If the vision of a top fintech company comes to fruition, he’ll create portfolio diversification for alternative investments.
Lawrence Calcano is the Chief Executive Officer of I Capital and he was the latest guest with Andrew Busch, the Chief Market Strategist for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), on Busch’s podcast.
Forbes Magazine selected ICapital as one of its Top 50 Fintech Companies for 2018.
According to Forbes, ICapital currently has $55 million in capital funding.
ICapital’s mission, according to its site, “make high quality private investments accessible to all qualified investors while enabling managers to reach new sources of capital.”
As Busch and Calcano noted, stocks and bonds would be considered traditional investments while private placements, buyouts, and venture capital would be considered alternative investments.
While stocks and bonds are open to most folks, these alternative investments require minimum investments of $5 million and more.
Busch noted that the vision of ICapital would bring these investment opportunities to the masses: “It’s utilizing technology to provide access to a different market segment or a different asset class, which was previously only available to large investors like hedge funds.”
Calcano’s vision sees diversifying within alternative investments: “We’re really trying to cover the waterfront on terms of strategies, right, so I mentioned before the objective of allowing people to create a diversified portfolio. That includes being able to create a diversity of strategies. A lot of times people think about private equity as being one thing, like buyouts or maybe they think about venture capital.
“To us, you know it’s the full gamut. It’s buyouts- and by the way buyouts come in many flavors they can be mega buyouts, or midsize buyouts, or they could be small buyouts of small local companies that are $20, $30, or $40, $50 million. So, we work across the spectrum. Growth, I’ve already mentioned. That’s obviously an important part of the mix of investment choices we provide. Distressed-companies that are in distress. There are a number of general partners in the marketplace that are focused on these kinds of situations. Venture capital obviously is an important one. Then credit, lots of different flavors of credit investing- some of which are more direct lending and those would be more high quality credit to firms that invest to lower parts of the capital structure which have higher risk and as a result higher return typically speaking.”
ICapital works with high net worth individuals, financial intermediaries and alternative investment managers, according to its site.
Their platform allows its members to “Access in-demand managers at low investment minimums.” And to “Research investment offerings with diligence materials and powerful research tools. Invest using our online portal for simple, streamlined subscriptions and reporting,” according to its website.
Besides Calcano, other in their hierarchy include: Dan Vene who is the Co-Founder and the Managing Partner, Head of Platform, Nick Veronis who is also the Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Head of Origination & Due Diligence, and Eileen Duff who is a Managing Partner and Head of Distribution.
