Job Swaps

Job swaps round-up - 28 July

Friday 28 July 2017 14:04 London/ 09.04 New York/ 22.04 Tokyo

North America

Ashurst is cutting its CLO practice because it sees it as "less relevant" to its global structured finance practice. It says "it will not be replacing the CLO team," many of whom have moved to Chapman and Cutler. The five partners joining Chapman and Cutler are Pat Quill, David Nirenberg, Steve Kopp, Doug Bird and Tom Glushko.

Hunt Mortgage Group has opened a new production office in Philadelphia and Harris Heller has been hired to lead the local effort. As md, Heller will be responsible for originating conventional and small balance agency business, as well as placing Hunt Mortgage Group's proprietary fixed and floating rate products in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. He will report to Vic Clark, senior md, and Michael Becktel, md at Hunt Mortgage Group. Prior to joining Hunt Mortgage Group, Heller was md of loan originations at Greystone & Co, where he sourced a wide variety of commercial real estate deals, including agency, FHA, CMBS and proprietary multifamily bridge loans. Before that, he served as md with RAIT Financial Trust.

KCAP Financial has formed a joint venture with Freedom 3 Opportunities, an affiliate of Freedom 3 Capital, to create KCAP Freedom 3. The company and Freedom 3 Opportunities contributed approximately US$35m and US$25m respectively in assets to the KCAP-F3 JV, which in turn used the assets to capitalise a new fund managed by one of the company's wholly-owned investment advisers. The joint venture agreement will allow the company to invest in senior middle-market loans, as well as provide additional sources of investments through its joint venture partner.

Pretium Partners has acquired credit manager Valcour Capital Management, which has about US$1bn in assets. Pretium, led by former Goldman Sachs executive Don Mullen, will buy 100% of the shares of Valcour, which will continue to operate as an independent manager following the sale, according to an investor letter.

CDO transfer

Tricadia CDO Management has assigned its rights and obligations as collateral manager for TABS 2005-4 to Dock Street Capital Management. Moody's confirms that the move will not have an adverse impact on the ABS CDO's ratings.

Index launch

JPMorgan has launched a new agency pass-through RMBS index, dubbed the MBS Agency Index, or MAX. The aim is to provide an efficient and in-depth measure of the US MBS market's largest and most traded fixed-rate agency programmes. As such, the index references 30-, 20- and 15-year MBS across 404 aggregates that cover almost 85% of the US agency market, as of 30 June 2017. FNMA, FHLMC and GNMA I/II mortgages account for 43%, 27% and 30% of the benchmark respectively.

MSR transfer

Ocwen Financial Corp is set to transfer its interest in and subservicing agreements relating to approximately US$110bn UPB of seasoned non-agency MSRs to New Residential Investment Corp. Upon the transfer of the portfolio, an NRZ subsidiary will make a lump sum restructuring fee payment - which is expected to total US$400m - to Ocwen in exchange for Ocwen forgoing payments under the existing agreements. NRZ has also agreed to invest approximately US$13.9m to purchase approximately 4.9% of Ocwen's common equity. Subject to the approval of certain counterparties to the related securitisations and other customary closing conditions, the transfers may begin as early as September 2017 and continue into 2018.

Risk retention vehicle

Neuberger Berman has closed its CLO risk retention vehicle, Neuberger Berman Loan Advisers, with approximately US$450m of committed capital. Through Neuberger Berman Loan Advisers, the firm has partnered with its investors to provide strategic capital to its CLO management business in order to comply with US and EU CLO risk retention rules. It anticipates continuing to be an active CLO issuer over the next several years.

28/07/2017 14:04:36