Last month, eCapital Corp., a leading capital solutions provider for small and medium-sized businesses in North America and the UK, announced it achieved substantial growth in 2020 andconsolidateda total ofeightacquired entities into a simplified corporate structure.  

Marius Silvasan, CEO of eCapital, is responsible for leading the company’s overall vision and direction, as well as developing the overarching strategies that support its corporate goals. In this role, Silvasan balances the interests of a diverse investment community with the operational model and resources required to become a global leader in alternative lending.

As CEO, Silvasan ensures that the entire organization is well-aligned with eCapital’s core corporate values. In addition, Silvasan provides oversight for eCapital’s major technology initiatives; ensuring that the organization’s technological suite provides market-leading experiences to investors, customers and employees. Silvasan has been instrumental in the organization’s acquisitions, including the company’s acquisitions of Gerber Finance and Paragon Financial Group.

Prior to his position with eCapital,  Silvasan was CEO and director of ONE Bio Corp and a founder of Tele Plus World Corp. He has over 20 years of experience in structured finance, syndication and mergers and acquisitions. He holds a BBA and an MBA from HEC University in Montreal.

Please tell us a bit about your background and your career trajectory and how you ended up at eCapital.

Silvasan:  I’ve been a business owner for almost 30 years. My career started in telecommunications where I developed several businesses from the ground up. I also made a number of acquisitions during my tenure in that space and brought one of my company’s public, before selling most of those assets in the early 2000s. I took some time off and then presented with an opportunity to enter the financing space.

I acquired part of what is now known as eCapital in 2010, which was called Trade Finance Solutions at the time, and was subsequently rebranded to eCapital in June of 2020.

We have been building this business organically from 2006 until 2017, when we began growing aggressively as a result of eight acquisitions over the last four years within the factoring and asset-based lending space.

Could you provide us an overview of eCapital and your recent announcement that the company has consolidated eight acquired entities into a simplified corporate structure?

Silvasan:  In the simplest form, eCapital is a provider of capital to small and medium-sized businesses that have cash-flow constraints and cash-flow needs. We provide financing in the United States, Canada, and the UK, servicing roughly 4,000 businesses. In most cases, we are the senior lender to those businesses; meaning we provide all of the capital they need to grow. The capital we provide comes in the form of factoring and/or asset-based lending. We purchase invoices as needed from customers and finance against those assets and others such as inventories, equipment and real estate based on our customers’ specific needs.

We began by growing the business organically, but we’ve made a certain number of key strategic acquisitions starting in 2017. Based on those acquisitions, we felt it was appropriate to consolidate our branding and operations under one company, in order to come together as one business focused on a common objective. This new structure will help take our business to the next level.

We rebranded in 2020 to the eCapital name, which was one of the businesses acquired in 2019 as we felt the branding matched our renewed focus on technology. We have also proceeded with the consolidation of our back office through the deployment of technology across the group. We’re in a very good position to grow organically and aggressively in 2021 and thereafter.

I would also like to touch on technology further here. When you’re a nonbank lender servicing small and medium-sized businesses, being able to do it in an automated way by the use of technology is key. We have developed a variety of client portals which allow our customers to streamline their access to capital and accelerate their ability to process funding requests. It also allows us to confirm assets, such as accounts receivables, with third-party account debtors. Technology allows us to enhance the whole financing process and effectively manage risk, all while providing the maximum amount of capital to our customers.

We have a full IT department and staff of programmers, who continuously enhance our technology platform from a customer perspective as well as from a back office, risk management and underwriting perspective.

What are the main goals of the company over the next year?

Silvasan:  Over the next year we plan to stay the course. Obviously, we faced the pandemic during 2020, but we stayed the course in terms of our strategy and have continued to support our customers. Notwithstanding the pandemic, we continued to grow our business through key strategic acquisitions, with four acquisitions made in 2020 alone. As a result, our revenues increased considerably, over 60 percent in 2020 versus 2019. We also grew the size of our book considerably, increasing it over 50 percent during the course of 2020. 

In 2021, we’re looking to continue growing organically and take advantage of what we see happening in the financing and lending sector, which is a consolidation of the non-bank lending space. We want to participate in that consolidation by acquiring smaller players and portfolios that we can integrate onto our platform, further increasing the overall size of our business.

eCapital is industry agnostic, but were there certain borrowers over the past year, because of the pandemic, that were more affected than others?

Silvasan:  There are certain sectors that we have some level of concentration in, an example being the logistics and transportation space. A sector that has done well throughout the pandemic. We also provide financing to staffing businesses and food distribution companies, which have also done well. Those are areas where we have some higher level of concentration, but overall, we service about 80 industries.

What are your predictions for the next year?

Silvasan: From an economic perspective, we expect that the countries we currently operate in (U.S., Canada and the U.K.) will continue to grow. There is a good deal of liquidity being provided to the market from a variety of sources as well as suppressed liquidity from investments that were postponed during the pandemic, but were committed to prior to the outbreak. In 12 to 18 months, we believe we will see a period of increased economic activity, which is going to favor businesses such as ours. 

We also expect increased liquidity in the marketplace from new and existing players, which will lead to increased competition. There is going to be some level of pressure on pricing, which means that being able to scale up and use technology to manage cost and increase efficiency is going to be a key consideration for nonbank lenders. We’re fairly bullish in terms of the next 12 months based on where we currently sit.