Sector developments and company hires

US CLOs, Trups CDOs under observation
Fitch has placed 102 tranches issued by 43 US CLOs and 13 tranches issued by seven Trups CDOs under criteria observation (UCO), following the publication of its CLO and corporate CDO rating criteria last week (SCI 17 September). The agency intends to resolve the UCO status by applying the updated criteria to each transaction within six months.

In other news…

North America
Matthew Hays has joined Latham & Watkins as a partner in the finance department and member of its structured finance practice, based in Chicago. Hays represents asset managers, fintech companies and financial institutions on a variety of complex structured finance transactions across a broad range of asset classes. He joins Latham from Dechert in Chicago. 

Q CELLS North America has named Alex Kaplan head of solar financing, based in San Francisco. Kaplan was previously vp, head of capital markets at Mosaic, responsible for its ABS programme. Before that, he worked at SunFi, SolarCity and the PFM Group.