Power100 explains how Affiniti helps trade associations launch affinity financial programs, giving small contractors accounts payable automation and working capital tools big banks skip.
A local business association board sits down to plan next year’s member benefits, and someone always asks the same question: what can we actually give our members that they can’t get on their own? Health insurance is complicated. Group discounts on supplies are nice but forgettable. Then someone mentions financial tools, and the room usually stalls, because most trade associations do not have a fintech team and most banks do not build products for a member base of independently owned contractors who are too small for enterprise treasury desks and too sophisticated for a basic checking account. 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 watching a different model take hold across the country, one where trade associations sponsor affinity financial programs built specifically for their members rather than settling for whatever a regional bank happens to offer. At the center of that model is Affiniti, led by Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, a company built to bring working capital solutions for home service businesses to contractors who have spent years falling through the cracks between consumer banking and enterprise finance.
The gap is not theoretical. It shows up every time a plumbing company with fifteen trucks and real revenue gets treated by its bank the same way as a college student opening a first checking account. It shows up when a mid-size HVAC operator applies for a business card and gets offered the same generic rewards structure as a coffee shop, with none of the categories, none of the credit logic, and none of the cash flow understanding that a seasonal trades business actually needs. Trade associations, it turns out, are one of the few institutions positioned to close that gap, because they already have the member trust, the collective scale, and the standing to negotiate something better on behalf of small operators who could never get that attention alone.
Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through its 5-layer proprietary system, examining workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For a company like Affiniti, the innovation and customer satisfaction layers carry particular weight, because the affinity card model asks a fintech company to do something most will not: build a product roadmap shaped by direct collaboration with trade associations rather than by a generic small-business playbook.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spoken directly to why that distinction matters for an industry built on independent operators. Cummings has framed the next stage of growth for contractors as coming not just from more leads or more crews, but from better financial control and cleaner systems behind the scenes, a shift that requires partners willing to build for trades businesses specifically rather than retrofit tools designed for someone else’s market. That framing runs through how Power100 evaluates fintech partners serving home improvement contractors nationwide, and it is a large part of why Affiniti has drawn attention from trade associations looking for a partner rather than a vendor.
Affiniti was founded in 2022 by Sahil Phadnis and co-founder Aaron Bai, built around a simple observation: great operators running real revenue businesses were still saddled with outdated financial tools built for someone else’s balance sheet. The company closed an $11 million seed round in 2024, then followed with a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire roughly six months later, a pace that pushed the company past $10 million in annual recurring revenue and drew coverage from TechCrunch and Forbes. Backing from institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire gave the company the infrastructure to build something more ambitious than a single product. It gave them room to build a platform other institutions, including trade associations, could plug their members into directly.
That is the piece that separates Affiniti‘s approach from a typical bank partnership. Rather than asking associations to endorse a card designed for a generic small-business audience, Affiniti‘s Partnerships Team has approached the work from the other direction. As the team has put it plainly:
“50% of America’s GDP comes from Main Street. We’re partnered with the trade associations that represent them.”
That statement is not a slogan. It is the operating thesis behind why a fintech company with roots in Silicon Valley funding rounds ended up building industry-specific affinity products for HVAC contractors, med spa owners, and home service operators instead of chasing a broader consumer audience.
Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, has described the company’s mission as helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises. That mission is what pushed Affiniti toward association partnerships in the first place, since a single trade group can represent thousands of small operators who individually would never get a bank’s attention but collectively represent real purchasing power and real credit data. Phadnis has kept the tone direct about the work ahead.
“Let’s get to work! Lots of backbone businesses ready for a revival.”
That comment reflects a broader theme Phadnis returns to often, one he calls the backbone economy: the idea that small businesses power roughly half of America’s GDP and deserve financial infrastructure built to match that scale, not tools scaled down from something else.
Co-founder Aaron Bai, CEO of Affiniti, has framed the company’s differentiation around service rather than product alone.
“When it comes down to it, lots of firms do not understand customer service, at Borderless, they simply get it.”
