Lineage and Range of Expertise
We Value Relationships Most of All!
The Specialty Finance Group is a sophisticated intermediary. The asset originators and finance companies we work with are carefully screened prior to engagement. Each opportunity is thoroughly researched to make sure that the asset class has merit in the current economic and interest rate environment, and management has an excellent track record.
The firms that engage us are only introduced to the appropriate highly professional investment groups, including some of the largest institutions from the world of Private Equity, Mezzanine, Hedge Funds, and Senior Lenders. We always encourage financing sources to do their own due-diligence prior to committing funds.
The Founder of SFG has over 45 years of innovation in securitization from the very start of the Structured Finance, asset bundling, and rating business that has transformed capital raising. This Structured Finance transformation now dominates all aspects of capital raising for debt, equity, and M&A, and fuels the ongoing growth of credit funds, alternative investment funds, and ancillary products. Many multi billion-dollar lessons from losses in both credit underwriting and unhedged interest rate risk have been learned…. SFG appreciates other’s mistakes. They are not lost on us but are carefully taken into account in our advice to clients. The Founder’s early Securitization build outs for securitization platforms include firms like Citibank, Bear, Hutton, and Trepp Financial Services.
Before securitization, Richard Benson, the Founder of SFG, was a key trading desk economist at Chase around the time that Paul Volcker had left to play Chairman of the Fed where for over ten years, inflation and high interest rates were the scourge of the Nation. Combined with warped winner take all politics, investment returns then were volatile and times turbulent. SFG’s suggests get your seat belt buckled up for the roller coaster ride of the next ten to twenty years. SFG can assure you those times are now back but with a vengeance. This go around, the stake of the US dollar as the sole world reserve currency is hanging in the balance. It not looking good for the dollar long term as it twists in the wind.
Fortunately, before six years at Harvard earning a PhD, work was a combination of monetary history studies, GAAP and Alternative Financial accounting at HBS, and modeling four hundred plus equation models of the US Economy at DRI.
DRI – Data Resources was founded by Otto Eckstein and Henry Kissinger. Don Marron subsequently sold DRI to McGraw Hill at a record sum for a FinTech at the time, which put Don Marron on course for his FinTech Private Equity firm, LightYear, which became Don’s passion along with collecting ART after moving on from being Chairman of Paine Webber. DRI was the first major PE FinTech Home run.
While an undergraduate doing advanced graduate courses in Mathematical Economics, Richard used Bayesian Math to create an AI that modeled micro behavior of debtors, and the common fallacies of creditors in loan underwriting. That work led to his being invited to the Harvard PhD Program in economics for Linear & Non Linear programming, and advanced multivariate Bayesian analysis.
“Bayesian is the basis of all the current AI micro economic modeling that might have a meaningful chance at a quantum shift in value add.”
SFG still leads ground breaking work, but in the real world of Wall Street and investing. Be assured that one is never to old to take a fresh look at a problem, and develop a better solution. Having real work experience working with Twenty Plus FinCos a year for forty years is also a help to understanding both the problems and solutions that FinCos need to survive & thrive in volatile times.
Two things we are determined to accomplish:
- Help our clients generate massive real wealth, not just GAAP earnings, and;
- For those that have made true wealth – Help them hang on to their fortune while their ship on the ocean faces never ending Force Six Hurricanes as they sail into and out of the eyes of the storms.
Contact SFG today.