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Eric Donnelly

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The profile

Chief executive of Capital Plus Financial, LLC since 2014 and of its parent, Crossroads Systems, Inc. (later Crossroads Impact Corp.), since December 2017. Capital Plus was one of two PPP lenders of record for the Blueacorn channel; its parent reported fiscal 2021 net income of $195.4 million and paid a $40-per-share special dividend in July 2021. The company disclosed that SBA closed its 2023 review with no material adverse findings. He has not been charged with any crime.

In the archive

Identity and role

Eric A. Donnelly is the chief executive of Capital Plus Financial, LLC and of its parent holding company, Crossroads Systems, Inc., later renamed Crossroads Impact Corp. (formerly OTCQX: CRSS). Capital Plus is a CDFI and B-Corp-certified lender in Bedford, Texas, whose stated mission is single-family homeownership for Hispanic borrowers. He has run Capital Plus since 2014 and the holding company since the December 2017 transaction that put Capital Plus inside it. (From September 2021 through the end of 2023, the Capital Plus subsidiary's CEO title was held by Thiru Vignarajah, with Donnelly running the parent.) In the PPP, Capital Plus was one of the two originating lenders for Blueacorn, the lender service provider. Capital Plus held the legal underwriting role; Blueacorn was its agent.

Biography

Donnelly is a graduate of Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's in economics. He began his career in commercial banking, and in 2005, after what the company's disclosures call "many years in commercial banking," he founded a national small-balance commercial real-estate finance company aimed at small business owners. (The name of that 2005 company is not in the public record.)

By the company's account he was hired in 2012 by the firm's founder to scale what was then a roughly 25-year-old social enterprise, and he became CEO in 2014. The firm's CFO, Farzana Giga, partnered to acquire "Capital Plus Inc." and form Capital Plus Financial via a private-equity fund, then sold it into Crossroads in 2017. Under Donnelly, Capital Plus kept a roughly $130 million single-family mortgage book aimed at Hispanic homeownership, and won its B-Corp certification. Donnelly was a 2017 graduate of the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative and went through BBVA's Momentum program for social entrepreneurs; he sits as lead independent director of InBankshares and on several nonprofit and impact boards.

Capital Plus is a wholly owned subsidiary of Crossroads Systems, a former Nasdaq technology and intellectual-property company that delisted in 2017, reorganized through Chapter 11, and was taken over that October by the investment vehicle 210 Capital: Robert Alpert and C. Clark Webb, who also run the alternative-asset manager P10. Crossroads then bought Capital Plus in December 2017. Because Crossroads deregistered after its bankruptcy, its 2020–2021 financials are OTC disclosure statements and audited financials posted to the company's own site, not SEC filings. The figures below come from the company's audited disclosures.

The company and its PPP/EIDL role

In fiscal 2020 (the year ended October 31, 2020) it earned net income of $3.65 million. The Blueacorn partnership was announced January 11, 2021. Capital Plus approved roughly 472,000 PPP loans at an average size around $16,000, ranking first in the country by loan count as of April 11, 2021. Audited holding-company figures for fiscal 2021: total revenue up 2,446% to $932.7 million; gross PPP processing-fee income of $868.4 million; operating income up 4,127% to $243.4 million; cash earnings of $36.27 a share against $0.74 the year before. Net income was $195.4 million. Excluding PPP, revenue for the year was about $34.9 million.

PPP paid the originating lender a processing fee, with the largest percentage on the smallest loans. Of the $868.4 million in gross fees, $628.1 million was recorded as "PPP processing fee expense." Net to Crossroads was about $240 million. On the 86,521 loans referred through Womply's Fast Lane, Capital Plus earned roughly $187 million in fees. To fund the loans it drew roughly $6.4 billion on the Federal Reserve's PPP Liquidity Facility. Capital Plus held the legal underwriting and BSA/AML duty; the House Select Subcommittee reported that lenders including Capital Plus described their oversight of fintech partners as limited to "spot checks" conducted at random on a small percentage of referred files.

In mid-2021 it declared a special dividend of $40.00 per share, payable July 26, 2021. On 5,971,994 shares that is $238,879,760 in cash. Donnelly held 718,590 shares, about 12% of the company; his fiscal 2021 compensation was $9,249,474, of which $350,000 was salary and $8,899,474 a bonus.

