Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | November 13, 2023 | Worcester Business Journal 11 businesses. First introduced in 2017, previous iterations of SAFER have made it through the House, but have never been passed by the Senate. is year, ongoing wars and congressional leadership changes have potentially once again sunk any chance of passage. Local options grow Despite the lack of reform, local banks continue to increase the amount of services that are available to cannabis clients, including the chance to receive loans, a big development for an industry that has historically lacked access to traditional forms of capital. MSB offers cannabis companies loans that range from $100,000 to $10,000,000, helping businesses with everything from working capital to real estate and equipment purchases, according to Curran. "It used to be that we would not lend to cannabis companies directly," he said. e scrutiny that is required of cannabis accounts has the unintended benefit of giving banks extra insight into the well-being of the potential into the space, that there were pain points that we heard from cannabis customers that other financial institutions were making them do manual uploads of all their income and sales data," said Jaworek. Companies have begun to try to find solutions to the mountains of compliance-related work. Many banks utilize the services of Green Check Verified, a fintech firm headquartered in Florida. e company has over 153 different banks and over 8,000 businesses on their platform, according to company founder and CEO Kevin Hart. eir platform allows for banks to look at every transaction to ensure compliance by allowing technology to do the heavy liing. "It's a complex weave of plumbing and infrastructure of data and money moving back and forth between all the nodes and pieces," said Hart. As long as cannabis remains federally illegal, it's likely that banking cannabis will remain a unique challenge. But there is pending legislation in Congress that supporters say could improve the situation: e Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act. e purpose of the legislation is to prohibit federal regulators from punishing banks for conducting transactions with state-legal Kevin Hart, CEO of Green Check Verified loanees, according to Hart. "When you can look at the financial health and performance of a cannabis business and see it at a single dollar level day in and day out, you have more visibility into the health of a cannabis business than you do any other commercial account," he said. e competition between banks has also led to a decline in fees. "Massachusetts is a real trendsetter when it comes to the cannabis industry," said Hart. "ey were one of Cost of legal Mass. marijuana since 2021 0 100 200 300 400 500 2021 2022 2023 $402.70 $167.48 Retail Cost of Flower per Ounce Source: Data provided by Cannabis Control Comission, retrieved on Nov. 1, 2023. the first states where not only one, but multiple financial institutions went to zero fees for cannabis banking. at's a bellwether event." While the reduction in fees is newsworthy, Maranda is quick to remind the industry that compliance remains the most important factor. "I get a little nervous when I hear banks say that they're going to do this work for free," she said, "It makes me wonder if they understand the compliance burden they're taking on." W

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