Fiduciam increases all female Spanish team to eight
01 October 2019
Fiduciam has increased its Spanish team to eight, having recruited three new members of the team over the summer, the most recent of which joined this week. All will be based in London but fully dedicated to the Spanish market.
Fiduciam only started lending in Spain in January last year and is currently handling a pipeline of €70 million of loans due to close by the end of October in Spain.
Remarkably, all of its Spanish team are women. Fiduciam has been surprised by how many job applications it receives from Spanish women and how few from Spanish men. The strong emphasis in London on genuine gender equality through initiatives such as Women in Finance has certainly had an important impact.
The team combines experienced underwriters who used to work for Spanish banks and debt funds, with younger professionals who have recently graduated from university. The existing team has already molded into a strong and dynamic group and the new members will contribute to this.
Fiduciam has found an incredibly captive market for its bridging solutions in Spain, hence the rapid growth rate of its Spanish business. It is filling a vacuum left by the mainstream banks. Until now, only Madrid-based specialist debt funds were offering a solution, but at substantially higher interest rates than those applied by Fiduciam; whereas Fiduciam uses the same interest rates in Spain as are typical for the UK bridging market.
Fiduciam’s Spanish business covers the entire country and caters for both the international cross-border borrower and the entirely domestic Spanish borrower. Clients in Spain include British ex-patriates, who are now real estate developers in Spain, but also large family-owned Spanish industrial companies that need solutions for special situations.
Johan Groothaert, CEO of Fiduciam, says: “We are incredibly proud of our Spanish team. Even though expectations were already high at the outset, we are surprised by the strong uptake of our loan solutions in Spain. Fiduciam’s lending infrastructure is optimised to handle multiple jurisdictions and currencies, and we have invested substantial resources in widening our platform to cover Spain.
“With the new team members joining, we now have a real Spanish community in our London office; some of us have even started learning Spanish. It is a great country so it is always pleasant to look at projects and to meet with borrowers there.”
