:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bloomberglinea/2S6HDIY5PNAOLPCXGJYU4VG3EY.jpg "Scene at Unicentro shopping center in Bogotá, Colombia.")
Bloomberg — Gramercy Funds Management LLC, an emerging-markets asset manager, loaned $100 million to OmniLatam, a Bogota-based fintech that’s entering the Brazil market.
The credit line is “much more than a facility, it’s a partnership that we’re going to take across the region,” OmniLatam Chief Executive Officer Diego Caicedo said in a video interview. “This will allow us to more than double our Colombia loan book and, as we start growing in Brazil, Gramercy will probably be sitting next to us.”
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OmniLatam specializes in providing digital working-capital products to small and midsize businesses. It collects data such as invoices and tax forms to help make credit decisions based on the prospective borrower’s clients, sales and employees.
The $100 million asset-based revolving credit line has an 18-month maturity and is denominated in Colombian pesos, with Gramercy taking the senior tranches and OmniLatam the junior ones.
Caicedo, who spoke in Bogota after having just returned from Sao Paulo, said he expects the firm to complete its first loan in Brazil in June. OmniLatam already has an office in the nation’s financial center in Sao Paulo’s Faria Lima neighborhood, and plans to employ as many as 50 people there by the end of the year.
“We are finally landing in Brazil,” he said. “It’s great to be back traveling to Sao Paulo after Covid and everything,”
Expanding in Brazil will be one of the firm’s top priorities this year, according to the CEO. The idea is to operate in partnership with local banks, and to use so-called FIDCs, funds in Brazil that buy securities backed by loans. He aims to “leverage license and technology from one of the bank-as-a-service providers.”
Omni was founded by Caicedo and his partner Andres Abumohor in 2018, and was purchased by Greensill Capital in June 2020, just eight months before the London-based company filed for administration in the U.K. after a stunning collapse that shook the global financial community. In May 2021, the two Latin American managers bought the region’s operations back with the help of the Miami-based investment firm 777 Partners.
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After the management buyout, Omni almost tripled its credit portfolio, to $100 million, of which 80% is from Colombian companies and 20% from Chilean ones. The firm, which loaned about $300 million last year to more than 1,500 companies, has about 240 employees and is hiring roughly 20 every month. It has approximately 15,000 clients that supply about 60 big corporations.
