Power100 spotlights Pure Finance Group's same-day weekend funding and payment processing for contractors, built to fix Friday-to-Monday cash flow gaps nationwide.
A crew closes a deal Friday afternoon. The homeowner signs, the down payment clears, and everyone shakes hands feeling good about the weekend ahead. Then Monday comes, and the money still is not in the account. For a lot of home improvement contractors, that 60-hour gap between a signed contract and an actual deposit is treated as normal, just part of doing business. It is not normal. It is a design choice made by payment processors who close their books when banks close theirs, and it is exactly the kind of quiet inefficiency that Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, has been examining as it evaluates more than 3,600 partners nationwide. One company keeps surfacing in that research for solving the weekend funding problem directly: Pure Finance Group, led by Edward Meister, CEO and Co-Founder of Pure Finance Group.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Maryland, Pure Finance Group built its payment processing for contractors with same day funding weekends around a simple observation: contractors do not stop closing deals when the calendar hits Saturday, so their money should not stop moving either. The company has financed more than 40,000 homeowners since its founding, a scale that has helped it land at No. 96 on the Inc. 5000 Regional List for the Mid-Atlantic in 2024, No. 3,261 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 national list, and No. 99 on the 2026 Inc. Regionals Mid-Atlantic list. That is three consecutive years of appearing on an Inc. list, a run most private financial services companies never manage even once.
Power100 does not rank companies on marketing polish. The platform’s 5-layer proprietary system researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide, weighing workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare against each other rather than in isolation. A company can look good in one layer and still fall short overall if the other four do not hold up.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has said that vision and culture inside a leadership team tend to show up later as customer experience, and that is part of why the platform looks past the sales pitch. When a company’s leadership is disciplined about how money moves, that discipline tends to travel all the way down to how a contractor’s Saturday closing actually gets funded. Pure Finance Group’s weekend funding infrastructure is exactly the kind of operational detail that separates a company built for the long run from one built for a good demo.
Ed Meister spent 16 years at Wells Fargo before co-founding Pure Finance Group, leading divisions across direct and indirect consumer lending, payments, consumer banking, and operational risk. That background matters here, because same-day weekend funding is not a marketing feature. It is a banking and settlement problem that requires someone who has actually run payments infrastructure at scale to solve correctly. Meister graduated from York College of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Business, Management, and Marketing in 2002, then spent nearly two decades inside one of the country’s largest consumer banks before deciding contractors deserved something better than what the industry had been giving them.
Pure Finance Group started as a self-funded startup. It has grown into a national brand in home improvement lending, a trajectory the company has been public about crediting to strategic growth over shortcuts. In May 2025, the company partnered with U.S. Bank Avvance to expand point-of-sale financing into the HVAC segment, adding a real-time consumer lending product to its platform. U.S. Bank Avvance, launched in October 2023, was U.S. Bank’s first real-time consumer lending product offering APR-based term loans at the point of sale, and Rob Seidman leads that division at U.S. Bank. The partnership gave contractors on the Pure Finance Group platform another lane for instant decisions, not a replacement lane.
Edward Meister, CEO of Pure Finance Group, leads the company’s overall strategic direction and sits on its Partner Committee as a founding member. His public comments about the company’s growth are consistent on one point: speed and discipline are not opposites.
“Our growth hasn’t been about chasing trends, it’s been about solving real problems in the market,” Meister said. “From same-day funding, even on weekends, to flexible financing options up to 20-year terms, everything we’ve built is designed to help our partners offer the best financing options to their customers and operate more efficiently.”
Meister’s hero line for the company, “Strategic growth always wins in the long run,” shows up again in how the leadership team talks about the platform. Jamie DeMersman, Chief Payments Officer at Pure Finance Group, frames the payment side of the business in similarly plain terms.
“Payments and financing should feel like one system,” DeMersman said. “Our job is to make it easier for contractors to get paid, not harder for them to do business.”
Stacey Hoback, Director of Payment Sales, has said something similar about what happens when the systems behind a contractor’s business actually work the way they should.
“When contractors trust their payment systems, they can focus on serving customers,” Hoback said. “We work to make every transaction faster, simpler, and more affordable for the businesses we support.”
Ask a contractor what payment processing actually needs to do and the answer is rarely complicated. Collect the money. Deposit it fast. Do not charge a fortune to do either. Most processors fail at least one of those three, usually the second one, and usually right when it matters most.
