A Strategic Addition to the AVANA Companies Family
We are excited to announce that AVANA Companies has acquired a majority interest in Extensia Financial (“Extensia”), a Credit Union Services Organization (“CUSO”) headquartered in Northridge, California. This strategic acquisition increases the assets under management (“AUM”) of our firm to $1.3 billion, and uniquely positions us to expand our loan product offerings and increase the value of our borrower customer relationships.
A CUSO, for those of you who may be unfamiliar, is an organization owned at least in part by a credit union that provides services primarily for credit unions and its members. Extensia has, for the last two decades, originated commercial real estate loans for participation by credit unions. Bringing a credit union loan marketplace into the AVANA Family of companies is a natural fit with our existing Institutional investor and bank loan participation platforms.
The addition of credit unions to our loan investor base will allow us to offer our borrower customers more competitive pricing on a more diverse pool of commercial real estate and renewable energy loan products. This will allow us to capture a broader complement of borrower customers and provide lending products to them across a broader cross-section of their business lifecycle. In addition to allowing us to better serve our borrower clients, this will allow us to better serve our institutional investor clients by (1) providing increased diversification of transactions, (2) improve confidence in the takeout of development deals by captively offering the associated term financing, and (3) improving individual transaction profitability by improving the “stickiness” of borrower relationships.
We are working on a number of other strategic additions to the AVANA Companies family that we’ll announce in the coming months as we continue to build a world-class small business lending and impact investing platform. As we approach the end of one of the most challenging years in recent history, we thank you for your partnership and trust and look forward to navigating a bright 2021 with you.
Sincerely,
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Sundip Patel
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Michael Sheneman
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