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Thomas Capasse

Executive

PPP · PPPLF
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP, PPPLF
Updated

The profile

Co-founder, chairman, CEO and chief investment officer of Ready Capital, a publicly traded mortgage REIT whose ReadyCap Lending was a large first-round PPP lender; its Form 10-K for 2021 (SEC EDGAR) reported $941.5 million outstanding under the PPP Liquidity Facility at December 31, 2021. No PPP enforcement action against the company is on the public record.

Identity and role

Thomas E. Capasse is the chairman, chief executive and chief investment officer of Ready Capital Corporation (NYSE: RC), an externally managed commercial mortgage REIT, and a principal and co-founder of Waterfall Asset Management, the firm that manages it. He is Ready Capital's chairman, CEO and chief investment officer (company executive page); the October 2016 and November 2022 dates are not in the capture. In the PPP, Ready Capital's small-business subsidiary, ReadyCap Lending, was an SBA-approved lender that originated several billion dollars of loans.

Biography / career arc

He holds a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College and was a founding member of Merrill Lynch's asset-backed securities group with Jack Ross (Ready Capital executive page; Wikipedia, secondary). The Dean Witter, Bank of Boston, Greenwich Capital, Nomura and Macquarie roles and their dates are cited to his Waterfall biography, whose capture is a stub (Wikipedia mentions Macquarie).

In 2005 Capasse and Ross co-founded Waterfall Asset Management (Waterfall About page; Wikipedia, secondary). The public company was renamed Ready Capital in 2018 (Wikipedia, secondary) and merged with Anworth Mortgage Asset Corporation in March 2021 (PR Newswire); the Sutherland, ZAIS and Broadmark steps are cited to Wikipedia, whose capture does not carry them.

The company and its PPP/EIDL role

In the program's first round in April 2020, deBanked called it the biggest PPP lender by volume, with on the order of 40,000 loans and roughly $3 billion in approvals at an average loan around $73,000. The company's own April 15, 2020 release reported reaching $2 billion in SBA loan approvals (PR Newswire copy). SBA loan-level data credits Readycap Lending with 106,252 loans worth about $4.78 billion and about $0.31 billion in lender processing fees.

The following figures are from Ready Capital's Forms 10-K for 2020 and 2021 (SEC EDGAR). In its 10-K for 2020, Ready Capital described itself as one of "fourteen non-bank SBA lenders" and said it had "facilitated the fundings of approximately $2.7 billion" of PPP loans. Much of that came through a lender-service-provider arrangement under which it underwrote and serviced about $2.5 billion of loans that were sold to a third party for $43.3 million in fees, on top of the loans it originated directly. The 10-K for 2021 states: "As of December 31, 2021, we had $941.5 million outstanding" under the PPP Liquidity Facility, up from $76.276 million a year earlier, at the facility's 0.35% rate. The same filing breaks the program into its two legislative rounds: roughly $109.5 million originated directly and $2.5 billion as a lender-service provider under the CARES Act, and about $2.2 billion of originations under the later Economic Aid Act, which the PPPLF balance financed. Net PPP-related income was about $56 million in 2021 and about $23 million in 2020.

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Thomas Capasse personally, or to Ready Capital, ReadyCap Lending, or Waterfall as a borrower, is established in the public record.

No PPP-fraud finding, SBA enforcement action, DOJ action, or SEC action against Ready Capital, ReadyCap Lending, Waterfall, or Capasse personally related to the PPP exists in the public record.

Ready Capital's current litigation does not concern the PPP. After the company reported its 2024 results in early March 2025 — with a dividend cut and a book-value write-down — the stock fell about 27% in a day, and a securities class action (the Quinn case, later expanded) followed (Hagens Berman release, the Levi & Korsinsky notice capture carries no case detail). The $284 million allowance figure, the Goebel caption and the derivative suits previously cited here are not in the sources we have.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Capasse remains chairman, CEO and CIO of Ready Capital and a Waterfall principal (company pages).

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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