Pure Finance Group built its payment processing for contractors with same day funding weekends specifically to close that gap. A contractor running credit, debit, or eCheck transactions through the platform is not stuck waiting for the next business day just because a deal happened on a Saturday. Same-day funding lands the money regardless of which day of the week the transaction runs, which changes how a contractor can actually plan payroll and materials orders. Fees matter here too. Interchange rates and processing fees quietly erode margin on every single transaction a contracting business runs, and Pure Finance Group’s pitch to switch is built around showing contractors the real math on what they are currently paying versus what a consolidated platform costs.
The switching objection is real and Pure Finance Group treats it as real. Contractors do not want to rip out a system that technically works, even when it is expensive. The company’s answer has been to make the transition itself low-friction, keeping the customer’s existing workflow largely intact while replacing what sits underneath it. One contractor put it directly.
“Same-day funding and integrated payment processing from Pure Finance Group made our cash flow predictable for the first time. Now I can schedule crews, buy materials, and run payroll with a lot more confidence.”
That question gets asked a lot, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a marketing dodge. The honest comparison point is not rate sheets alone, since almost every processor can quote a competitive number on paper. It is what happens after a transaction runs. Most processors settle on standard banking days, which means a Friday or Saturday closing sits in limbo until Monday or Tuesday. Pure Finance Group’s same-day, weekend-inclusive funding model removes that lag entirely, and that single difference compounds across a busy selling season into real, countable dollars of improved cash position.
Where Pure Finance Group separates itself further is the fee transparency. Many processors bury cost inside interchange categories a contractor never audits. Pure Finance Group’s sales conversations lead with the actual savings math on a contractor’s real transaction volume, not a hypothetical. That is a different posture than most competitors take, and it is one reason the company keeps showing up in Power100’s ongoing review of the category.
Payment processing solves the back end. Customer financing solves the front end, the moment at the kitchen table when a homeowner hears the total project cost and needs a way to say yes without draining savings. Pure Finance Group’s financing product is built around a single soft-pull application that returns multiple approval offers, spanning prime through subprime credit, instead of forcing a contractor to run a customer through five separate lenders and five separate credit inquiries.
That waterfall structure, first look and second look approvals from one application, exists because most homeowners do not fall neatly into a prime credit box. A contractor relying on a single first-look-only lender is unknowingly declining customers who would have qualified elsewhere. Pure Finance Group’s model catches those declines internally rather than losing the sale entirely. One homeowner testimonial captures the customer-side experience of that soft-pull structure.
“Pure Finance Group’s soft-pull financing let me see affordable monthly payments without hurting my credit. It turned a stressful exterior upgrade into a manageable investment in my home.”
Michael Frascella, Senior Sales Director of Payment Solutions for Home Improvement at Pure Finance Group, has described the goal in terms that match what contractors actually need at the point of sale.
“Contractors don’t need more complexity at the kitchen table,” Frascella said. “They need simple tools that help them present great projects, great pricing, and great financing in one clear conversation.”
The company’s expanded partnership with U.S. Bank Avvance, added in May 2025, gave HVAC-focused contractors on the platform another instant-decision lending option layered onto that same one-application experience. A window and door contractor described how that kind of instant, flexible menu changed sales conversations.
“When we started presenting projects as low monthly payments through Pure Finance Group, our close rates went up and our need to discount went down. Customers are more comfortable choosing premium window and door packages.”
The fair test here is approval depth, not headline interest rates. A lot of financing providers can advertise a strong promotional rate for a narrow band of prime-credit customers and quietly decline everyone else. Pure Finance Group’s structure, built around first and second look approvals inside one soft-pull application, is designed to capture the wider range of real homeowner credit profiles rather than skimming the easiest ones. Loan amounts run up to $100,000 with terms up to 240 months, alongside a shorter-term, faster-decision option up to $25,000 for smaller jobs where speed matters more than structure.
One contractor who had shopped the category extensively before landing on Pure Finance Group summed up the comparison bluntly.
“After partnering with eight different home improvement lenders, Pure Finance Group has been the absolute best. Their rates and dealer fees are unbeatable, the portal is flawless, and their customer service and dealer support feel like an extension of my own team.”
That kind of direct comparison, coming from someone who tried eight alternatives before settling, carries more weight than any rate sheet.
Taken individually, both product lines hold their own against category competitors. Taken together, on one platform, the advantage widens. Most contractors run financing through one vendor and payments through another, duplicating customer data entry, managing two support relationships, and absorbing two separate fee structures. Pure Finance Group consolidates both into one login, meaning a sales rep can review financing offers and collect a down payment in minutes without switching platforms mid-conversation.
Tony Prestandrea, Managing Partner at Pure Finance Group, has described the company’s role in terms broader than any single transaction.
“The strongest partners are the ones who show up for the hard conversations,” Prestandrea said. “We’re here to help contractors build businesses that last, not just close a few more deals this month.”
