankly. Vermont as well. Vermont has some strong regulatory laws in place that make it very favorable to the consumer, maybe even more favorable than it makes sense than to offer the loan or lease. So we kind of offer different contracts and we allow you to kind of say, “Nope, we’re not interested, just wholesale.” Not for that state, yeah. So there’s built into the system is the idea of jurisdiction and kind of what that means, because you’re right. And also that it depends heavily on exactly what you’re offering, right? So if you’re B2B versus you’re a two consumer, and then maybe if you’re small size or if maybe you’re offering tractor equipment or whatever it is and you’ve got a higher ticket value, those make a big difference.

Paul Manley (19:15):

So we don’t want to dictate to our clients how they run their business. We just want to facilitate them. So, hey, we offer, if you’ve got special rules, we can put those in to help you out. If you don’t need those, don’t have to use them.

Christopher Dryden (19:29):

Yeah. For me, it’s interesting because I generally have seen these issues from the problem side, as like Paul stated earlier. So things that I never had run into where I’d seen complaint letters come across from people that are specialized in industries like, “Have you built stuff in like where if you do the credit pool and you’ve got like an FCRA compliance where if they’re rejected, you give them the notices and kind of what’s there?” Because I kid you not, when it comes to consumer finance, it’s overwhelming at times because you don’t just have to worry about the federal, but also the state and now with the federal being somewhat stripped away, now the state’s become more relevant and none of them are uniform. It’s craziness, right?

Paul Manley (20:16):

Yeah, that definitely makes them go all over the place. Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (20:19):

Exactly. And you guys have addressed that through being able to allow the user of your platform to basically pick and play?

Deepika Shahani (20:32):

Yes, that’s right. So we allow the user of the platform to identify, give us a list of the different parameters that they need us to plug in and automate for them. For example, if you have a three day right to cancel deal and I’m just going to say it like Vermont, let’s say Vermont has a three day right to cancel deal, right? And that is what needs to be submitted to the client for signing. Well, if you don’t tell us, our software doesn’t know that. As long as you’re able to provide us the parameters upfront so that we can customize this for you, and that’s the beauty of DealHub360 is that we can customize anything for you. Whatever notices you want to send to your consumers, whatever notices you want to send to your ISOs and agents, as well as credit bureaus that you want to integrate with, you give us the parameters which are state requirements, credit requirements, underwriting requirements.

Deepika Shahani (21:32):

We customize, we build it for you and we present to you your own unique platform, which then allows you to be in compliance with whatever your vertical is, be it payments or be it trucks and trailers financing, right? There are so many different verticals that have completely different parameters on how these contracts are being done or these credit reports are being pulled. And so we build that for you and we customize that for you.

Christopher Dryden (22:03):

Is the standard version of DealHub 360, what kind of bells and whistles are included in it that kind of might be something that is normal for anybody in this capacity?

Deepika Shahani (22:15):

Yeah.

Paul Manley (22:17):

Well, standard bells and whistles are, I mean, you get basically everything off the bat. Really, it’s if you have special circumstances that we would go and customize for whatever you need, but you get all the state stuff. You can do it yourself if you want to. There’s configuration portals in there. What you get kind of out of the box is you get the platform, the pipeline management, you get some of the underwriting, the AI screening, you get the notifications, the reports, the billable stuff. You get kind of the whole package just out of the bat. You can customize a lot of it. So there are customization screens, but if you just want to run vanilla, which will give you a good equipment leasing base or a good financing base, it’ll just work for you. In fact, we have auto signup. You can just go sign up, check it out if you like it.

Paul Manley (23:07):

Same day, yeah, if you go for it. There’s no financial repercussions. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. If you want to customize it, we’ll help you out.

Christopher Dryden (23:16):

Yeah. I was going to ask, so the offering, is it something that is more of software as a service with a minimum commitment at time or because obviously to get knee deep in something like this, it would take some sort of investment on the subscriber’s part, right? Go ahead.

Paul Manley (23:35):

We have auto signup, just log in, get signed up, start working on it. There’s no minimum commitment. We’ve always said, if you don’t like the product, you’re not locked in. We’re not going to hold your data ransom. You can download it all if you want to. If you use it for say a month or two and you decide to do something else, go for it. Here’s all your data. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. We’ll try and get you back, but if you want to move a different direction, that’s fine. No,

Christopher Dryden (23:59):

That’s great. That flexibility’s awesome. Well, we want customers that want to do that. Excuse me. Paul, you said something earlier that I was interested in because we talk about this a lot on our podcast as it intersects into our space, but how has AI been used by you guys in integrating with the product that you built?

