Company hires and sector developments

Cayman CLO first

Maples Group has supported the first ever US CLO to issue out of the Cayman Island. The transaction was a US$501m middle market CLO from Natixis, which closed on 13 August 2019.

ESG implementation

THL Credit has developed and begun utilising a new investment framework for assessing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in analysing credit quality and risk factors. THL Credit said the goal is to increase the consideration of ESG factors and better understand their impact on the long-term value and strength of its borrowers across the firm’s tradable credit portfolio, which includes syndicated bank loans, high yield debt, and CLO debt and equity, as well as its direct lending portfolio.

ILS

Twelve Capital is expanding its distribution efforts into Australia and New Zealand by partnering with Allen Partners, a capital advisory and fund placement consultancy based in Sydney. The firm has successfully helped establish specialised asset managers in the region across a number of different asset classes. Twelve Capital says that the insurance sector is typically under-researched by asset managers and banks in the region, which creates significant investment opportunities for its clients in asset classes including catastrophe bonds and ILS.

Markel Corporation today announced the launch of Lodgepine Capital Management Limited, its new retrocessional insurance linked securities (ILS) fund manager in Bermuda, together with a reinsurance company, Lodgepine Re. Lodgepine's initial product offering will be the Lodgepine Fund, a property catastrophe retrocessional investment fund ahead of the 2020 renewal period. Markel's Andrew Barnard will serve as Lodgepine ceo. Additionally, the entity is drawing from Markel's deep talent by appointing James Welsby as cio and John Duda to lead the retrocessional portfolio management team. The Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) has given its approval in principle for the licensing of Lodgepine Re, the reinsurance company, and once all requisite approvals of the other Lodgepine entities have been obtained, Markel will work to have all entities organised and capitalised in the coming weeks.

Structured credit support

Quantifi, has been selected by Jefferies Group to support its growing structured credit business. To meet investor demand for more innovative and tailored investments, Jefferies has grown its structured credit capabilities to include synthetic CDOs based on diverse portfolios of corporate credit default swaps. To support this synthetic CDO business, Jefferies sought to acquire a state-of-the-art pricing and analytics solution with enhanced capabilities for synthetic structured products, instead of developing its own in-house system. Quantifi was selected for its market leading analytics, including the ability to calculate VaR for complex credit products, strong integration with existing in-house systems, technical flexibility, and high performance computing.