Andrew Milgram

He said, they won't do a penny less than 160.

So I said, great, you're done.

We went through the auction and the way the auction rules worked, you had to buy all of the medallions or really didn't satisfy the lender's needs.

And the truth was the combination of the way we structured the bid and the auction rules were such that it was going to be really hard for anybody other than MarbleGate to win the auction.

So we walked away with 48 outright medallions.

But most importantly, we had created a mark that we then had hand delivered to every lender in the space.

Now, they had direct evidence of a meaningful number of medallions transacting at a level way below where they had previously estimated it would.

And by the way, we did that to them at the very end of November, beginning of December.

So they're looking at a year-end mark that didn't feel so great.

Surprise, surprise, come January, conversation becomes pretty serious with a number of the lenders we had talked about, and they wanted to engage at much more reasonable levels.

We ended up buying the largest portfolio available from a federally chartered bank.

It's an important understanding when you're dealing with banks, what their regulatory scheme is.

State charter banks, credit unions, federally chartered banks, they all have slightly different ways they operate and how they're regulated.

Because at the end of the day,

Banks always make decisions for three reasons, regulatory, regulatory, and regulatory.

People think of banks as economic actors.

They're not.

They're regulatory actors.

So this compromised their regulatory position.

For a federally chartered bank, those tend to be much larger banks.