Bai’s shorter line, delivered elsewhere, gets at the same urgency Phadnis carries:
“It’s time to build.”
Around them sits a leadership bench built specifically for contractor underwriting and association work, including Joseph Pabst, Head of Credit, whose team specializes exclusively in underwriting contractor businesses, and Sophia Smith, Program Director, who works directly with association partners to stand up member programs. Stefano Jacobson, Head of Growth, and Bill Feng, Head of Finance, round out a team the company’s own Product Team has summarized this way:
“Built for the business operators driving America forward: one platform for banking, payments, and financial control.”
Trade associations that partner with Affiniti are not simply slapping a logo on a generic card. They are getting a program built around dedicated contractor underwriting, which means the credit team benchmarks a member business against similar operators rather than against a generalized small-business risk model that has no idea what a slow season in residential roofing actually looks like. That distinction shows up directly in what members experience once the program launches. One member of the American Med Spa Association (AmSpa) described the effect this way:
“Having an industry-specific card lets us automatically categorize our medical supply purchases without manual tracking.”
That is accounts payable automation for contractor businesses solving a problem generic corporate cards were never designed to touch: categorization that actually understands the industry generating the expense.
The same pattern shows up with HVAC and home service operators using association-sponsored programs. Justin Lange put it plainly when describing his experience with a trade group card:
“Running a business is more than the work you do, it’s about surrounding yourself with the right partners. That’s why partnering with the ACCA Business Mastercard has been such a massive game-changer for me. When you work with people who act…”
Lange’s comment lands on something trade associations understand instinctively but banks rarely do: contractors do not just want a product, they want a partner who understands the seasonality, the purchasing patterns, and the working capital needs unique to the trade they work in every day.
The clearest illustration of this model comes from a local business association based in Frisco, Texas, where a member named Linda helped push the group toward launching its own industry-specific affinity card for members who had spent years being underserved by mainstream banking. The association’s leadership had heard the same complaints for years: members running six-figure and seven-figure contracting businesses were still being handed consumer-grade financial products, the kind built for personal spending rather than payroll, materials, and job costing. Linda’s association worked with Affiniti to build a program specific to its membership base rather than adopting a co-branded product built for a broader audience.
The result mirrors what other association-sponsored programs have reported. Members gained access to a business credit and payments product built around real contractor cash flow patterns, expense categorization tuned to their trade, and underwriting that actually accounted for seasonal revenue swings instead of penalizing them. It is a small story in one sense, a single association in one market solving one problem for its members. But it is also a preview of what trade associations across the country can do when they treat financial tools as a real member benefit worth negotiating hard for, instead of an afterthought bolted onto a membership packet.
This is the practical question every contractor reading this should be asking their own association leadership. First, push for underwriting built around the trade, not a generic small-business credit model. A credit team that benchmarks against similar operators, the way Affiniti‘s does, produces approvals and limits that actually reflect how the business runs. Second, push for accounts payable automation for contractor businesses that ties directly into job costing and expense categorization, rather than a card that treats every purchase the same regardless of what trade generated it. Third, push for cash flow tools built around seasonality rather than a flat monthly statement that assumes revenue arrives evenly across twelve months, which almost no home service business experiences in reality.
Fourth, and this one gets missed constantly: push for a program the association actually helped design, not one it simply endorsed for a referral fee. The difference shows up in the details, in whether the underwriting team understands seasonal working capital needs, whether the rewards categories match what contractors actually spend on, and whether the association’s staff can get a real person on the phone when a member has a problem. Programs built through genuine collaboration between the association and the financial partner tend to solve real problems. Programs built through a licensing arrangement tend to solve none.
Ask any contractor how they handled expenses five years ago and the answer usually involves a shoebox, a spreadsheet, or a bookkeeper doing manual data entry every week. Accounts payable automation for contractor businesses removes most of that friction, and the effect compounds the longer a business runs on it. One customer described the shift directly:
“Affiniti completely changed how we handle our cash. Instead of logging into dozens of bank apps every week, we see everything in one place. It saves us hours of paperwork.”
