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Tony Ettinger, who in the
1990s helped start two specialists in distressed consumer loans, has
joined the New York private equity firm Fortress Investment Group
LLC as a managing director in charge of forming joint ventures.
As American Banker reported in
April, Mr. Ettinger had been hunting
private equity capital to build a servicer that would specialize in
identifying borrowers in trouble and working out a modification or
repayment plan forthem before they default.
In an interview Wednesday, he said he had received “a flurry of
interest” in the idea, and the project may yet come to fruition. He
is “trying to sort it through right now,” he said, and to figure out
what makes sense for Fortress and how to deal fairly with the
handful of employees at Credit-Based Capital, the Chappaqua, N.Y.,
firm he started in August of last year.
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Mr. Ettinger, 49, said he got
a phone call a couple of weeks ago from Peter L. Briger Jr., one of
the principals at Fortress, who suggested that instead of “doing one
deal for yourself, come here and do a bunch of them. He made it
attractive, and the next day I joined.”
Fortress, which manages $21 billion
of investments, was part of the consortium that bought the
manufactured housing finance operations of Conseco Inc. for $850
million in 2003. This year a Fortress-managed fund agreed to buy the
Dallas home builder Centex Corp.’s nonprime lending unit for $575
million. The lender will be renamed Nationstar Mortgage LLC when the
deal closes, which is expected to happen this summer.
In 1996, Mr. Ettinger founded
C-Bass LLC with veterans of Citicorp Securities’mortgage trading
desk. The bond insurer Enhance Financial Services Group Inc., where
Mr. Ettinger was an executive vice
president, put up half the capital; the
Milwaukee mortgage insurer MGIC
Investment Corp. put up the other half. C-Bass, based in New York,
buys and securitizes subprime and nonperforming loans and services
them through its Houston unit Litton Loan Servicing LP
.
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Two years later Mr. Ettinger set up
another New York joint venture
between Enhance and MGIC: Sherman Financial Group, which buys
unsecured consumer debt such as charged-off credit card and Chapter
13 bankruptcy receivables. Radian Group Inc. of Philadelphia bought
Enhance in 2001, and Mr. Ettinger retired.
In 2003 he joined Maple
Financial
Group Inc., an $18 billion-asset company based in Toronto, where he
ran thecommercial finance business.
He said the investments he
works on
for Fortress will involve “a full array of assets that are
attractive from a risk return perspective” — both consumer and
commercial.
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