Ask a small business owner in George Town about their bank and you’ll often hear the same thing owners say in Rosario, or in a ranching county in West Texas: the bank won’t give them the time of day. Not because the business is bad. Because the business is small, or local, or doesn’t fit the box — and the institution on the other side of the desk isn’t built to lend to it.
This is one of the most consistent and least appreciated patterns in finance. The businesses that actually build an economy — the ones that make things, hire people, and compound value in a community — are systematically underserved by the mainstream banking system. And the fix has been known, and proven, for over a century.
Three markets, one gap
The pattern shows up in economies that could hardly be more different from one another.
In the Cayman Islands, the banking sector is built around offshore finance and a small, high-net-worth domestic market. It is concentrated and conservative. A genuine local microenterprise — thin collateral, short track record, a modest borrowing need — simply can’t get a meaningful facility. The loan is too small to be worth the bank’s underwriting cost, and the local knowledge needed to price it is exactly what a big institution doesn’t gather.
In Argentina, the failure has a different cause but the same effect. Chronic inflation and volatile, punishingly high interest rates make banks afraid to lend at all — you can’t price a multi-year loan when the currency might move violently next quarter. Private-sector credit is strikingly thin. Sound businesses go unfunded not because they’re poor credits, but because the whole system is too frightened to lend.
And in Texas ranching — in the deepest capital market on earth — a rancher who needs capital to expand the herd runs into a banking system poorly suited to living collateral and seasonal, weather-exposed cash flow. It’s why American agriculture leaned for generations on the Farm Credit System and local ag banks rather than money-center institutions. The gap isn’t a symptom of a poor or unstable economy. It’s a feature of how large, centralized banking underwrites small productive borrowers everywhere.
The credit gap isn’t about bad borrowers. It’s about a mismatch between what big banks are built to do and what productive local enterprise actually needs.
The proof case: Germany
If you want to know what fills that gap, look at the economy that has done it most successfully for the longest time. Germany’s financial system rests on three pillars — and two of them are networks of hundreds of small, deliberately local institutions.
The Sparkassen, the public savings banks, are restricted by law to their home region: deposits raised in a community must be redeployed as credit within that same community. The Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, the cooperative banks, are member-owned and locally governed. Between them, they have financed the Mittelstand — Germany’s famous base of small and mid-sized industrial firms — through booms, busts, and crises that broke far larger institutions.
That regional ring-fencing is the secret ingredient. It forces local savings into local productive lending and stops that money from being swept off into national asset markets and speculation. The credit goes where it builds real capacity. Studies of the German system consistently find these regional relationship banks support local firm growth and cushion local downturns — precisely because they know their borrowers.
Why it works — the mechanics
The advantage of local, relationship-based lending isn’t sentiment. It’s a handful of concrete mechanisms a big centralized bank can’t easily replicate:
- Informational advantage. A local lender underwrites on soft information — reputation, market knowledge, the real prospects of the operation. That reaches sound borrowers who never look creditworthy in a standardized financial model.
- Scale fit. A small, purpose-built lender can profitably make loans too small for a large bank to bother with.
- Hold-to-maturity discipline. When the lender keeps the loan on its own book, incentives align: it’s rewarded for lending to borrowers who actually repay, not for originating volume to sell on.
- Credit into production. Because the borrowers are operating businesses, the money funds inventory, equipment, and expansion — productive capacity, not speculation.
The economist Richard Werner — who coined the term “quantitative easing” — put the principle plainly: what determines whether an economy grows or bubbles isn’t the quantity of credit but its composition. Credit into production builds economies. Credit into speculation inflates them. Locally-embedded lenders, structurally, do the former.
Where CI Mavericks comes in
This is the model we’re building — and it’s the clearest expression of what we mean when we say we have skin in the game.
Our Joint Ventures aggregate patient investor capital and deploy it into real operating enterprises in the markets we serve. Alongside that investment structure sits an independent, ideologically-aligned private credit company — a genuinely separate lender, but one that shares the thesis: disciplined, relationship-based lending into productive local enterprise, underwritten on real local knowledge and held to maturity. It plays the role the Sparkasse plays in Germany — the local credit engine — while its independence preserves the integrity the structure requires.
Investment and aligned local credit are more powerful together than apart. Direct investment builds ownership in productive enterprises; local lending extends the same thesis to businesses we don’t own but whose growth strengthens the markets we’re invested in. And the two goals reinforce each other rather than compete:
For the investor: exposure to a lending strategy grounded in the most durable evidence in banking history — credit that funds production, underwritten locally, held to maturity — through a structure built for alignment and defensibility.
This isn’t philanthropy dressed up as investment, and it isn’t investment indifferent to the places it touches. It’s the recognition — well-supported by the German record — that credit directed into productive local enterprise is at once the most constructive thing capital can do and, managed with discipline, among the most durable ways to earn a return.
We don’t advise on this from the sidelines. We deploy our own investors’ capital into it and stand behind an aligned lending engine built to serve it. That’s what walking the talk looks like.