Paul Manley (24:21):

So we’ve been working on it. There’s so much to AI, right? There’s so many different … AI is kind of an interesting umbrella term, because AI just gives a whole class of sciences then right now everyone’s talking about generative AI or the LLM integrations, which is kind of where we’re kind of bringing in things right now. So our plan, what we’re offering right now, we’re kind of starting a little bit simple where we’re just doing screenings. So plug in your PG, plug in your business information, we’ll go and vet that client, that client in business or the PG in the business. And we’re bringing back basically what your underwriting team would do. So your underwriting team, they’re pulling Better Business Bureau, they’re pulling credit pulls, they’re doing all these kind of tasks. And then we’re basically letting AI go out do that. It’s kind of interesting because when you kind of let AI do it, we tell it to get a standard set of information, but also it finds things that we hadn’t found or even thought of, may go search more or as it’s kind of investigating things that a person may not even think of.

Paul Manley (25:27):

So it’s kind of interesting having a little more intelligence or maybe just a little bit more creativity on that side. This is just kind of a phase one, right? Phase one is just letting it do screening. We’re kind of working through what does phase two and phase three mean. And we’re probably adding a rag, which is a retrieval augmented generation to kind of do more internal searches. So you can search through your documents, you can search through our database to find either similar or related items. And then you ultimately, right everyone’s talking about what the future is, at least not even the future, but what’s happening currently. Everyone’s getting involved in basically letting your models interact with more actionable, actionable ways. So the MCP protocol is the thing that allows you to say, “Hey, I’m an AI. I’ve looked at this thing. I want to do this action now.

Paul Manley (26:19):

Do you want to do this? ” Whatever that might be, do a better business search or maybe actually-

Deepika Shahani (26:26):

Or credit. Yeah. Just doing credit analysis, right? And taking your financial statements and tax returns and bank statements and giving you a summary and say, “Hey, I’m an AI agent and I recommend that you approve this deal for $500,000 because here are the matching parameters that allows this deal to be at a risk score of five or 10, whatever the case may be, right?” Or it can go outside of your portal and do all kinds of analysis if there are public records available and provide you feedback. So we’re just trying to figure out what phase two and three will look like because there is so much AI opportunity out there, but it costs a lot of money. So how can we provide this AI information for a reasonable amount that ISOs and vendors, brokers and vendors can afford? I know of companies that are charging $2,500 in membership fees, plus another couple of hundred dollars just to run AI and overall AI analysis on one

Christopher Dryden (27:42):

Application. Yeah, no.

Deepika Shahani (27:43):

And that’s a lot of money for smaller guys, right?

Christopher Dryden (27:46):

Well, here’s the funny part. It’s needed, right? So I got a little story that’s kind of off topic, but James told me that our director of first impressions that works out in the front of our office, she got an Airbnb over Thanksgiving for her family and they go to check in and she’s working on the four digit code to get the key out and she’s on the phone with the alleged person that was giving it to her and she’s like, “We’ll try this one. We’ll try this one.” She’s like, “Look, it’s a four digit code. This isn’t that hard. What’s the deal?” And then all of a sudden a neighbor comes by, turns out that the people that were trying to rent it had been evicted and they were renting it out and it had gotten through Airbnb or whatever the rental service was, it had gotten all the way through to her paying a deposit and everything else to her getting to the door.

Christopher Dryden (28:40):

And that’s where like what Paul was just describing with the AI when I was like, “Why aren’t they using that? You can scrub the record to figure out whether or not that thing was subject of a lawsuit.”

Christopher Dryden (28:50):

Yeah, it’s kind of

Paul Manley (28:51):

Crazy. Unless it’s hallucinating or just making things up because that’s also, we want to make sure that a person is still reviewing AI, make a recommendation. Great.

Christopher Dryden (29:01):

Oh, for sure. Please look at it though. And there always needs to be a human element. I say that it’s like software, garbage in, garbage out, right? So you can only do so much. There’s still … I joke about AI with the kids in my house. I was like, “Look, AI is not fixing my plumbing.” It’s just not going to do it. AI’s not giving me a massage, right? It’s not happening. Wait for the robots. We see what you’re using AI for, David. All right, Judy, Jess, So coming in the next year, what do you see the best practices for your customer base as this is kind of expanding? And also where do you see the pain points that are being addressed that this will help you overcome?

Paul Manley (30:21):

Well, I mean, I think just guidelines is one, when you’re using AI, always have a person in control of that. So that’s kind of just one guideline that’s always going to be there. And then kind of addressing pain points. I think just as I think about our customer base, as they expand, as they’re growing, I mean the pain point is paperwork, compliance, consistency and notifying. As you grow, it’s harder to give that personal touch with each item that you’re kind of processing, each of your sub clients or your customers that we can help out with by offering notification services and kind of just making sure that a process is consistent. And Brad’s always been great about this, but I think we kind of get to a limit where how much can you effectively handle before you kind of have to ease back on quality? And I think this is where DealHub 360 comes in.

