Merged into GCM Grosvenor , ticker now GCMG
CFFA

Completed

GCM Grosvenor

GCMG
First $9.75
Merger $13.09
34%
Merger +6mo $9.84
1%
Merger +1yr $8.91
9%
Recent $9.86
1%

CF Finance Acquisition Corp.

Raised
$250M
CIK
1728041
SPAC Ticker
CFFA
Merger
GCM Grosvenor
Merged Ticker
GCMG
External link: SEC Filings

SPAC Team

Leadership

Officers consist of:

- Howard W. Lutnick, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer , who joined Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P., or Cantor, in 1983 and has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cantor since 1992 and as Chairman since 1996;

- Anshu Jain, our President , who also serves as the President of Cantor, a position he has held since January 2017, and previously served as a senior executive of Deutsche Bank, which firm he joined from Merrill Lynch in 1995, most recently in the position of Co-CEO from June 2012 to June 2015;

- Henrique de Castro, our Chief Operating Officer , who has served as an advisor to Cantor since February 2015 and who served as the Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo! Inc. from 2012 to 2014;

- Steven Bisgay, our Chief Financial Officer , who has served as Cantor's Executive Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer since February 2015; and

- Stephen M. Merkel, our Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary , who has served as Executive Managing Director, General Counsel and Secretary of Cantor since December 2000 and was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Cantor from May 1993 to December 2000.

We, our sponsor, and CF&Co are all affiliates of Cantor. Cantor is a diversified company specializing in financial and real estate services for institutional customers operating in the global financial and commercial real estate markets, whose businesses include CF&Co, a leading independent middle market investment bank and primary dealer, BGC Partners, Inc., or BGC Partners, whose common stock trades on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "BGCP", a leading global financial technology and brokerage business primarily servicing the financial services markets, and Newmark Group, Inc., or Newmark, whose Class A common stock trades on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "NMRK", which, through its subsidiaries, operates a real estate services business that offers a full suite of services and products for both owners and occupiers across the entire commercial real estate industry.

Over the past 70 years, Cantor, led by Howard W. Lutnick since 1992, has successfully built a well-capitalized business across multiple and growing business lines, with numerous market-leading financial services products and large and growing commercial real estate businesses. Cantor has been at the forefront of financial and technological innovation in its industries, developing new markets and providing superior service to thousands of customers globally.

Mr. Lutnick has led Cantor's expansion from a broker of fixed income and equity products to become a premier global financial services provider, which is recognized for its leading institutional equity and fixed income capital markets services, investment banking, prime brokerage, wholesale financial brokerage, insurance brokerage, commercial real estate services, commercial real estate asset management, commercial real estate loan servicing, and commercial real estate financing operations. Over Cantor's and its affiliates' history, its employees have developed long-term relationships with a wide range of U.S. and foreign private and public financial services organizations of all sizes. We will seek to capitalize on the substantial resources and the global infrastructure of Cantor and we believe these relationships will provide us with exposure to a broad selection of potential acquisition targets. However, there is no formal agreement between us and Cantor with respect to the provision of any services to us by Cantor and its employees. Consequently, while we expect Cantor and its employees to provide us services so that we can capitalize on the substantial resources and global infrastructure of Cantor and leverage Cantor's relationships, there is no guarantee that Cantor or its employees will provide any services to us or that we will be able to do so.

Our officers, in their positions as officers of, or advisors to, Cantor, respectively, have a history of making successful acquisitions. From 2005 through 2018, Cantor acquired over 60 companies in the financial and real estate services industries. In financial services, these acquisitions have included, among others, the publicly traded wholesale and inter-dealer brokerage firm GFI Group, Inc., or GFI, Sunrise Brokers Group, a global leader in listed and over the counter ("OTC") derivative products brokerage, and Besso Insurance Group Limited, an independent insurance broker. In real estate services, these acquisitions have included, among others, Newmark & Company Real Estate, Inc., Berkeley Point Financial LLC, which is one of the nation's leading providers of multifamily capital solutions, engaged primarily in the origination, funding, sale and servicing of multifamily loans guaranteed by Government Sponsored Enterprises, Grubb & Ellis, Apartment Realty Advisors ("ARA"), and Cornish & Carey. Most of Newmark's subsidiaries, including, ARA, Berkeley Point and Cornish & Carey now operate under the name "Newmark Knight Frank"or "NKF".

Mr. Lutnick has led Cantor's successful exit from many of its acquisitions and investments. For example, in 1996, Cantor launched eSpeed, its fully electronic treasuries trading platform. Cantor developed and launched eSpeed into which BGC Partners was merged in 2008. In June 2013, BGC Partners sold the eSpeed business to Nasdaq, Inc. for $750 million in cash and up to $484 million earn-out shares of Nasdaq, Inc. (based on the stock price of Nasdaq, Inc. at the time the deal was announced). Following BGC Partners' acquisition of GFI in 2015, BGC Partners, whose Chairman and Chief Executive Officer is Mr. Lutnick, sold GFI's Trayport business a leading intermediary and provider of trading technologies and support services to the global OTC and listed markets, to Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. for $650 million in stock.

Cantor and its affiliates, under the guidance of Mr. Lutnick and our other officers, have a history of making accretive acquisitions, as set forth above, and of creating shareholder value, as evident from the revenue growth in Cantor's BGC Partners and Newmark businesses.

Cantor's BGC Partners Financial Services revenues nearly quadrupled between 2003 (which at the time included eSpeed) and the trailing 12 months ended September 30, 2018 (excluding revenues from of eSpeed, which was sold in 2013 as set forth above). Cantor's BGC Partners business has significantly increased its revenue-generating headcount over the last ten years, including as a result of BGC Partners' acquisition and integration of more than 20 companies over this timeframe.

Cantor entered the commercial real estate brokerage market by acquiring Newmark in 2011 for total consideration of approximately $99 million (based on BGC Partners' stock price as of the day the deal closed). Since such acquisition, Newmark's revenues increased from approximately $230 million (unaudited) in 2011 to approximately $1.9 billion for the trailing 12 months ended September 30, 2018 at a compounded annual growth rate ("CAGR") of 37%. This CAGR is significantly higher than those of its publicly traded full service U.S. commercial real estate services competitors over the same time period. In December 2017, Newmark debuted on the Nasdaq Global Select Market after an initial public offering. Newmark had a fully diluted market cap of approximately $2.9 billion as of the end of the third quarter of 2018.