Highlights

  • Montfort’s evolution in scaling our private credit business
  • Diversification from SaaS financing to technology, asset-backed, real estate, and insurance financing
  • Acquisition of Pivot Financial, Brightpath Capital, and Langhaus Financial
  • 3x growth in assets to over $450 million in 2022
  • Continued growth expected in 2023, despite macroeconomic challenges

2022 was a pivotal year for our company which saw the evolution of TIMIA Capital into Montfort and the substantial growth of our private credit business.

Montfort reflects our management team’s recent expansion and innovation in new private credit sectors, including insurance (Langhaus Financial), real estate (Brightpath Capital), and asset-backed lending (Pivot Financial). 

With this expansion, our business has more than tripled in size in the past year to over $450 million in assets.

The Decision to Launch Montfort

One of the questions I get asked frequently is why we decided to create Montfort. 

The short answer is that we needed to scale our business in an efficient way.

Operating a specialty private credit organization as a publicly traded company means incurring extra costs that private credit organizations do not incur. So, while being a public company provides our operations with flexibility in terms of sourcing capital, succession planning, and engaging staff in a share of the business, we agreed that a diversified acquisition strategy was the best path forward in order to achieve scale.

Our analysis indicated that there were a large number of specialty private credit companies operating in different verticals. 

We also determined that we could create synergies by operating several private credit companies under one parent company, Montfort. We can create efficiencies by sharing knowledge, processes, technologies, and back-office costs across multiple companies.

In 2023 and beyond, the individual private credit companies we acquired in 2022 will continue to operate as usual and serve their respective markets. Montfort — the publicly traded parent company — will work in the background, identifying synergies, creating efficiencies, and scaling faster as a group than we could have individually.

Introducing the Montfort Group of Companies

Montfort evolved as the parent company of TIMIA Capital, adding Pivot to the group of companies in 2021 and Brightpath and Langhaus in 2022.

Each company operates in a distinct market, diversifying our private credit portfolio and providing stability across the group.

TIMIA Capital provides non-dilutive growth capital to technology businesses with between $2 million and $20 million in annual recurring revenue. 

Pivot Financial provides specialty, asset-backed financing to small to mid-sized enterprises in Canada with 1-100 employees and $1-$100 million in revenue. 

Brightpath Capital provides private mortgages on urban residential properties across Ontario. Working with licensed mortgage brokers, Brightpath arranges residential mortgages for people who don’t meet traditional banks’ lending criteria.

Langhaus Financial provides long-term lending solutions for financing or borrowing against the Canadian life insurance policies of businesses or high-net-worth individuals. 

Challenging Macroeconomic Environment

The tail-end of pandemic effects, a spike in inflation and subsequent interest rate hikes, and the war in Ukraine combined to create a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Capital is constrained across the entire finance industry — debt and equity — and we’ve seen private equity and venture capital providers reducing their financing and becoming more conservative with their investments.

For Montfort, this has created opportunities and challenges. We are seeing more deal flow than ever, given the capital constraints elsewhere in the system.  We have also adapted our underwriting and pricing to reflect our new environment.  

2023 Mission

Montfort’s mission in 2023 is to create value for investors by leveraging our experienced management teams and advanced tech-enabled lending platform to provide private debt capital through our group of investment companies.

With more diversification across private credit asset types, Montfort is intending to focus on organic growth, building value in the companies we’ve already acquired, rather than adding more companies to the group.

Watch out for our upcoming article detailing our perspective on private credit trends in 2023 and beyond.