Context Business Lending, a family office-backed specialty finance company focused on asset-based lending, welcomed new executive talent hires to support its rapid growth during this unprecedented time for the lending market and for small businesses.
CBL has developed rapidly the past 24 months into an emerging market leader by investing in technology, data analytics and human capital. The addition of these four senior executives was needed to support CBL’s portfolio growth over the past two years, nearly quadrupling the size of its portfolio as more middle-market businesses look to asset-based lending as an alternative financing solution.
Josh Beauvais joined the management team and Stephen Butler has been promoted, both will serve as co-chief credit officers for Context. Through the promotion of Butler to co-chief and a long, selective search process to find his co-chief partner Beauvais, CBL has taken a unique approach to its internal decision-making framework.
Butler has spent the previous three years with CBL and has decades of experience in ABL, having worked for several well-known bank and non-bank ABL groups across the country.
Beauvais comes to CBL with a long history at Crestmark Bank, most recently as special assistant to the chief credit officer and has more than 15 years of financial service experience, 13 of which are in the asset-based lending space. Beauvais will co-lead CBL’s new loan review process as well as ongoing borrower relationship management alongside Butler. Butler will be based out of CBL’s home office outside of Philadelphia and Beauvais will be based in Detroit.
“We believe that having two experienced, creative minds at the helm of credit optimizes our ability to create flexible working-capital solutions and lower our risk.” Meredith L. Carter, CEO of Context Business Lending, said. “Even beyond our co-chiefs, every member of our credit team is empowered to independently analyze risk and challenge long-held ABL practices. We believe that through a collaborative decision-making framework, we can better maximize creativity and manage risk.”
In addition, CBL recently hired two additional experienced members of its credit team: Carrie Brown as underwriter and L. Baldwin Barkerding as portfolio manager. Brown spent the previous 12 years of her career with Sterling Commercial Credit and brings her experience to enhance CBL’s underwriting team. Barkerding comes to CBL with more than a decade of experience in banking and spent the last six years as a portfolio manager at Crestmark Bank. Brown will be based out of Detroit and Barkerding will be based out of New Orleans.
