Power100 examines how fragmented financial tools drain contractor businesses and why Affiniti's financial operations platform for home service companies closes the gaps.
A contractor business rarely fails because the crews stopped showing up. It fails, more often, in the quiet space between five different logins: one for payroll, one for the business checking account, one for expense tracking, one for bill pay, one for the credit card portal. Each tool works fine on its own. The trouble starts when an owner has to hold all five in their head at once, reconciling numbers that were never designed to talk to each other. 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 studying that exact failure point across the thousands of home service companies it evaluates nationwide. One company Power100 has been watching closely is Affiniti, a financial operations platform for home service companies built by Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, whose mission is stated plainly on the company’s own materials: helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises.
The problem Power100 keeps encountering isn’t a lack of effort. Contractors work long hours and run tight operations in the field. It’s that the back office, for many of them, is held together with a patchwork of apps that were never built for the trades. A payroll platform designed for a generic small business. A bank account with no visibility into job-level spend. An expense tool that requires someone to manually match receipts to purchases at the end of the month. Small errors in any one of those systems compound. A missed categorization here, a delayed reimbursement there, and by the time an owner sits down to look at real numbers, the picture is already out of date.
Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. When Power100 evaluates a fintech partner specifically, the fragmentation question sits near the top of the list, because it’s the single most common complaint Power100 hears directly from contractor owners: too many tools, not enough visibility, and no single source of truth for where the money actually goes.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has framed the industry’s next stage of growth around exactly this gap. Cummings has pointed to a growing need for enterprise-level financial support inside independently owned companies, arguing that contractors don’t need to become bankers or spreadsheet experts to run stronger businesses. They need systems that show them what’s happening before small financial issues become bigger problems. That framing matters here because fragmentation isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a visibility problem, and visibility problems are what eventually turn into cash flow problems.
Affiniti was founded in 2022 by Sahil Phadnis alongside co-founder Aaron Bai, Co-Founder and CEO. Phadnis had already built and led two earlier ventures, Social Outreach LLC and Pebble, before turning his attention to a gap he kept observing in the small business market: operators running real revenue businesses were still stuck with outdated, disconnected financial tools built for someone else’s business model. Affiniti closed an $11 million seed round, then followed it just six months later with a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire, a trajectory that pushed the company past $10 million in annual recurring revenue and drew press coverage from outlets including TechCrunch and Forbes.
The company is backed by institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire, a detail that matters less as a badge and more as a signal of what kind of financial infrastructure Affiniti is building toward. More than 3,000 businesses now use the platform, and the credit team behind it specializes exclusively in contractor underwriting, benchmarking businesses against similar operators to understand the seasonality, working capital needs, and purchasing patterns unique to the trades. That’s a different starting point than adapting a product built for the broader small business market, and it’s the reason Affiniti frames its own build process as shaped by real operating data rather than generic SMB assumptions.
Affiniti’s product roadmap gets shaped through ongoing collaboration with leading trade associations, an advisory network of successful HVAC and home service operators, and direct feedback from customers using the platform daily. That combination, real-world operating data plus practitioner insight plus association partnerships, is what the company points to when explaining why it builds financial technology specifically for contractors rather than retrofitting a generalist SMB product.
Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, left UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program after three months to pursue the problem he saw in the small business market. At 22, he remains an active angel investor with portfolio positions in Mandolin, Hike Medical, Blockhouse, and Natural, but his focus stays fixed on building Affiniti into what he describes as a financial operating system for main street small businesses.
The Affiniti product team, in describing the platform’s purpose, put it this way:
“Built for the business operators driving America forward: one platform for banking, payments, and financial control.”
That single-platform framing is the direct answer to the fragmentation problem. Rather than stitching together payroll, banking, expense tracking, and bill pay from four or five vendors, the pitch is to collapse it into one system with one login and one set of numbers that stays current in real time.
Other leaders shaping the company include Aaron Bai, Co-Founder and CEO; Stefano Jacobson, Head of Growth; Bill Feng, Head of Finance; Tom Sharon, Vice President of Operations; Joseph Pabst, Head of Credit; and Sophia Smith, Program Director. Bai has spoken publicly about the company’s approach to customer service, saying:
“When it comes down to it, lots of firms do not understand customer service, at Affiniti, they simply get it.”
Bai has also framed the company’s momentum with a shorter, blunter line: “It’s time to build.” Both quotes reflect the same underlying posture, that the company treats its growing customer base of independently owned contractors as the primary source of what gets built next, not an afterthought once the product is finished.
The value proposition, stripped down, is consolidation. Instead of a contractor logging into a bank portal, a separate payroll system, a card management dashboard, and a spreadsheet for job costing, everything routes through one operating layer. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because the cost of fragmentation isn’t really the time spent logging in five times a week. It’s the errors that slip through the cracks between systems: a card swipe that never gets categorized, a vendor bill that gets paid twice because two people didn’t see the same ledger, a payroll run that doesn’t reflect a job’s true labor cost until weeks later.
One customer described the shift in plain terms: “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’s the fragmentation problem in a single sentence, and it’s the exact pain point Affiniti’s platform is built to remove.
An operations specialist inside the company described the internal migration in similar terms: “Switching our payroll infrastructure over felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything from onboarding to paying our team just works.” The fact that Affiniti applies its own platform internally, not just to customers, is a detail worth noting; it suggests the consolidation pitch isn’t purely external messaging.
