This past week major news broke in the MCA industry with a lawsuit being filed against Centrex, Trey Markel and CEO Kris Kehler. The suit was filed for 1 million dollars by Fund411 operating as FundAmerica. Centrex and its partners are accused of sending private client data to third parties AKA back dooring their clients data. I have been familiar with Centex for some time and several years back a rogue lead broker in the industry who specializes in stolen data had told me he had a password to the Centrex platform. It appears back dooring, security breaches and selling third party data may be something Centrex has been involved with for some time. This is part of what we discuss weekly concerning where to place your data and who to trust. You must establish relationships with funders who need your business and will not back door you (or as little as possible). CRMs should be vetted and carefully researched. You are putting all of your leads and deals on a platform it must be secure.
This week I saw a major increase in the amount of cell phone and verified emails ordered by my clients. The regulations around 10dlc caused many ISO teams to pause their texting campaigns and look for other ways to reach merchants. There are options such as Message Desk and Cherry SMS that are allowing ISO teams to reach out to merchants and generate submissions. This can sometimes be a 2-way street as texting is needed to reach the merchant but some of these platforms are using their customers data to fund or settle deals. It comes down to how important is it for you to get your SMS campaign out and also understanding much of the industry already has the same data, it’s just about finding guys who are ready now to move on an advance. Many of my other clients have made the investment into building their own platform for texting. Many of these new platforms have had to deal with initial challenges in getting the texting to work, however they control their own data 100 percent. So, there is a tradeoff between quality and security.