- 1Erica Gilerman joined Triton in July 2021 as General Counsel and is now Chief Legal Officer.
- 2Triton grew from six employees in 2021 to 75, across Florida and Texas.
- 3Merchants increasingly use AI-written letters in collections disputes, and some bring AI agents onto calls.
Small business finance has long held that anyone can send money out the door and the hard part is getting it back. Erica Gilerman is Chief Legal Officer of that hard part at Triton Recovery Group, a South Florida collections firm focused on merchant cash advances, commercial loans and equipment financing, handled on a contingency basis.
A closed deal means a stipulation
In collections, Gilerman said, "closing the deal" means a signed stipulation the client is happy with and that makes financial sense for the merchant. She counts her first one within two weeks of starting.
Triton's people tend to say collections starts in underwriting. In a taped 2024 interview, CEO Leo Vargas called underwriting the most important piece of getting a deal done. He said funders should know from the outset what a merchant will use the money for, and should set terms around anticipated receivables rather than deposits. The firm is interested only in legally enforceable paper.
From six employees to 75
Gilerman was recruited in 2021, when Triton had six people and was a young commercial collections firm working entirely in the MCA space. Vargas placed an ad in the New York City market for a collections attorney. She answered, met him in New York, and got an offer, with one condition: a month of training at the Miami office, away from her family. She started in July 2021 as General Counsel and says she learned the front end of the MCA business from Vargas.
The company then sponsored Broker Fair, a December 2021 conference in New York, and began hiring more afterward. Gilerman moved her family to Miami two weeks later. Five years and nearly 70 hires on, Triton has 75 employees in Florida and Texas.
Background
Gilerman was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of immigrants, and attended Madison High School, in a law program whose curriculum was created by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself a Madison graduate. She began at Pace University, in Downtown Manhattan, around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed. That convinced her to avoid a narrow niche, and she first planned a career in public accounting before returning to law. Her earlier work included employment litigation and collecting medical debt for New Jersey hospitals. She says her accounting background helps her understand factor rates and how businesses operate, and that she tries to collect by putting herself in the debtor's position.
She now says the MCA industry is the niche she belongs in, and that without it, small shops across the country would not exist as they do.
Within two weeks, I closed my first deal. I just clicked in the industry.
AI on both sides
The newest frontier is merchants using large language models to draft letters, emails and demands. These often contain wrong information or cite the wrong statutes, Gilerman said, and merchants sometimes act as their own attorneys with AI help or even say AI represents them. She sees a lot of output from ChatGPT and Claude, and says it repeats itself and sounds generic because nobody tells the tool to write in their own voice. Some merchants try to bring AI agents onto phone calls.
Collectors can use AI too. Vargas wrote in a recent social post that the best agencies will use it to cut repetitive work, improve compliance, analyze consumer behavior and optimize account placement, while collections remains about people.
Vargas said Gilerman took a chance on Triton at an important stage of growth and has grown into a key member of the executive team. Gilerman likens MCA collections to chess, where the checkmate is getting the payment in the door so the client can redeploy the funds.
Source reporting: deBanked.