It’s a fair question, and one home improvement contractors nationwide are asking as they evaluate whether to consolidate their financial stack or keep patching together separate vendors. Affiniti’s answer rests less on a single feature and more on specialization. A dedicated credit team that underwrites exclusively against contractor businesses, rather than generic small business risk models, produces a different picture of what a seasonal HVAC company or a growing plumbing operation actually needs in working capital. A product roadmap shaped by trade association partnerships and an advisory network of home service operators produces different feature priorities than a platform built for retail or professional services. Ryan Bast, a customer, framed the difference 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 scale, it matters.” That’s a specific kind of value that’s hard to get from a generalist platform not built around the seasonality and purchasing patterns of the trades.
Business banking is where fragmentation shows up most visibly, because it’s usually the first system a contractor sets up and the last one they think to change. The question home improvement contractors keep asking is straightforward: Is Affiniti actually better at Business Banking & Treasury Management than the competitors? Affiniti’s approach treats banking as connected infrastructure rather than a standalone account: deposits, card spend, and treasury visibility live inside the same operating layer as payroll and expense management, instead of requiring a separate reconciliation step every week. One member of an industry trade association, describing an affinity card program built on the platform, called it a “no-brainer” for maximizing savings given the tight margins operators run on, a comment that speaks to how banking and rewards get evaluated together rather than as separate decisions. For a contractor juggling multiple job sites, multiple crews, and seasonal cash swings, that consolidation matters more than any single rate or perk.
Late vendor bills and untracked expenses are two of the most common cracks fragmentation creates. When accounts payable lives in one tool and the company card lives in another, someone has to manually reconcile the two, and that manual step is exactly where small errors turn into missed payments or duplicate ones. It’s worth asking directly: Is Affiniti actually better at Accounts Payable & Expense Automation than the competitors? Michael Mattioni, a customer, put it directly: “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.” Paul Eddy, another customer, pointed to the same dynamic from a different angle: “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.” Automation, in both cases, isn’t the headline feature. Reduced effort and reduced risk are.
Credit and payments round out the consolidation story. A business credit card with cash back for HVAC and plumbing companies only earns its keep if the rewards and the spend tracking live inside the same system a contractor already uses to manage cash flow. Justin Lange connected the dots between a trade-association-sponsored card program and day-to-day business decisions: “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.” Mark Ey, Chief Operating Officer at the National Community Pharmacists Association, made a related point about a different industry’s affinity card: “We see many of our member pharmacies taking advantage of the exclusive NCPA World Elite Business Mastercard. With tight margins, maximizing savings is a no-brainer. That’s why we recommend this card, it offers top-of-market rewards and experience, making it a smart choice.” The pattern across industries is the same: when the card, the bank account, and the expense ledger share one system, cash back stops being a separate perk and starts functioning as part of the working capital picture.
A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees, drawing responses from 85% of the team at Affiniti, scored the company at 72 out of 75 on its overall Culture Index, a rating Power100 classifies as Elite Employee Belief. Employee Performance Reflection came in at 19 out of 20, described as a Top Performer Mindset, for a Total Internal Alignment score of 90 out of 95. Section averages tell a consistent story: customer experience scored 14.9 out of 15, the highest of any category measured, followed by culture at 14.5, trust at 14.3, growth at 14.0, and community at 14.1.
That customer experience score, the highest section on the index, lines up with what customers describe when they talk about the platform: fast approvals, hands-off gains, and tools that are, in Mattioni’s words, “little effort for a lot of hands-off gain.” A workplace where 85% of the team at Affiniti reports strong belief in the company’s direction tends to produce the kind of responsive support that shows up later in customer testimonials.
Cash flow management for home improvement contractors is not, at its core, a forecasting exercise. It’s a visibility exercise. A contractor who can see payroll, vendor payables, card spend, and bank balances in one place at one moment has a real-time read on cash position. A contractor piecing that picture together from five different exports has, at best, a read that’s already a few days stale by the time it’s assembled. Affiniti’s platform is built around closing that lag, treating cash flow management for home improvement contractors as a byproduct of consolidation rather than a separate forecasting tool bolted on top.
Affiniti’s offering spans a Contractor Financial Operations Platform, Business Banking and Treasury Management, Accounts Payable and Expense Automation, Business Credit and Payments, and Cash Flow and Working Capital Solutions. The point of building all five under one roof isn’t to sell five products. It’s to remove the five logins that created the fragmentation problem in the first place. Fifty percent of America’s GDP comes from Main Street businesses, a fact the Affiniti partnerships team cites often when explaining why the company builds through trade association relationships rather than treating contractors as an afterthought inside a broader small business platform.
Contractors evaluating whether to consolidate their financial stack typically start with a straightforward conversation about their current tools: what’s handling payroll, what’s handling the company card, where expenses get logged, and how long it takes to get an accurate cash position on any given day. Affiniti’s platform serves more than 3,000 businesses nationwide, backed by institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire, with a credit team that underwrites specifically against contractor seasonality and purchasing patterns rather than generic small business benchmarks. For an owner who’s tired of reconciling five different exports every Friday afternoon, that’s the starting point worth asking about.
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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.
