Mailson is Arrabon Capital's Founder and Managing Partner. He directs the firm's credit strategy, transaction structuring and institutional investor relationships.
He leads origination and execution across Arrabon's four product lines — asset-based revolvers, receivables finance and private securitization, equipment finance, and warehouse and lender finance. He sets the firm's credit standards and approves every facility Arrabon arranges, and is responsible for its institutional funding relationships and for the administration of structured programs after close.
Specialty Finance and Asset-Based Credit
In Toronto, Mailson underwrote and structured asset-based credit at CWB Maxium Financial, the specialty finance subsidiary of Canadian Western Bank, through the bank's acquisition by National Bank of Canada. He covered a $450 million-plus portfolio and held direct responsibility for seven borrower credits across four asset classes:
- Litigation finance — portfolios of funded cases, where eligibility turns on case stage, duration risk and diversification of outcomes rather than payment history.
- Auto and consumer receivables — facilities against retail installment contracts, underwritten on static pool performance, loss curves and servicer quality.
- Equipment and fleet finance — term and lease facilities against appraised hard assets, advanced on liquidation value with residuals tested independently.
- Lender finance — revolving lines to originators funding their own books, with eligibility criteria and concentration limits set above the originator's own and back-up servicing agreed at close.
A borrowing base is built from the asset upward, never from a template downward. What qualifies as collateral in a litigation portfolio bears no resemblance to what qualifies in an auto pool, and the discipline of rebuilding that architecture for each asset class is what Arrabon's underwriting inherits.
Through the acquisition, every facility was examined twice: on its own credit merits, then against an acquiring institution's credit policy. The question is never only whether a structure works, but whether it survives outside review.
Capital Markets and Securitization
At ABN AMRO in Amsterdam, Mailson sat in Global Markets across Debt Capital Markets Syndicate and Structured Products.
On the syndicate desk he covered over €5 billion of EMEA benchmark issuance for financial institution and corporate issuers, working on orderbook build, pricing and investor allocation on live transactions — the discipline of reading institutional demand in real time, and of knowing where a credit actually clears rather than where it was marketed.
In Structured Products he covered securitization, significant risk transfer and secured debt origination across ABS, portfolio transactions and private placements. Significant risk transfer means pricing credit risk that is transferred rather than sold outright, and satisfying a regulated counterparty that the transfer is real — the question Arrabon answers on every true-sale program it structures.
At SFI Markets, Mailson served as one of the lead arrangers of a EUR 300 million syndicated green loan for ACCIONA's Gulf operations, running structuring and syndication on a single mandate.
North American asset-based technique, executed under European security law, placed with institutional capital that understands both. That combination is what Arrabon was founded to bring to the Benelux and German mid-market.
Early Life and Career
Born in Guinea-Bissau and raised in Portugal and the United States, Mailson began his career at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York, serving from 2010 to 2014 as an Operations and Finance Analyst covering peace missions across West Africa.
He trained as an engineer at Ghent University in Belgium, followed by a BA in International Business Administration from Artevelde University of Applied Sciences in Ghent, Belgium. He joined McKinsey & Company in Brussels before completing an MSc in Financial Economics at Maastricht University, where he served as a Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant in Financial Markets and Financial Management.
Mailson works in Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Spanish.