(Bloomberg) -- Opea Securitizadora SA, one of the largest service companies for the structured private-credit market in Brazil, plans to keep buying smaller competitors ahead of what it expects to be a doubling of the local market by 2030.
“We continue to study alternatives for inorganic expansion, especially those that can be complementary to the products and services we already have in our platform and can accelerate our development road map,” Opea Chief Executive Officer Flavia Palacios said in an interview.
Opea in July completed the acquisitions of two firms, True Securitizadora SA and Maximus Servicer Assessoria e Consultoria em Recebiveis Ltda., after buying Planeta Securitizadora SA, which specializes in the agribusiness sector, in 2022. The takeovers boosted Opea’s total assets under management to 330 billion reais ($58.5 billion), and helped the company keep up with growing demand.
The market for structured credit products in Brazil is booming, fueled by interest rates that have stayed higher for longer than many analysts predicted. Volume surged 52% in July from a year earlier, to 950 billion reais, according to central bank data. That includes asset-backed securities, such as so-called CRIs and CRAs, as well as funds that buy credit packages, known as FIDCs.
Owned by US private equity firm Jaguar Growth Partners LLC, Opea offers services such as structuring, issuance and management of asset-backed securities and funds, as well as debt collection. It also has an asset-management firm and a fintech unit. Jaguar is a closely held investment-management firm focused on real estate companies and operating platforms. Its headquarters are in New York, and it has affiliated offices in Latin America and Asia.
Opea’s workforce has increased to more than 300 people from 15 when the firm was created in 2020, according to Palacios.
“More sophisticated securitization structures started to demand more from us internally,” she said. “It’s something that demands more people, more processes, more control.”
Still, Brazil has a long way to go. Compared with more developed markets like those in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, securitization in Brazil is still “very, very simple,” Palacios said. It also represents only about 16% of local credit, according to the central bank.
“The bar for companies to be able to access credit via securitization is dropping,” Palacios said, “and that’s a positive.”
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