About Faes & Co
We are an investment firm focused on providing investors with consistent, stable, asset-backed returns. Our Faes & Co Income Fund invests in real estate bridging loans secured by first mortgages against residential property across the US. Our group company, F2 Finance, is a technology-enabled bridging lender that originates loans for the Fund.

Hi there,

We’re excited to be issuing our latest edition of News & Views from Faes & Co.

We have had a very busy few months at our firm. Our lending portfolios are growing nicely, and performing well. We are also in the closing stages of finalizing our first institutional funding partnership (and we're also working through another term sheet with an additional funder that we will seek to bring on soon after our first partnership closes). 

Our platform has been built for institutional scale, and this is being recognized by the external validation we are receiving from some very large funds and banks that we are partnering with.

Thank you to those that have been supportive of our journey to date.

📈 Fund Performance

The Fund continues to be popular with investors. As one of the few funds in the sector that is regulated and audited (by a top tier firm), savvy investors are appreciating the institutional quality of the offering we are providing. 

The Fund is continuing to pay a 10% fixed return to investors (that invest over $250k), and importantly continues to be a

diversified portfolio of performing first mortgage loans against residential property in the US. 

We have a number of webinars that we are running for different investor groups in the coming months. If you would like to be included in one of these, please let us know and we can share the timings (or a link to one of our videos).

Our Fund brochure can be found here, and we have a new updated Fund factsheet which can be found here.

If you’d like to book a call to run through the Fund, or to hear our views on the market, please contact Jamie on email at jamie.mcgee@faes.co or you can schedule a meeting directly here.

📽️ New Corporate Video

We recently put together a short corporate video for our firm. In putting this together we worked with the team from Shoreditch Design (the London based agency that helped us with our initial brand design, who have now also opened an office near ours in Santa Monica in California).

We are working on a number of videos, webinars and investment materials relating to our Fund, which we will share with you in the coming months as they are released. In the meantime, you can watch our corporate video here:

🤔 Food for Thought

      🏦 What are banks paying on deposits?

We recently ran a poll on our social media channels* asking ‘what do you think is the current average interest rate on a US bank account?’. The results were surprising, in that whilst we obviously have a very sophisticated audience that follows us 😉, the majority of people got the answer wrong.

When asked this question, most people (about 71.7%) thought that the average bank deposit interest rate in the US was paying over 1% per annum. However, amazingly, whilst base interest rates are at a multi-decade high, the correct answer is that the average bank deposit interest rate is currently a measly 0.46%. So whilst banks are happy to increase the interest rates that they charge borrowers for mortgages (and other lending), they are not passing on the base rate increases to depositors. 

With many people struggling with the increased costs being put on the consumer from inflation, you can understand why a lot of people just don’t like the banks. This is generally good for firms like ours as we sell our Income Fund (paying 10%), and for the environment where borrowers are increasingly happy to consider obtaining funding from alternative lenders, like our F2 Finance.

* If you don’t already, please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.

📰 Our Firm in the Press

Our firm has had a number of mentions in the press over the course of the last month or so.

UK wealth management firm Evelyn Partners, did a profile on our founder Christian Faes. The profile talks about the background to starting LendInvest, and now Faes & Co. You can read the profile here.

Christian has also done a few podcasts, firstly with investment platform, Investipal, where they talked about ‘Fintech & the Private Credit Boom’. You can take a listen to the podcast here; and also with Will Beeson’s Rebank podcast, where they talked about ‘Building the Optimal US Fintech Lender’. You can listen to that podcast here.

🥽 Things We’re Reading and Listening to

We’re big fans of the ‘Capital Allocators’ podcast, and recently enjoyed this discussion with Blythe Masters on ‘fintech innovation’. Blythe has a really interesting background and perspective having been a senior 

executive at JP Morgan and now a partner at fintech private equity firm, Motive Partners. You can take a listen to the podcast here.

Another piece of media we consume regularly is Marc Rubenstein’s weekly Net Interest newsletter. He writes on the world of capital markets and lending, and each week he picks an interesting topic to do a 

deep dive into. We recently enjoyed this piece on ‘Banks in Disguise’, where he talked about a number of big name brand companies, which act more like banks than anything else we ordinarily would know them for (think, Starbucks et al). You would be shocked to learn how much Starbucks has sitting on its balance sheet just from its prepaid card/app. Want to guess how much? You can read the article here.

🎟️ Events

We recently hosted a drinks event in Santa Monica for people working in the bridging finance sector, bringing together those that work in the industry across originations, capital markets and technology. As we grow our footprint in the US market, we anticipate doing an event like this on a regular basis. 

There are also a number of events that our team will be at in the coming months.

These include: 

• IMN Real Estate Family Office & Private Wealth Forum in Dana Point, CA (June 13-14); 
• Future Proof in Huntington Beach (Sep 15-18), where we will be a headline sponsor of the event;
• PIMDCON in Dallas, TX, which is a Physician and Entrepreneurship conference related to low-risk, long-term investing (Sept 26-28);
• Opal Group’s ABS West in Laguna Beach, CA (Dec 4).

If you will be at one of these events or would like to introduce us to someone that you'd like us to speak with, feel free to reach out ahead of time and let us know.