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How ProducePay reduced servicing costs by 25% and scaled their lending operations by partnering with Bedrock to implement an institutional-grade platform.
ProducePay was created to solve a set of deeply entrenched challenges in the global produce supply chain: limited access to affordable capital, opaque pricing dynamics, and fragmented supply chains that leave growers carrying most of the risk. From the beginning, the company’s mission has been clear. Farmers deserve predictable financing, transparent market signals, and a system that works with the realities of seasonal production rather than against them.
This mission sits within a broader shift happening across financial services. Over the past decade, non-bank and specialty lenders have grown rapidly as traditional banks have pulled back from complex or asset-specific lending. Industry research from firms such as McKinsey and Preqin consistently shows private credit and specialty finance expanding at double-digit annual rates, with global private credit markets now measured in the trillions of dollars. Much of that growth is concentrated in sectors where assets are complex, underwriting requires domain expertise, and flexibility matters more than standardization.
Agriculture fits squarely into that category.
Today, ProducePay supports more than 700 commercial-scale growers and buyers across North America, Latin America and the EU. Through its Predictable Commerce Platform, the company facilitates billions of dollars in fresh produce transactions annually, providing season-long financing cycles that commonly range from millions of dollars to tens of millions per farm. These are not small, homogenous loans. Each financing structure is tailored to specific crops, geographies, harvest schedules, and buyer relationships.
As ProducePay’s lending activity scaled, so did the complexity of its operations. What began as a differentiated lending model for growers was rapidly becoming a sophisticated financial ecosystem involving growers, buyers, logistics partners, and institutional capital providers. That growth created a defining moment for the company.
When Nathan Gilliland joined ProducePay as Chief Financial Officer, the company had already achieved meaningful scale and product market fit. But the back office systems and servicing infrastructure had not evolved at the same pace.
ProducePay was issuing thousands of advances each year, sometimes exceeding $100 million dollars in monthly loan activity during peak harvest cycles. A single grower loan could be tied to thousands of downstream produce shipments, each generating its own payment events, adjustments, and reconciliations. Capital providers required daily and monthly reporting across utilization, collateral, exceptions, and cash flow performance.
The problem was not effort. Internal teams were working tirelessly to keep up. The problem was structural.
As Gilliland put it, “We were clearly in the lending business, but we didn’t yet have a sophisticated loan management system. The complexity underneath the business had simply outgrown off-the-shelf software and manual processes.”
Spreadsheets, workarounds, and manual reconciliations created operational drag and risk. Reporting cycles became stressful. Confidence in data suffered. And while ProducePay’s lending model reduced risk at the grower level, the operational burden behind the scenes continued to grow.
At the same time, ProducePay was engaging with large institutional capital providers whose expectations around accuracy, transparency, and controls were non negotiable. These included major alternative investment managers in the Top 25 PE firm in 2025 per PEI 300 list whose diligence standards and reporting expectations required ProducePay to operate with true institutional rigor.
The company faced a strategic choice. Either constrain growth to match existing infrastructure or build a professional servicing foundation capable of supporting where the business was headed.
ProducePay chose the latter.
Agricultural lending is inherently complex. Pricing volatility is extreme. Crop yields fluctuate with weather and timing. Produce cannot be stored indefinitely. And repayment is tied not to fixed schedules, but to harvests, shipments, and buyer payments.
Unlike traditional consumer or commercial lending, specialty lending in agriculture requires systems that can track value as it moves through a supply chain. A single loan may be secured not by a static asset, but by crops in the ground, produce in transit, and receivables tied to large buyers. This is one reason many traditional lenders have historically avoided the sector, despite its size.
ProducePay had intentionally evolved its lending model to reduce risk. Rather than waiting for growers to repay loans directly, the company implemented cash-control structures that required buyers such as large grocery chains to pay ProducePay directly for shipments. ProducePay would then reconcile each payment, apply it to the correct loan, and remit the remaining balance to the grower.
This approach dramatically reduced credit risk. It also multiplied operational complexity.
