YieldStreet, an alternative investment platform, has debuted marine finance as a new asset class, believed to be a first-of-a-kind investment product for retail investors.
George Cambanis, the founding partner and former CEO of Deloitte Greece is joining YieldStreet as the managing director of its marine finance offering. With this new asset class, YieldStreet investors will be able to participate in three main types of marine transactions: vessel acquisition, vessel construction and vessel scrapping.
More than $10m has already been committed across hundreds of investors to the shipping offering. This offering marks the highest volume of total investors in a single offering in YieldStreet’s history.
“Technology is the greatest equalizer and the power of individuals making their own investment decisions has been underestimated for too long, as demonstrated by our engaged investor base. YieldStreet is committed to its mission to enable individuals to build wealth via a truly diversified portfolio of alternative assets,” said Michael Weisz, president and founder of YieldStreet. “By marrying technology and data together with sophisticated structuring and George’s experience, we are able to offer flexible capital to originators in the marine industry, which we expect will be up to $250m of investments in this asset class by the end of 2018.”
The ship finance offerings have target yields of 8-20%.
“I could not have imagined a better way to put my 40 years of marine industry experience behind a mission like YieldStreet,” said Cambanis. “To provide investors access to highly structured opportunities in this global industry for the first time is game-changing.”
YieldStreet claims it is changing the way wealth is created, providing access to asset-based investments historically unavailable to most investors.