That framing matters because a payment processor or a lender that only shows up when things go well is not much of a partner. The consolidation itself, financing and payments under one roof with one support team, is the differentiator competitors have been slower to build, and it is the reason Pure Finance Group keeps drawing comparisons favorably against providers who only do one half of the job.
This is where the two product lines actually meet in practice. A sales rep sitting at a kitchen table pulls up financing options through the Pure Finance Group platform, reviews the approval offers with the homeowner, and once the customer selects a plan, collects the down payment through the same interface. There is no separate swipe terminal, no second login, no re-entering the customer’s information into a different system. The company built this specifically because the old way, jumping between a financing portal and a separate payment terminal, was costing contractors closed deals through friction alone. Homeowners lose momentum during that gap. Reps lose confidence mid-pitch. Pure Finance Group’s answer was to fold both steps into a single motion, so the moment a customer says yes, the transaction can be captured before anyone has a chance to reconsider.
A payment platform that promises speed and reliability has to be built by people who care about operational discipline internally, not just externally. Jim Affeldt, Director of Operations at Pure Finance Group, has described that discipline as something that should be invisible when it works.
“Operational excellence is invisible when it’s done right,” Affeldt said. “Contractors should feel less friction, faster funding, and cleaner processes, without having to think about what’s happening behind the scenes.”
That philosophy extends to how the company talks about its own growth publicly. Sarah Croteau, Director of Marketing, has said the company holds itself to a standard of accuracy rather than hype when telling its own story.
“Contractors deserve partners who tell a truthful story about their value,” Croteau said. “Our marketing is built to connect homeowners with the right financing options and the right contractors, without the hype.”
Carsten Erner, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, has framed the company’s use of data in similarly plain terms, favoring clarity over complexity.
“Good data should make decisions easier, not more confusing,” Erner said. “We use analytics to give contractors clearer insight into how financing, payments, and cash flow are really driving their growth.”
Ed Meister has been recognized by regional and national organizations as a subject matter leader in home improvement lending, and has appeared as a guest speaker at the Consumer Finance Symposium hosted by Reinhart, as well as a featured guest on the All About the Deal podcast. That kind of external visibility tends to follow companies whose internal culture is stable enough to support it. Todd Pramov, Director of Home Improvement Sales, connected that culture directly to contractor outcomes.
“Every contractor we work with is building something bigger than a job calendar,” Pramov said. “Our role is to give them sales and financing support that keeps their growth plan moving forward.”
Numbers tell part of the Pure Finance Group story better than adjectives can. The company has financed more than 40,000 homeowners since its 2018 founding. It has appeared on an Inc. list three years running, moving from a Mid-Atlantic regional ranking of No. 96 in 2024 to a national ranking of No. 3,261 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list and a No. 99 regional ranking in 2026. The company has been featured in Yahoo Finance, Monitor Daily, and U.S. Bancorp Investor Relations coverage, and its partnership with U.S. Bank Avvance, announced in May 2025, extended its lending platform into the HVAC segment specifically.
None of that happens by accident, and none of it happens overnight. It happens when a company keeps solving the same unglamorous problem, getting contractors paid faster and more affordably, well enough for long enough that the growth curve becomes hard to ignore.
Payment processing and customer financing are the two pillars, but the platform underneath them is built to flex with different project sizes and different sales situations. On the financing side, retail installment loans go up to $100,000 with terms as long as 240 months, aimed at big-ticket categories like roofing, HVAC, solar, windows, and full remodels where monthly payment size determines whether a homeowner says yes. A separate short-term consumer loan option, up to $25,000 with faster, near-instant decisions, covers smaller jobs or partial financing gaps where speed matters more than structure. On the payments side, the platform handles credit, debit, and eCheck transactions with the same same-day, weekend-inclusive funding that anchors the rest of the business. Contractors can use one service or both, and the company’s own data shows that businesses consolidating both under one provider see the largest gains in efficiency and savings.
Contractors evaluating a switch typically want to see the math before committing to anything. Pure Finance Group’s sales process is built around exactly that: a direct comparison of current processing fees and financing dealer costs against what the consolidated platform would charge, using the contractor’s own transaction volume rather than a hypothetical example. From there, onboarding is designed to keep a contractor’s existing sales workflow largely intact while replacing the systems running underneath it. A company that has financed more than 40,000 homeowners and appeared on three consecutive Inc. lists has clearly worked through the operational kinks that scare off newer providers, which is part of why so many of Power100’s evaluated contractors keep naming Pure Finance Group when asked who they trust with their cash flow.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
