The brand is new. The person reading your file is not.
I spent my career on the other end of this.
I'm Carmine Bruno. I came up in restructuring and investment banking, and I worked the Casper Sleep and Sam Ash restructurings — the industry gave me a Rising Star award for it, which mostly meant I had spent a great many nights reading credit agreements that had already gone wrong.
Restructuring is the autopsy. You arrive after the debt has failed, and you can see precisely what killed it: the wrong structure, a lender who was never right for the business, a rate nobody made anyone compete for. It is almost never the company. It is almost always the paper.
Transparent runs that autopsy in advance. We put the file through the tests a credit committee runs — coverage, global cash flow, collateral, tenure — and I read the result knowing which of those files come back broken. Then lenders bid for it under a codename.
If it will not place, I will tell you why in writing, for free. I would rather lose the fee than put you in the deal I would get hired to unwind later.
What that means on your file, specifically
He reads it
Not an intake coordinator, not a junior. The six underwriting tests are run against your documents and the result is read by the person who signs the engagement letter.
He writes the memo
The bankability memo and the teaser lenders see are drafted from your file, reviewed line by line, and shown to you before anyone else sees them.
He picks the lenders
Which names go on the list, and why each one. You approve every name before your file moves.
He negotiates
The indications come back and get run against each other on rate, structure, covenants and timing. That is a conversation with lenders, not a spreadsheet.
That is true while we are this size, and we would rather say so than pretend it lasts forever. The whole process is published — the six tests, the seven disclosures and what everyone in this business charges, including us.
The work, in order
- 01
You send the file
Two years of business returns, YTD financials, a current debt schedule, and an A/R aging if you have receivables. Ten minutes if your books are current — they are files you already have. If pulling them together is hard, that is the books rather than the request, and it is worth knowing now.
- 02
Bruno underwrites it
Our agent runs the tests a credit committee runs — coverage, global cash flow, collateral, tenure, program eligibility — and shows the arithmetic instead of a score. You get the memo whether you place with us or not. Bruno is named after our founder — the six tests are the ones he ran by hand for years, and he reads every memo before you do.
- 03
You approve what goes out
We build the teaser lenders will read and show it to you first. Nothing leaves until you have seen the document and approved the lenders by name.
- 04
We go to market redacted
Lenders receive your credit metrics under a codename — not your company, not your address, not your owners. Nobody pulls your credit to give an indication, so shopping costs you no inquiries.
- 05
They bid before they know you
Preliminary indications come back priced on the numbers alone. A lender that wants the file has to say what it would do before it learns whose file it is.
- 06
The best five compete
We take the strongest indications and run them against each other on rate, structure, covenants and timing — then hand you the terms side by side, annualised, until the best deal is the one on the table.
Questions before you send anything? Write to me directly. I answer this address myself.
carmine@transparentcap.comCarmine Bruno · Managing Partner, Transparent Capital LLC. Every figure on this site comes from a public file — 118,868 closed loans in the SBA’s own release — or a rule you can look up.