Paul Manley (31:13):

We can help you with that. We can kind of increase your consistency, quality and notification because everyone likes knowing the status. If you’re just working at home where you’re working off your Excel sheet, no one knows what you’re up to really. In the portal, everyone gets notified. You get information. Everyone can see kind of what’s going on in the status. It’s kind of just easy to self-service. So kind of where I see just people like communication. It’s so nice just to know what’s going on with your lease or your status or if you need extra information or extra stipulations being achieved or satisfied. It’s kind of where I see just solving pain points and kind of moving forward, helping people realize their business, making it better for them. Because that’s really where we want to help out with people is just kind of take their business and let them grow bigger and consistently.

Christopher Dryden (32:10):

Yeah. I mean, I would think from a customer service standpoint, when you put automation into a process where you’ve got an agent, like I see an agent being the interface with the end user and you’re the backend or there is a backend and this software allows to ping the agent to do something. It’s almost like a call to action. Like your system’s really assisting the process in general like, “Hey, this has been done and here’s the next step.” Or, “Hey, we’ve done all this, but you’re missing A, B and C and I need you to go do that. ” And it’s rather than having to pick up the phone or type an email, the system automates it and gives a report of … It was funny, there’s an auto place next door and they did an analysis on my stepdaughter’s car and I got an email and it’s yay long with a report of like, needs immediate attention probably in the future, this is all okay.

Christopher Dryden (33:08):

And then the estimate came right behind it. So even for something like I saw something fairly sophisticated and now it’s pushed to us and I’m sure there’s an email automation 24 hours if there’s been no response, right? So it’s kind of nice to see. Have you guys had preliminary talks with any larger ISOs that have a decent size agent base or do enough volume or offering free equipment programs where this is a great management tool or even facilitates the process? Have you gone there yet?

Deepika Shahani (33:42):

So we do have a lot of ISOs on our platform today. However, they’re indirect. They’re accessing our platform through their current lender, right? So for example, Azure Leasing is one of our clients and Azure leasing allows their ISOs to access our portal, submit transactions to Azure through the portal, do eSign, run credit, communicate with each other, as well as with their agents. So the agents of the ISOs also get their unique IDs to access the portal. We are trying to connect with those ISOs that do not have lenders that do not have brokers that are doing their own in- house financing and can use our portal to do that. We’re still trying to access that market of ISOs, but we have hundreds of ISOs, I would say at least 400 ISOs or so along with their agents that currently access our portal through their lender login.

Christopher Dryden (34:46):

You worry about any security concerns because it’s funny, we had a guy on, you should go watch this podcast. His name’s Peter Sagerstrom and he does cybersecurity. And this dude’s really smart. I mean, ever since I met him, I’ve used him on transactions to look through IP that’s being purchased and do some sort of an analysis and a pine as to like, is it what they say it is? And he’s got a very diverse background, but he has a company called Traceless and they do all of these cybersecurity protocols within a system. And it was fascinating that just what he was sharing on the podcast about how things operate, because I’m not in that world to see what happens and all of the security concerns that exist. Oh, sure. Things that I never would have thought of, right? And so when you’ve got all these users, even though they have unique IDs, you guys worry about security features associated with the information in there or is it just locked down to the point where they can really only see and not manipulate anything and like, is that something … Or how about this?

Christopher Dryden (35:54):

Tell me about the security features of DL360.

Paul Manley (35:58):

Yeah, sure. So the one, you’re right, users users only see what they’re supposed to see. And what they’re supposed to see is we have a hierarchy of users from the broker, lender, vendor, agent, where that’s your kind of hierarchy from the top down. Each one gets a smaller and smaller view, not just in terms of like what they can, like the leases they can access or the equipment they can see, but in terms of what like fields they can see. So you kind of get the broker can see everything, lender can see pretty much everything. Vendors see less and then you just keep getting less and less until you get to the final user. So we kind of would do that just in terms of like access control. You have types of users, you have identity in the system and there’s role access controls. Then on top of that, I’m from payment space and this is always set up to be very PCI in mind.

Paul Manley (36:47):

We’re not regulated as such, thank goodness, that’s a hoop. That’s a hope to get through. But in terms of scanning security, hardening, segregation and scoping all your data, so that’s all in there because we’d always assumed at some point we’re probably going to add payments in line. So we’ll just start out from the beginning, making sure that we’re secure enough to do that. So today could we pass PCI? I think so. I don’t have to do that luckily because I don’t necessarily want to go through the audit, but we should be able to. So in terms of security, it’s all … We’re talking HSM hardened, all your data is encrypted. Although you can access your data and we provide reporting. When it’s at rest when it’s on our servers, it’s all encrypted and it’s kind of locked out per user. So step one, when you log in, we’re actually, you know, we’re assigning you keys so you can kind of access your data as you go and we encrypt and decrypt on the fly as you move data through the system.

