FAQ
Funders

Per our Mission Statement, CleanFi operates like a contractor or building owner’s Project Financing department, at no cost to them to access all of our services, and at no cost to you for onboarding and maintaining your financing solution with CleanFi.

When you accept our invitation to onboard one or more of your product(s), we start by building all of their features into our database, including rate, term, conditions, variants (asset class, corporate entity, improvement type, project size brackets etc.), underwriting requirements, even a custom application and document upload engine that is specific to your requirements.

We will help you onboard as many products as you want based on numerous project profile options, like funding amount, corporate type, etc.

You can float your rate for any product based on the 5, 10 or 20 year T-Yield, and build-in whatever minimum rate floor you want, as well as any fees, points and product notes.  CleanFi adds its own pre-underwriting fees to your product, unless you wish to include it in your origination fee to make the product more competitive.  All the fees and points associated with that product will be included in the calculations for the ensuing proposals generated by CleanFi.

We then give you an admin access to your account so you can make any alterations you want at any point.

Once the Onboarding completed, we can instantly activate your product.  From that moment on, once a user inputs a project that matches all the criteria of any one of your products, we deliver a fast, easy, reliable, updatable, actionable indicative proposal based on your product instantly. 

When an applicant electronically signs an application for your financing solution, we notify you and you can logon to CleanFi via your admin account to retrieve all the details of the application.

You have no obligation to accept this file, of course.  If you don’t, we will attempt to adjust your product to avoid a repeated submission of a similar application profile.  If you do, your acceptance of the application is a tacit agreement to pay us the agreed-upon pre-underwriting service fee at funding. 

When a project becomes an application, we make certain that the applicant (our client) has presented a file that is complete and is within your underwriting profile for the funding product for which they are applying.   If we see a problem with the file, we will ask the applicant to address it, or divert the file to a better matching alternative financing option. 

Our objective is to maximize the efficiency of your project intake and underwriting operations.

NOTE: CleanFi reserves the right to refuse or discontinue the hosting of any funder or product on the CleanFi platform, at any time, without justification.  Onboarding of a funder, and the maintenance of the data related to any of that funder’s product is entirely at the discretion of CleanFi’s management.

There are three principal reasons CleanFi provides “blind” indicatives:
1- Anonymity facilitates and encourages funder participation.   From the moment of our inception, we understood that funders do not want to reveal their identity in an openly competitive situation.  This allows funders the freedom to be experimental, and it allows them to be incognito if the proposal which corresponds to their product happens to be non-competitive for any particular project. 

Conversely, the policy is an enabler if you are a funder that wishes to get aggressive with a specific market segment on CleanFi without changing your rates in your more open market interactions.

2- It releases you the funder from any liability for misinformation. The onus is on us, CleanFi, to deliver reliable, reasonably accurate indicatives.  Of course, that requires good-will in both direction, and it is the reason we are in regular contact with all of the funders whose product we replicate.

3- Our revenue model dictates it.  We could not be free to contractors, developers and building owners and managers nationwide if we allowed all of the proposals to be branded.  As well, we could not maintain the agnostic stance we have toward funding solutions.

Per our mission statement, we attempt to address as many different project financing problems as possible.  This requires we cover all of the mechanisms in the Department of Energy’s mapping of funding solutions needed to achieve our societal Net Zero objectives.

Funders and the number of products that are active on CleanFi varies constantly according to various factors. At all times there are at least several dozen or more funders and products on the platform.

Each funder will most often have several products, often spanning across project size, asset class, geographies, or any number of qualifying criteria.

The CleanFi team selects funding mechanisms (i.e., Capital Lease), funders (i.e. Acme Green Bank) and products (e.i., Sub-$250k nonprofit projects in Virginia) based on the need we have to find a compelling financing solution for a particular project problem (or financing challenge), and the competitiveness of that solution compared to other options in that category.  

CleanFi does not attempt to catalog the financing industry.  We attempt to find the most compelling solutions to each sort of project configuration, and if possible, provide several of the best cooperative options we can find in order to create a marketplace for your project.