A single twenty-million-dollar loan could translate into thousands of shipments, hundreds of buyer payments, and continuous adjustments across pricing, timing, and volume. Payments often arrive as large wires accompanied by extensive shipment documentation that need to be reconciled precisely and quickly.
“We made the business safer,” Gilliland explained, “but we also made it far more operationally complex. That complexity demanded a real servicing platform, not workarounds.”
As institutional capital providers increasingly look to deploy capital into specialty finance and asset-backed lending, this level of complexity is no longer optional. Firms that cannot demonstrate accurate, real-time reporting and operational control are simply not able to access the most attractive sources of capital.
ProducePay evaluated a range of options, including traditional loan management systems and outsourced reconciliation services. Many solutions promised automation. Few demonstrated an understanding of how ProducePay actually operated.
What Gilliland and his team were looking for was not a generic platform. They needed a partner who understood lending deeply, appreciated that not all loans behave the same way, and could help design how a professional servicing operation should function at scale.
That search led ProducePay to Bedrock Servicing.
“What stood out early,” Gilliland noted, “was that Bedrock didn’t start by showing us a product. They started by asking where we were trying to go. They took the time to understand our destination before proposing how to get there.”
As ProducePay’s lending business continued to scale, it became clear that solving the company’s operational challenges would require more than incremental fixes. What was needed was a deliberate redesign of how the business operated at its core, aligned with the expectations of sophisticated capital providers and the realities of agricultural lending.
This moment coincided with broader market dynamics. According to research from rating agencies and alternative asset managers, capital providers are increasingly demanding institutional-grade controls, transparency, and reporting before allocating capital to specialty lenders. The opportunity is significant, but the bar is high.
Bedrock Servicing engaged early as a strategic guide, beginning not with systems or software, but with conversations about ProducePay’s long-term goals and the capital structures it ultimately wanted to access. This initial phase focused on advisory and consultation to define what a professional, institutional-grade servicing operation needed to look like for the business as it matured.
Hernan Hernandez, Chief Executive Officer of Bedrock Servicing, described that early work as foundational: “Before we ever talked about technology, we needed to understand where ProducePay was going as a business. Our role was to help translate their strategy into an operating model that could support growth, satisfy capital providers, and remain durable as complexity increased.”
Through joint discovery sessions, detailed process walkthroughs, and future-state design discussions, Bedrock worked with ProducePay’s leadership and operations teams to step back from day-to-day pressure and gain a shared understanding of how lending, servicing, reporting, and capital relationships needed to function together. This work replaced reactive problem-solving with a clear, intentional path forward.
As ProducePay moved toward defining the structure of its long-term servicing model, aligning the commercial framework with the operating design became essential. Bedrock’s leadership worked closely with ProducePay to bring clarity to how the partnership would function, ensuring that expectations around workflows, reporting, and data governance were consistent and well understood. This phase required tight coordination across both organizations so that business objectives, capital requirements, and operational needs could be woven into a single, durable approach.
Clint Thompson, Chief Revenue Officer for Bedrock, highlighted the importance of this integration between the firms: “Our focus from the beginning was on building alignment, making sure the operating model, the workflows, and the data structure were all built to support where ProducePay was heading. ProducePay couldn’t afford to be forced into a generic operating structure.”
This emphasis on alignment helped establish a coherent blueprint for the servicing environment, connecting strategic intent with a practical operating model. By ensuring that commercial goals, governance standards, and day-to-day servicing needs were structured around a shared vision, the partnership entered implementation with clarity and cohesion. This foundational work set the stage for the hands-on execution that followed, supporting a servicing operation designed for consistency, transparency, and growth.
With a clear operating vision in place, the focus shifted to building the technical foundation capable of supporting it. Bedrock implemented an institutional grade commercial loan servicing platform designed to handle the scale, variability, and precision required by ProducePay’s lending model. The platform became one of three core systems underpinning ProducePay’s business, alongside its CRM and ERP.
