Sector developments and company hires

CLO pricing service selected
SCI Valuations has been selected by Bloomberg’s Enterprise Data business to provide daily CLO debt pricing to integrate with Bloomberg’s Liquidity Assessment (LQA) tool. The integration of this data with LQA will enable Bloomberg customers to more effectively and easily view and manage their portfolios, the companies say.

SCI Valuations provides automated valuations for US and European CLO debt, as well as bespoke pricing for CLO equity and European ABS/MBS. It employs sophisticated proprietary algorithms that take into account refi/reset effects, manager performance, bond margin and many other relevant performance metrics to generate price, DMs and WALs.

SCI Valuations also monitors the BWIC and new issue market daily and calibrates inputs accordingly, as well as deploying a multi-factor deep-dive algorithm that takes into context credit and liquidity/MV factors, along with the idiosyncratic nature of CLO debt securities.

In other news…

EMEA
Blackstar Capital has appointed Khalid Javaid as head of legal, responsible for providing structuring, legal and execution advice in relation to transactions and new business. He will also provide legal oversight of regulatory matters and government affairs. Javaid joins from DLA Piper, where he was a legal director.

North America
Angelo Gordon has appointed Nicholas Smith as md to lead the firm’s whole loan business and expand the team’s capability across multiple asset classes. Rodney Hutter has also been hired as md, responsible for private credit origination.

The pair will be based in New York and report to TJ Durkin, Angelo Gordon’s co-head of structured credit. Smith was previously head of non-agency residential mortgage trading and ABS trading at Bank of America, while Hutter was previously md and head of originations in the structured lending group at Waterfall Asset Management.

RFC on trade receivables update
S&P is requesting comments on proposed updated methodologies and assumptions to rate ABS backed by trade receivables. The proposed criteria apply globally to all new and outstanding trade receivable, factoring and supply chain financing transactions. The criteria also apply to trade receivable transactions used as collateral in partially supported ABCP conduits.

Among the changes that S&P is proposing are: a new approach for addressing elevated levels of country risk in trade receivable transactions; a change to its approach for analysing the yield reserve element of the carrying cost reserve; and a new approach that explains under what circumstances the agency may be able to rate single or concentrated obligor trade receivable pools. The proposed criteria, if adopted, are expected to have no impact on any outstanding structured finance ratings for term trade receivables or on S&P’s liquidity enhanced credit analysis for trade receivable pools in partially supported ABCP conduits.

Comments on the proposed criteria should be submitted by 26 April.