Freight Factoring: Why OTR Funds in 2 Minutes, Non-Recourse

FreightWaves sits down with Clayton Griffin, President of OTR Solutions, to dive into how they’re revolutionizing trucking finance. Discover OTR’s unique non-recourse factoring model that provides instant funding for carriers, mitigating risk and streamlining operations. Learn how their innovative OTR Select platform is building a robust ecosystem for brokers and carriers alike.

OTR Solutions expects its core factoring business to grow roughly 60% in 2026 compared with 2025, driven by an approximately 35% increase in invoice count, according to Clayton Griffin, president of OTR Solutions. The company currently factors freight for about 23,000 carriers and processes invoices for roughly 10,000 brokers annually, giving it a vantage point across a substantial share of the brokered trucking market.

The growth figures underscore how OTR is leveraging its financing scale — the company projects $8 billion in carrier freight spend on the factoring side this year — to move into adjacent data and capacity-matching services. Its product OTR Select surfaces historical spot-rate data and pre-vetted carrier options by lane, drawing exclusively from carriers that have cleared OTR’s underwriting standards. Griffin said the platform is a direct outgrowth of the company’s document-imaging and invoice-verification technology, not a separately built initiative.

“The document imaging technology, which is freight-specific, is AI-driven, and is the best in the industry bar none, is what is feeding Select, which is a data product. The only reason that the data is as good as it is is because our factoring division relies on it to make the best decisions possible,” said Griffin.

The carrier-vetting angle carries meaningful fraud-mitigation implications for brokers. Griffin noted that open-market load boards are losing postings as shippers pressure brokers to avoid unknown carriers, and he positioned Select as a way to expand a broker’s “known carrier network” without posting freight publicly. Because OTR funds carriers — in some cases within two minutes of invoice upload with no human intervention — every carrier in the network has already passed financial and identity underwriting, including personal background checks on business owners.

OTR’s factoring portfolio is predominantly non-recourse, meaning carriers are not charged back if a broker fails to pay. Griffin pointed to the Convoy collapse as a real-world test: when Convoy shut down overnight and left factoring companies with exposures exceeding $100 million industry-wide, OTR absorbed the loss rather than clawing funds back from carriers. “It doesn’t come from the carrier,” Griffin said, contrasting OTR’s approach with recourse-heavy competitors.

On the freight cycle, Griffin said inflation-adjusted rates remain well below OTR’s long-term median across its entire history of factoring invoices, and he cited the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2025 cost-per-mile study as evidence that carriers are still operating below breakeven. He attributed the prolonged soft-rate environment partly to capacity that was artificially depressing rates — referencing non-domiciled CDLs and related regulatory issues — and argued that meaningful organic capacity re-entry would require rates to rise substantially above current levels before new entrants find trucking financially attractive.

Griffin was skeptical that regulators would ease the safety-focused rules driving current capacity tightening. “I think it’s a very tough sell to me that you’re going to have government officials effectively saying we don’t care as much about safety,” he said. He added that legitimate carriers who have long operated to high standards have been forced to compete against operators that did not meet those standards, and that sustained regulatory accountability could eventually make trucking an attractive career path again — though he cautioned that outcome remains a long way off.

• OTR Solutions forecasts ~60% core factoring revenue growth in 2026 vs. 2025, with invoice count rising roughly 35%, backed by $8 billion in projected carrier freight spend this year.
• OTR Select gives brokers lane-level spot-rate data and pre-vetted carrier options drawn solely from carriers that have passed OTR’s financial and identity underwriting — without open-market posting.
• Griffin says inflation-adjusted spot rates remain below OTR’s long-term historical median and below carrier breakeven per ATRI’s 2025 cost study, pointing to an early-cycle freight market.

This Summary is generated thanks to a transcription of the interview, for the full interview please enjoy the video above.