Rather than forcing ProducePay to adapt to rigid, off the shelf software, the platform was configured to reflect the realities of seasonal lending, shipment level repayment, and cash controlled loan structures. This ensured that technology reinforced the business model rather than constraining it.
The servicing platform provided ProducePay with:
• A bank grade loan accounting core
• A unified data fabric serving as a single source of truth
• A lifecycle workflow engine to manage complex loan events
• Exception and risk intelligence embedded into daily operations
• Institutional grade reporting for capital providers
• Operational leverage to scale without adding headcount
For ProducePay, this represented a fundamental shift. “We finally had one place where we could go and know the data was right,” Gilliland said. “That alone significantly changed how we operated.”
With this foundation in place, ProducePay gained the confidence to continue innovating its lending model while meeting the rigorous expectations of sophisticated capital partners.
The success of the platform depended not only on its capabilities, but on how it was implemented and supported. Bedrock’s team worked closely with ProducePay through a series of intensive, hands on planning and execution sessions designed to translate strategy into operational reality.
These working sessions brought teams together in person to map data flows, reconcile edge cases, and validate how loans, payments, and reporting would behave under real operating conditions. The focus was on detail, accuracy, and repeatability, ensuring the system could perform reliably during peak cycles and under scrutiny from capital providers.
David Bain, Chief Operating Officer of Bedrock Servicing, emphasized the importance of this approach: “When you’re dealing with real capital and complex loan structures, the details matter. Our team spent time alongside ProducePay working through data, processes, and exceptions so the system would perform in the real world, not just in theory.”
That hands on partnership extended beyond implementation. ProducePay is supported by a dedicated Bedrock account team with deep familiarity with its data, processes, and reporting requirements. This ongoing support allows ProducePay to continue refining workflows, introducing new reporting capabilities, and adapting the platform as the business evolves.
By the time the system was fully operational, ProducePay had not simply implemented new technology. It had established a durable servicing operation designed to support scale, transparency, and long term growth.
The impact was immediate and measurable.
Manual reconciliation work declined sharply. Reporting cycles that once took days could now be completed in minutes. Servicing costs dropped meaningfully even as loan volume continued to grow. Most importantly, confidence returned.
“There’s a huge difference between having data and trusting data,” Gilliland said. “Now, when we send reports to our capital providers, we know they’re right.”
That confidence changed internal behavior as well. Teams could focus on managing the business and attracting new growers rather than fighting the process. Conversations with lenders became proactive rather than defensive.
With a professional servicing foundation in place, ProducePay is now positioned to pursue opportunities that were previously out of reach.
The company is working toward more sophisticated capital structures that require exceptional transparency, consistency, and control. These structures have the potential to significantly reduce cost of capital and expand access to financing for growers across regions and crops.
“This platform doesn’t just support where we are today,” Gilliland explained. “It supports where we’re going. It allows us to work with larger, more demanding capital providers and to do so with credibility.”
The same foundation also enables future innovation, including enhanced reporting, self service access for capital providers, and new payment and reconciliation capabilities for growers and buyers.
ProducePay’s journey illustrates a broader lesson for non bank lenders and specialty finance firms. Growth inevitably creates complexity. The question is whether that complexity is managed through patchwork solutions or through a deliberate investment in professional infrastructure.
Bedrock Servicing serves as the guide for organizations ready to make that transition. By combining deep lending expertise with institutional grade technology and hands on implementation, Bedrock helps clients move from manual operations to scalable, credible, and investor ready platforms.
As Gilliland summarized, “For us, it ultimately came down to people. We needed a team that understood lending, understood our destination, and could bring the right technology to the table. Bedrock felt like that team from day one.”
ProducePay is now equipped with a servicing foundation built for scale, resilience, and trust. For lenders seeking to professionalize operations and unlock their next phase of growth, the path forward is clear. To discuss how Bedrock Servicing can help your business scale and modernize, contact us at info@bedrockservicing.com or visit www.bedrockservicing.com.
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