Your Wise Funding Group LLC Agreement: The Terms That Matter Once Suit Is Filed

Wise Funding Group is now behind the effort to sue you on the payments you owe. The complaint is no surprise: It says you defaulted and wants the full balance, plus fees. It may even name you as a guarantor. Those are the claims Wise makes, not facts the court has accepted, and they don’t mean Wise is necessarily entitled to all that money, or that you are personally on hook for it. To get what they want, Wise has to prove all those things. A judge may reject one claim or another depending on the terms of your deal and how the case is litigated. The terms of the merchant agreement that matter now are how you were served, your answer deadline, your default and reconciliation clauses, and the guarantee and confession of judgment. Read them again.

The Deadline to Answer

The deadline to answer in New York is 20 days if you were handed the papers in the State of New York. However you get it, do not blow the deadline.

Your agreement’s certified mail clause is not among the 30-day service methods listed in CPLR 320. Say you got a first-class mail notice that tracks 312-a, asking you to return the signed acknowledgment card. If you do, you have twenty days from that date to answer.

| How the summons was served | Days to appear or answer | When the clock starts | | Handed to you personally in New York | 20 days | At delivery of the summons | | Left with another person and mailed, under CPLR 308(2) | 30 days | When service is complete, not the date of delivery | | Served outside New York or by publication | 30 days | When service is complete, not the date of delivery | | First-class mail with acknowledgment, complaint enclosed, under CPLR 312-a | 20 days | When you send back the signed acknowledgment |

To see which row applies, first check the affidavit of service the plaintiff filed with the court. The claim there may be wrong, but it also may be true, so see what they say and how the rules apply to their story.

If you missed your 20 or 30 days to answer, there is another option. CPLR 5015(a)(1) gives you one year after the other side hands you the default judgment and notice of entry of the judgment. You need to come up with two things: a reasonable excuse for missing your deadline plus a potentially meritorious defense. In Marquez v GSB Supply Corp. (2025), the Second Department looks at both those issues. The other side gets to contest those two showings, and their arguments could be enough to prevent the court from vacating the judgment.

You have no limit of time to contest a judgment that New York lacks jurisdiction to enter against you. CPLR 5015(a)(4) says that flat-out. Maybe you never got the papers. CPLR 317 also gives you a year from the time you actually learn about the default judgment against you. Under this rule, there is a five-year ceiling. You qualify if you were not served in a way equivalent to personal delivery, never got the summons in time to defend and have a meritorious defense to the suit.

If you live in New York State at the time Wise files the confession of judgment, they are only allowed to do so where you said you lived when signing or where you live now. If you are a nonresident of New York, they may not file any confession of judgment. By the time Wise files the confession, it also has to be under three years old. The funder doesn’t need a confession of judgment to sue. A business resides where it has a place of business. A guarantor’s residence gets a separate look. HB 700 was the 2025 legislation that revised Texas’s commercial financing laws. Most of its provisions went into effect in September. Among other changes, it bars sales-based financing providers from filing a confession of judgment.

New York has statutes allowing the parties to choose New York law and courts, but the statutes are limited and only cover deals of $250,000+ and $1 million+. Maybe your document says you chose New York law anyway. Even then, it does not have to stick.

Your Counterstory

Wise Funding will come into court with a story to tell: that you defaulted and owe the full balance under your contract and guarantee. Your counterstory will start with whether the contract was valid when signed, if Wise really gave you the money under it and what you were supposed to do that you didn’t.

Events of default in funders’ merchant agreements are often one or more of the following: blocking ACH debits, changing the debited account, switching credit card processors, changing ownership or closing the business, materially false statements in the application and failing to provide the promised records. What your rights are when you do one of those things turns on the words in your document, and that takes reading them closely.

A fixed daily debit amount only roughly tracks your sales. The way to adjust the debit is under the reconciliation clause in your funding agreement. Just having slow sales is not enough to stop your obligation to pay. If you have a reconciliation clause and you want it to work, you have to do what the clause says. Courts have looked at how things worked in practice, and some funding agreements say ordinary slowdowns and closures are not breaches. In People v. Richmond Capital Group, the agreements provided for reconciliation, but none was actually performed. Keep everything you wrote to the funder about adjusting the daily debit.

In any usury case, the first question is whether this deal was really a loan. Reconciliation, a limited term and what happens if you go bankrupt all affect the call. If a loan at a rate over 25% is criminal usury, the deal is void and unenforceable. A corporation or limited liability company can raise that defense just as well as you can. But a rate alone doesn’t make a deal criminal usury or void.

True Business Funding (2d Dep’t 2025) turned on the reconciliation clause, the deal’s having no fixed term and its calling for bankruptcy to excuse the borrower. Together, they moved the court to hold this deal was not a loan. In contrast, in LG Funding (2d Dep’t 2020), another case about whether a merchant cash advance was usury, evidence showing the reconciliation clause was at the funder’s sole discretion plus allowing bankruptcy to trigger the default were enough to raise the question. Rate limits don’t cover deals of $2.5 million or more.

In court, a guarantee will only cover what it says it does. Some guarantee documents only cover performance duties, like not selling the business or moving accounts to a different bank. Other guarantees do cover payment. A guarantee that doesn’t cover the debt may still leave you having to pay if you didn’t live up to the performance duties in the personal guarantee. A guarantee cannot turn a void and unenforceable contract into something the courts will honor.

Settling with Wise Funding

The complaint asks the court to hit you with the unpaid purchased amount and those default fees. It will also ask for attorney’s fees, which are often a fixed percentage of the balance. On top of all that, they’ll tack on interest on the unpaid amount, plus every court cost they paid. Check what shows in the complaint against what your bank statements say to check for mistaken claims. One place to start is the debits that never got credited, and then the default and legal fees that may add up to more than a fair estimate of their loss. Pull together the merchant agreement, the guarantee, every bank statement and every reconciliation request, plus every email or letter you sent the funder, starting when the money went into your account and going to when you stopped paying.

Settling with Wise Funding is doable, but don’t expect any settlement to be the same as another. Negotiations can run into the different evidence each side has, what defenses look strong and the leverage either side can bring to bear. Any deal needs to spell out what the payment terms are and what the release covers. No matter what you talk about with Wise, you still have a deadline to get your answer on file. Any promise they make to put the case on hold does not stop that clock.

Before you redirect receivables or switch bank accounts, always have it reviewed by a lawyer. If the contract says you assigned the receivables to the funder, it may be allowed to notice your customers to pay it instead of you. The funder can do that without a judgment. Once the customer gets that notice, paying you no longer clears its bill. Only paying the funder does.

A free contract review costs nothing and takes a day or two. Call (888) 837-7053, or send the agreements to Delancey Street for a straight read on your options.