Twenty Five Years in Capital: What I Have Actually Done
A career that looks scattered on paper has one through line. Here it is.
On paper my career reads as a list of loosely related companies. Investment banking, private credit, specialty finance, consumer products, transactions on four continents. People reading a resume look for a straight line and do not find one.
The line is there. It is just not the line a resume is built to show.
For twenty five years I have worked on one problem: getting capital from the people who have it to the people who can use it. The instruments changed. The counterparties changed. The problem never did.
Where it started
I studied accounting at Illinois State. That is an unglamorous way to begin, and it is the most useful thing I ever did. Before I learned to sell a business I learned to read one, and reading a business from its numbers is a skill that does not expire.
Then an MBA at Loyola University Chicago with a derivatives concentration. I chose derivatives specifically. I wanted to understand how risk gets priced and transferred, not just how it gets recorded after the fact.
Reading financial statements and pricing risk. Everything I have done since has been some combination of those two things.
Capital markets
I served as Managing Director of an investment banking capital markets group. I raised institutional capital from family offices and high net worth investors, and I closed transactions across North America, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong.
The lesson from that period was not technical. Capital is not scarce. Trust is. Every cross border raise I worked on eventually came down to a single question in the mind of the person across the table: will this person tell me something I do not want to hear?
The ones who said yes were not the ones I impressed. They were the ones I had disagreed with at least once.
Building companies
I founded or co-founded several investment and specialty finance companies. That teaches you something a seat at a large firm cannot, which is what a bad month costs when it is your name on the front of the check.
It also taught me something I did not expect to need. When a business owner calls about capital, I know what they are feeling, because I have been on that side of it. That has turned out to matter more in practice than anything technical I learned in a classroom.
What I do now
Today I lead business development at a specialty finance firm. I built the ISO and referral partner channel there from zero to ten active partners producing roughly fifty qualified applications a month.
The instruments are smaller than a cross border raise. Working capital advances, business lines of credit, asset based lending, receivables factoring. The job is identical. Understand what the counterparty actually needs, price the risk honestly, and be the person they call the next time.
About sixty percent of the business is repeat and renewal. That is the number I am proudest of, and it is the only one on this page that cannot be manufactured.
What I am actually good at
Originating from nothing. Building a channel where none existed, which is a different skill from managing one that already works.
Being useful in two very different rooms. I can sit across from an owner of a trucking company and across from an institutional allocator, and be credible in both conversations, because the underlying question is the same one.
Saying no. More than a thousand transactions closed and more than a hundred million dollars funded, and the declines shaped the business more than the closings did.
Where I am headed
I am open to senior revenue and business development leadership roles in specialty finance, capital markets, and fintech.
If you are reading this because you are evaluating me for something, here is the fastest way to do it. Do not ask about my largest transaction. Ask about one I walked away from, and whether I can explain it without making myself the hero of the story.
Edward M. Liceaga has spent more than 25 years across private credit, specialty finance, and capital markets, with over $100 million funded and more than 1,000 transactions closed internationally. MBA, Derivatives Concentration, Loyola University Chicago. More at edwardliceaga.com.