Their own relief

Capital Plus was itself a PPP borrower. On April 13, 2020, before it became a Blueacorn lender, it took a $376,800 PPP loan of its own from Simmons Bank, reporting 28 jobs and payroll use, at its Bedford, Texas address. Public SBA data marks the loan "Paid in Full," and Crossroads' own audited cash-flow statement shows a $376,800 PPP-loan cash outflow in fiscal 2022, consistent with the company having repaid it.

No fraud finding, no charge, no civil fraud judgment, and no False Claims Act settlement against Eric Donnelly or Capital Plus exists in the public record.

The SBA investigation (2023). After the House Select Subcommittee's December 1, 2022 report alleged that Capital Plus and other lenders had not adequately overseen their fintech partners, the SBA announced on December 8, 2022 that it had launched a "full investigation" of the eight lenders named: Capital Plus among them, alongside Benworth, Celtic Bank, Customers Bank, Cross River Bank, Fountainhead, Harvest, and Prestamos. Capital Plus then signed what the company calls a "Voluntary Agreement" with the SBA on January 6, 2023, providing for enhanced supervision of, and reporting on, its PPP loan portfolio and origination procedures. The SBA sent "numerous requests" for information about the loans and about Capital Plus's Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering, and know-your-customer practices, and paused processing of all of Capital Plus's PPP guarantee-purchase requests. On August 28, 2023, per the company's audited financials, "the SBA notified Capital Plus that it had concluded its investigation and review of Capital Plus with no material adverse findings" and resumed processing. As of the disclosure (auditor's report dated January 31, 2024), the SBA had since processed and approved more than 47,000 of those guarantee-purchase requests. The disclosure lives in Note 19 of the Crossroads Impact Corp. audited consolidated financial statements for the years ended October 31, 2023 and 2022, posted to the company's investor page, not in a press release.

The Blueacorn arbitration. In March 2023, Blueacorn filed an arbitration demand against Capital Plus over their loan-service-provider agreement, claiming fees owed; Capital Plus filed counterclaims in May 2023 and, before the arbitration, had accrued $80 million in fees due to Blueacorn. On August 24, 2023 an arbitrator granted Capital Plus interim relief on document access, and Capital Plus posted a $5 million bond. Per the Subcommittee report and ProPublica, Capital Plus approved PPP loans to Blueacorn owners Nathan Reis and Stephanie Hockridge and later sought repayment.

Borrower class action. In Greathouse v. Capital Plus Financial (N.D. Tex. 4:22-cv-00686, Judge Mark Pittman), borrowers alleged Capital Plus failed to fund already-approved PPP loans. The named defendants included Capital Plus, Crossroads Impact Corp., Eric Donnelly, and Robert Alpert. Class certification was denied on September 6, 2023; the CourtListener docket records a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice filed May 22, 2024 (terms confidential). A later individual borrower suit (Tate v. Capital Plus) is a private action, not a government enforcement matter.

The Womply fee suit. Womply (legally Oto Analytics, Inc.) sued Capital Plus, Crossroads, and Donnelly personally in the Northern District of Texas (3:21-cv-02636) over the division of PPP lender processing fees; the case settled and was dismissed with prejudice on January 5, 2023. The Crossroads FY2021 disclosure had listed none of its insiders as carrying any criminal conviction or regulatory disciplinary action in the prior five years.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Donnelly was CEO of Crossroads Impact Corp. when the Harvest merger was announced on February 23, 2026. Crossroads' OTCQX listing ended around April 2023. It now operates as a privately held company — P10 and Conversant Capital put $180 million in at $10.76 a share in July 2022, a deal largely unwound by December 2024 — that still posts audited financials. It acquired the asset-based lender Rise Line in 2021, announced (but appears never to have closed) a Fountainhead deal in December 2021, and took the P10/Conversant money and rebranded as Crossroads Impact. On February 23, 2026 it announced a merger with Harvest Commercial Capital, another former Womply partner lender, with both companies to keep their existing brands; both CEOs, Donnelly and Harvest's Adam Seery, were quoted in the announcement. No SEC or criminal action against Donnelly or Crossroads has been located.

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