The Rick Trepp Legacy

Went to Dartmouth. I intend to be an outdoors person, so being up in Dartmouth in the woods was a fantastic experience. I went there as a math major. My freshman year at Dartmouth, Kemeny and Kurtz wrote what was known as the basic language. The concept in basic was to make the computer available to professionals. And I then used that for the next four years at up in Hanover. And then when I went up to the Air Force, I used that to debug the simulation models that the Air Force was doing. Carried that with me to Chase Manhattan Bank, where I spent almost ten years as a credit guy lending money, which I've used throughout the rest of my life. My driving need and desire for independence and realized that this was, from the forming of the company, a step towards that ability to have the independence. And the reason for that independence is I want to be measured by what I do, what I accomplish, not what people think I accomplish. So I have no problem working hard. I enjoy it. It's a challenge. But what it leads to is maybe working twenty four hours a day, but having complete independence. I founded Trepp back in nineteen seventy nine that led me into a market that didn't exist at that time, which was the market of the world of structured finance. I came back from lunch one day, and at that time, my secretary ran across the room, literally came running across the room and said, Rick, the White House is on the telephone. And a woman by the name of Shannon Ann Fairbanks, who was Reagan's chief of staff for his domestic cabinet counsel, got on the phone and said, Rick, I've got a room full of tax lawyers tomorrow meeting in the old executive office building. Would you be willing to come down and get involved in this project? And I ended up being asked to spend the next couple of years building the mass and the computer models so that Andy could structure the tax legislation that there was gonna be written. This was nineteen eighty two. Walked into Andy's office about a year later and he threw a prospectus at me and said, Rick, they just did the first CMO without us because the legislation had not passed. AND called me back up a year or two later and said, Rick, we're gonna rebirth what we just did before. So I did. I built the computer models that they used, and that ended up passing in the nineteen eighty six Tax Act. So that put us in a very interesting position relative to now what was going to become the whole structured finance market. Trip was an evolution and actually goes way back when we were doing the the work for the treasury. Those models then evolved into the taxable corporate world, which was then the foundation in the CMO world, which then evolved into the first models for the CMBS world, which is what Trepp excelled at and built given those models. So BlackRock had been aware of what we had done and the foundation that we had. And given their position as a major investor in CMBS and the need and their desire to see the market grow substantially and for liquidity to be increased so that their position was not a locked in position, they came to us and initially wanted to subscribe, but then decided there would be, and the next day decided that it would make far more sense to partner with us and therefore allow us to expand faster in terms of the creation of the library and the information therefore necessary for for secondary trading from the building of the marketplace. They're one of the best investors that that I've ever had. They were extremely market knowledgeable. They were a consumer of the product and had major relationships. It was a tremendous investment. When I went into it, I realized that this would be a major investment to accomplish what we wanted to within the marketplace. We also, in our position in the marketplace, we were lucky to be able to bring our name and our brand into it, which has been extremely valuable. And then we obviously brought a lot of years of scars, etcetera, that hopefully we don't repeat too many times. My view was that there was tons of bond information, but there was not a huge amount of ability to really analyze the underlying properties. I went to Trepp and said, let's do a joint venture, fifty fifty joint venture sub under Trepp, where all of our technology for managing portfolios of mortgages will be populated with your data in the Trep database, and we expanded that as now part of Rockport today. So if you look at the picture, the two right hand circles are what was TrepPort, our our piece of TrepPort with the Trep data all loaded into Rockport. And that is now the the third circle that you're looking at, which is Rockport Solutions, where we can provide the accounting and the servicing for major institutions that have large loan portfolios. And it's just today that we've arrived at the Rockport Group covers that picture in-depth. And the interesting thing is in the commercial mortgage world, it is a very deep vertical that needs digitalization, needs lots and lots of development. And at this point, we are positioned to, in fact, do exactly that in a digital world. When we first decided with Rockport and with the idea then with Rockport Val, everybody told me I was stupid. But I looked at it as there was a market opportunity out there with one dominant firm. You know, the only competition out there is Excel. The bad news in Excel is two things. One, you have no idea whether two months from now what you did is right as you roll it forward. And two, Excel sits on your C drive across multiple offices of yours. And when you want to go and aggregate data and look and see what you really got, you can't because it's all locked in C drives here and there. My concept on Val is it will become the digital representation of a building. Your great ideas and the things you're doing and what you wanna do, most people will question you on, disagree with you. Your employees will even disagree with you. I've learned that. And you just gotta accept it and be confident that what you want to do makes sense. I mean, obviously test it, but you will be many times making decisions that only you think are the right decisions. It's what you do when something bad happens that really counts. When things are good, yes, you need to be most efficient, etcetera. What really counts is when something bad happens, how do you make something good out of it?