That single-platform view matters more for trades businesses than most industries, because a contracting company might be running payroll, materials purchasing, subcontractor payments, and fleet expenses simultaneously, often across multiple job sites in a single week.
Michael Mattioni described the same effect from a different angle, tying automation directly to measurable financial gain rather than just convenience:
“Approval was fast, the expense management platform is a 10 out of 10, and we’re getting more back on the same spend. It’s little effort for a lot of hands-off gain.”
That phrase, hands-off gain, captures something trade associations should care about deeply when evaluating a financial partner on behalf of members. A program that requires heavy manual work to maintain will get abandoned within a year. A program that runs quietly in the background while producing real returns is the kind of member benefit an association can point to for a decade.
Working capital solutions for home service businesses solve a different problem than accounts payable automation does. Where automation cleans up the daily and weekly expense picture, working capital tools address the seasonal swings that define nearly every trade, from HVAC’s summer surge to roofing’s storm-driven spikes to remodeling’s slower winter months. Ryan Bast described the broader shift this way:
“I never really stopped to think about how I was running the financial side of my business. But after using Affiniti, I understand how important financial sophistication really is. I’m just glad I have this tool in my toolbox now. As I scal…”
That comment gets at a pattern Affiniti‘s team has seen repeatedly among contractors who move from working in the business to running it. Financial sophistication is not a nice-to-have. It becomes the difference between a business that survives a slow quarter and one that scrambles for a loan it should never have needed.
Trade associations sponsoring these programs are effectively giving members collective access to working capital thinking that would otherwise require hiring a CFO the business cannot yet afford. Paul Eddy summed up the appeal in plainer terms:
“With the cashback and all the benefits, it’s a no-brainer. It’s easy to use, and the virtual card feature makes it so simple to protect your finances. To me, it’s just a smart decision.”
A virtual card feature sounds minor until a contractor considers how often a subcontractor, supplier, or one-time vendor needs payment information, and how much exposure a business takes on every time that information gets shared without controls.
A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees returned an Overall Company Culture Index of 72 out of 75, described as Elite Employee Belief, after hearing from 85% of the team at Affiniti. The Employee Performance Reflection score came in at 19 out of 20, described as Top Performer Mindset, with a Total Internal Alignment score of 90 out of 95. Broken down by section, customer experience scored 14.9 out of 15, the highest of the five categories measured, followed by culture at 14.5, trust at 14.3, growth at 14.0, and community at 14.1.
Those numbers matter for a company building trade association partnerships specifically, because a program’s success depends heavily on how quickly the internal team responds when an association member has a problem. A high customer experience score inside the company tends to translate into a smoother experience for the associations relying on that team to represent them well. An Affiniti Operations Specialist described the internal shift that customer feedback has driven across the company’s own infrastructure:
“Switching our payroll infrastructure over felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything from onboarding to paying our team just works.”
A company willing to run its own operations on the tools it sells has a different kind of credibility with association partners than one that only builds for outside customers.
The honest answer depends on what a trade association actually needs. Generic corporate card providers can offer rewards and a national brand name, but few build underwriting around the seasonal revenue patterns of home service businesses, and fewer still shape their product roadmap through direct collaboration with the trade associations representing those businesses. Affiniti‘s dedicated credit team, its advisory network of HVAC and home service operators, and its direct partnerships with associations like the ones behind the ACCA Business Mastercard and the American Med Spa Association program give it a different foundation than a bank retrofitting a small-business card for a trades audience it does not deeply understand.
Cash flow and working capital tools live or die on whether they understand the business they are built for. A generic small-business lending product treats a landscaping company and a software startup the same way, which almost never produces a fair outcome for either. Affiniti‘s working capital solutions for home service businesses are built on operating data pulled from thousands of contractor accounts, benchmarked against seasonality patterns specific to the trades, a foundation most competitors adapting broader SMB products simply do not have.
