Andrew Milgram

The NCUA wanted to make sure that the way we were going to deal with the borrowers in the space respected the dignity of the borrower, that we were not going to be rapacious.

All of these loans had personal guarantees.

And so drivers who had levered up to buy a taxi medallion

had really at risk their home, their livelihood, everything.

And the NCUA understood that we needed to be commercial, but also wanted to make sure that we weren't gonna be abusive to the borrowers.

And so they spent a lot of time understanding how we were dealing with problems.

Now, a part of the story I left out earlier is that we ended up with 4,500 individual line items in this portfolio.

Prosecuting that is just a huge lift.

You have to send out bills every month.

You have to collect.

You have to call people when they don't pay.

So there's a servicing aspect to this.

We went to speak to virtually every servicer out there about could they help us?

And the answer for 97% of them was absolutely not.

We want nothing to do with this.

politically sensitive, tough space, tough borrowers.

Borrowers will spend two, three months out of the country, typically going back to their home to spend time with family.

Just a setup that a lot of servicers didn't want to take on.

The servicers who were even willing to have the conversation, which there were only a couple, their pricing was self-extractive.

There was no way we could do a deal.