Paul Manley (37:56):

So yeah, no, we’re secured. We’ve got metrics, we’ve got our security policies, procedures, we’re ready for bank audits.

Paul Manley (38:10):

We always intended security to be in mind and to pass audits because we’re eventually going to be accepting your credit card and then ACH data in there. So we want to make sure encrypted lockdown can only see what you want to, auditable, roll access controlled.

Christopher Dryden (38:27):

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, right? If you’re going to have a software system, eventually the end user that’s making the payments associated with the financing or whatever’s happening, you’re going to want them to like one stop shop. I mean, it’s like a logical progression.

Deepika Shahani (38:43):

That’s the planning, yes. Yeah. So the next phase, I think in the next year or so is to build a full on CRM attached to DealHub 360, because right now we’re a front end portal, right? A front end loan origination system powered by AI. But the goal is to build a CRM attached to this as well as a backend system so that it’s a one stop shop, right? And ISO can also become a lender and is also able to ACH payments and collect finance, payment plans, whatever it is that they need to collect from their customers. Similarly, banks, brokers, lenders, whatever you want to call them, they all can use our platform for customer service and collections and ACH and all of that good stuff. So that’s our phase two, three, four, whatever you want to call it at this point. That’s what we’re working on.

Christopher Dryden (39:36):

Yeah. I mean, it actually shrinks the economy of scale a little to me and gives people opportunity where they don’t have to be like a link in the chain. They can actually be origination point to a large degree. I mean, there’s a lot of opportunity. I mean, I’ve watched ISOs over the years try to do things outside of payments and for a variety of reasons. But one is that they’re sales guys, generally speaking, like they’re great at the sale. Ops is not always their strong point. So to have a robust tool that allows to manage these things, it just makes a ton of sense because I watch … I mean, I’ve got a couple guys that are, to me, sophisticated agents, kind of like wrecking balls that are out there just doing it on their own. And some of them do finance and they find these random deals and then they’ve got to go out and find a source of money and it’s just such a pain in the ass.

Christopher Dryden (40:29):

I mean, it’s like a … And then to manage what’s going on here and there, it would be so much easier for them even on a per deal basis to have access to something like this, right? I mean, it just makes a lot of sense. Look, I always give everybody the last word. What do you guys want to say that we might have missed?

Paul Manley (40:53):

Oh boy, we kind of covered a lot. We kind of went all over the place. We walked. We try. We try. I would say basically, if you’re an ISO, if you’re a lender, if you’re a broker looking to automate your business and you want some help with that, we’d love to help. Out of the box, you get a lot, you get a lot for real cheap. If you like it, that’s great. If you need help automating more things, we’d love to help out. So I think it’s really, we’d love to have a great collaboration with our clients and see how we can kind of help them expand. So I think that’s really what it’s all about is not just about the platform, but I’d like to see our clients succeed and help them.

Christopher Dryden (41:35):

Yeah. I mean, we’re here in the payments world, but when I look at a tool like this, I just see application all over the place, right? I mean, it’s because this is a tool that really is an organizational tool. It’s got some specific functionality related to lending, but from an organizational standpoint and what it tracks, it’s just got a lot of functionality to it and you can apply to a lot of different endeavors. And that’s what I find fascinating about it. It’s almost like sensory overload of all the things I think that I could apply this operation to. That’s the interesting part to me. Well, look, how does everybody find

Paul Manley (42:22):

You? Oh, all over the place. How do they find us, Depeka? We’re in a bunch of different sales.

Deepika Shahani (42:27):

Dealhap360.com. We’re on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Google. You’ll find us.

Christopher Dryden (42:33):

Great.

Deepika Shahani (42:34):

I live in Irvine.

Christopher Dryden (42:36):

Come see me. And if they want to email you.

Deepika Shahani (42:39):

It’s dipika.shahani@dealhof360.com or sales@dealhut360.com. It’s on our website. It’s very easy. Go to our contact page or a demo page. We can schedule a demo or a 30 minute introduction call right away. We’re always ready for

Christopher Dryden (42:59):

That. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on and sharing what you’re doing. I think it’s important because I really do believe … I tell the story all the time about Shift Four when it used to be HarborTouch and really it was the POS system that they designed, which was really basic, right? And that launched them into a new place and then Jared just figured out how to do more and more. And then I watched the more sophisticated ISOs and how they operate. And I think this is another progression in that evolution for them. And so I think what you’re doing is important. So thanks for coming on and sharing it with us.