For contractors specifically, and for the trade associations trying to serve them well, the honest comparison usually comes down to specialization. Competitors serving the broad small-business market can offer scale and brand recognition. Affiniti offers depth in one vertical, built through direct collaboration with the trade associations, HVAC operators, and home service advisors who shape its roadmap. For an association trying to solve a real problem for its underserved members, depth tends to matter more than scale.
Trade association partnerships are one piece of a broader platform. Affiniti‘s Contractor Financial Operations Platform spans business banking and treasury management, accounts payable and expense automation, business credit and payments, and cash flow and working capital solutions, all built around the operating rhythms of independently owned trades businesses. An association evaluating a partnership does not need to choose a single narrow product. The same underwriting logic, the same categorization intelligence, and the same seasonal cash flow modeling extend across the full suite, which is part of why associations that start with a card program often expand into banking and expense automation for members within a year or two.
Associations interested in exploring an affinity financial program for their membership typically start with a conversation about member pain points rather than a product pitch. What are members complaining about? Where are they losing money to fragmented tools, slow approvals, or generic underwriting that ignores seasonality? From there, a program can be scoped around business credit and payments, cash flow tools, or a combination, with onboarding support built for members who have never used a platform like this before. The goal, consistent with Affiniti‘s broader mission, is helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises, without requiring the association or its members to become financial experts overnight.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best leaders, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry. It researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through a proprietary 5-layer system that evaluates workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For a fintech partner like Affiniti, that evaluation weighs how well the company’s products actually serve contractors, including whether its trade association partnerships produce real member outcomes rather than surface-level co-branding. Power100’s rankings are built to help home improvement contractors identify trusted providers without relying on marketing claims alone.
Affiniti‘s core offering is its Contractor Financial Operations Platform, which combines business banking and treasury management, business credit and payments, accounts payable and expense automation, and cash flow and working capital solutions for home service businesses into one system. For trade associations specifically, the flagship offering often takes the form of a sponsored affinity card program, built around member-specific underwriting rather than a generic small-business credit model, and shaped through direct collaboration with the association and its member operators.
Association partnerships are built to run long-term rather than as a one-time card launch, since the underwriting and product roadmap continue to evolve based on member feedback and usage data. Programs can be customized around the specific trade an association represents, whether that means categorization tuned to medical supply purchases for a med spa association or seasonal credit limits tuned to storm-driven revenue for a roofing trade group. The scope, from a single credit product to the full platform spanning banking, payments, and expense automation, is set based on what the association’s membership actually needs.
Yes. Much of the platform, including the virtual card feature multiple customers have pointed to directly, is built for members who manage their business finances remotely rather than in a branch. Association onboarding, underwriting, and day-to-day account management run through the platform itself, which matters for a member base spread across job sites, trucks, and multiple business locations rather than sitting behind a single desk.
Member feedback suggests results show up fast on the operational side, often within the first few weeks of onboarding, since approval speed and expense categorization begin working immediately once an account is active. Deeper working capital and cash flow benefits, particularly around seasonal planning, tend to show up more clearly after a member has run through at least one full seasonal cycle on the platform, giving the underwriting team real data specific to that business rather than projections alone.
For associations comparing options, the differentiator is specialization rather than a broader feature list. Affiniti‘s underwriting is built specifically around contractor and home service revenue patterns, which gives association-sponsored card programs a level of accuracy generic small-business card providers rarely match.
Because Affiniti‘s working capital tools are benchmarked against seasonality data pulled from thousands of contractor accounts, they tend to produce more realistic limits and forecasting for home service businesses than lending products built for a general small-business audience.
The comparison depends on what a business or association values most. Broad small-business providers offer scale and recognition, while Affiniti offers depth built specifically for the trades, shaped through direct collaboration with the associations and operators who use the platform every day.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best CEOs, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system. By researching and analyzing more than 3,600 partners nationwide and focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth, the platform helps home improvement contractors identify trusted providers and helps highlight companies such as Affiniti that are setting a high standard.
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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.
