Before Thomas Greco worked for Hilco, he was its customer. During his years at GE Capital, he bought the services of a business he would eventually help lead. It is an unusually useful apprenticeship for an executive: the opportunity to discover what a company feels like from the other side of the invoice.
In financial services, that side of the desk matters. A valuation arrives with a number, but the person paying for it has a decision waiting. Can a transaction proceed? How should a lender understand the assets supporting a loan? What can the business do with what it owns? A report can be immaculate and still leave its reader with work to do.
Greco joined Hilco in 2010. The former customer became a leader of its valuation and industrial businesses, bringing a banking career to an organisation whose work sits close to lending decisions. His route into the company offers a more revealing introduction than a collection of executive titles. He had already experienced the service he would be responsible for delivering.
The customer changes sides
The move joined two kinds of experience. Greco understood the lender’s questions, and he knew Hilco as a provider. That combination puts the emphasis on usefulness: what an assessment enables someone to decide, how a team responds, and whether the service earns another call.
Hilco’s work encompasses valuation, monetization and advisory services. Those words can make a fairly concrete business sound like a committee meeting. Behind them are assets that companies own, decisions about their value, and choices about selling, financing or operating them. Greco’s career has taken him through several of those choices.
His current role is Executive Director - Valuation in Hilco Global’s Professional Services division. Earlier chapters carried CEO titles at Hilco Valuation Services and Hilco Commercial Industrial. The title has changed with the organisation’s structure; the connection between asset knowledge and the customer’s decision remains the thread worth following.
“Our strength is in relationship building.”
Thomas A. Greco
A career with several kinds of collateral
Greco’s education began with a business degree at the University at Albany, SUNY, followed by an MBA in finance at Fordham University. A native New Yorker, he built a career that would eventually reach far beyond the city. Before GE, his employers included Chemical Bank, National Westminster Bank and J.P. Morgan.
He spent 15 years at GE Capital. His responsibilities ranged from domestic loan syndication to asset-based lending across parts of the United States and all of Canada. He also led GE Real Estate’s American joint-venture equity investment business. In London, as President and CEO of GE Corporate Finance Bank, he oversaw European leveraged finance, asset-based lending and corporate lending.
These roles put different financial questions on the same résumé. Lending, arranging loans and making equity investments ask an executive to look at a business from different positions. Greco’s subsequent move into valuation brought those perspectives to an organisation serving lenders, investors and companies.
He also holds a Six Sigma Black Belt in quality management. Finance has enough belts, brackets and ratios to fill a wardrobe, but this qualification belongs to the discipline of improving processes. It adds a different kind of training to the banker’s background: attention to how work gets done, alongside the financial result.
When the market stops behaving
Greco’s public comments about valuation show an interest in reading the conditions around a number. In a January 2014 discussion of distressed assets, he described the challenge of distinguishing anomalous market evidence from longer trends. He pointed to the severe dislocation of late 2008 as a period when uncertainty shaped both valuations and transaction prices.
He also distinguished strategic acquisition value from the traditional approaches used in credit and underwriting. A buyer’s reasons for wanting an asset and a lender’s reasons for accepting it as support for financing are different questions. His discussion kept those purposes in view rather than treating value as a free-floating answer.
By March 2023, he was again discussing a changing environment. In a video conversation with Michael Toglia, recorded on March 17, the subjects included shifts from bank to non-bank financing, supply-chain effects on asset values and the relationship between enterprise values and individual assets. Across the two conversations, the recurring concern is the setting in which a valuation will be used.
Sydney, and the people who make expansion work
In September 2014, Greco announced a new Hilco Valuation Services office in Sydney. The opportunity was specific: Australia’s developing asset-based lending market and demand for independent appraisals. The practice would cover inventory, machinery, equipment and intellectual property, as well as business valuations.
The person chosen to lead it was Brendan Smyth, a Hilco colleague who had worked in London and was returning to his native Australia. Smyth had been with the company since 2007. The appointment connected familiarity with Hilco’s work to a personal connection with the market it was entering.
An office opening is easily described by a pin on a map. This one is more interesting as a staffing decision. Greco backed an experienced colleague whose move home also served the company’s expansion. Geography supplied the opportunity; a person had to make the practice work.
The same attention to experience appears in other announcements. In 2011, as Hilco Appraisal Services CEO, Greco welcomed Fred Raccosta to a relationship-management role covering the eastern United States. Raccosta’s background included lending and advisory work, and his remit included financial institutions, investment banks and investment funds.
A decade later, Greco announced Michelle Moreno’s arrival at Hilco Corporate Finance as Managing Director. Her responsibilities included originating and executing deals and advising on corporate finance and special situations. His comments connected her middle-market advisory experience with Hilco’s market access. The appointments give relationship building a practical shape: hire people who understand the conversation clients need to have.
In 2021, the commercial and industrial business also expanded its performance-solutions advisory practice. Greco described opportunities to invest in challenged companies needing both additional capital and a turnaround strategy. That combination connected financing with the work of improving operations. It provides another angle on his path from banking to Hilco: an asset assessment can sit alongside the practical work a business needs to carry out.
One example came with Shop-Vac, whose assets Hilco initially assessed for liquidation. Further work led to a sale of the remaining assets together to GreatStar Tools USA, completed on December 24, 2020. The process took 100 days and involved several Hilco businesses, including the valuation and commercial industrial operations Greco then headed. Equipment, inventory, receivables, property and intellectual property all belonged in the same transaction. It is a concrete illustration of the range around his role: several disciplines working on a business whose assets could be considered separately, then brought together in a sale.
A room where the spreadsheets can wait
The photograph brings the career down to the scale of a room. Greco stands at the right, wearing a name badge, at a summer wine tasting hosted by the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Turnaround Management Association. A sign thanks the sponsors. Hilco is among them. Everyone appears to have found a tolerable alternative to another presentation.
His public professional affiliations include the Turnaround Management Association and the Commercial Finance Association. These networks connect the people who lend, advise, restructure and transact. The picture records a social occasion inside that working community, where a familiar face can matter as much as an introduction.
Making room in the calendar
When Greco moved to Chicago in 2010, he also developed a connection with UCAN, the youth organisation. He recalled joining its President’s Board shortly after the move; his LinkedIn profile dates that service from 2011. In a 2019 interview, he spoke about the organisation’s education and empowerment work and the opportunity it gives young people to become leaders.
Asked how he found time for charitable causes, he offered advice with very little ceremony. Choose something enjoyable. Find contributions that fit into work or personal life. Mentoring, money and supplies were all possibilities. The answer allowed for different circumstances instead of prescribing one impressive-looking commitment.
“Make it something you just do as part of your life, and not some extraordinary event.”
Thomas Greco, on volunteering
It is a modest instruction from someone whose professional work involves substantial financial decisions. Ordinary repetition gets a place in the story. A contribution does not need a launch announcement to deserve a place in the calendar.
The next chapter still begins with value
Hilco’s structure changed in September 2025, when ORIX USA completed its acquisition of a majority stake. The company organised around two divisions, Professional Services and Capital Solutions. Greco’s current valuation role belongs to Professional Services, which brings together appraisal and advisory practices across several business disciplines.
The change places his work inside a company pairing asset expertise with a broader capital platform. It also returns the story to the relationship between knowing what assets are worth and deciding what to do with them. Those decisions were part of his banking career before they became the focus of his Hilco leadership.
There is a pleasing practicality to his route. The customer became the provider. The lender brought his questions with him. The executive’s stated strength remains relationships. For all the specialised language surrounding valuation, Greco’s career keeps returning to people who need an answer they can use - and people prepared to help them get it.