Sector developments and company hires

UTP agreement inked

UniCredit and Prelios have signed an agreement for the specialised management of unlikely-to-pay (UTP) loans, following the conclusion of a competitive selection process launched by the bank in 4Q21. The long-term agreement involves Prelios acting as the preferred partner in the management of UTP loans in the corporate segment held by UniCredit. An initial stock under management for the year 2022 will be complemented by future flows of new UTP loans over the next six years.

At the same time, Prelios advised UniCredit in the sale and securitisation of a UTP loan portfolio - mainly comprising corporate and SME exposures - amounting to approximately €2bn gross of value adjustments, under which it will be master and special servicer pursuant to Italian Law 130/99. This transaction allows UniCredit to achieve the full accounting deconsolidation of the portfolio in 2Q22, with Christofferson Robb as the main investor in the mezzanine and junior notes.

In other news…

EMEA

Alternative credit manager Arini has made three new hires in its London office. Younes Belcadi joins the firm as coo, Stan Fedorenko joins as senior investment analyst and Mehdi Kashani joins as senior structured credit trader. Belcadi was previously chief of liquid securities at Qatar Investment Authority, Fedorenko was previously an md at Centerbridge Partners and Kashani was previously head of ABS and CLO trading at BNP Paribas.

North America

Onex has named Robbie Jaber and Sandeep Alva as new co-heads of Onex Credit. In their new roles, Jaber and Alva will work collaboratively on both strategic and growth initiatives, and will oversee strategies across their individual areas of expertise. As co-head, Jaber, who joined the firm in 2020 to focus on its structured credit offering including its global CLO business, will concentrate on structured credit and CLOs, as well as liquid and opportunistic strategies. Alva, who similarly joined the firm in 2020 through the acquisition of Falcon Investment Advisors, will maintain responsibility for direct lending, mezzanine, and structured equity. Jaber and Alva each bring a respective 20 and 35 years of industry experience to their new roles, which the firm hopes they will utilise in their new roles to help support its ongoing growth plan.

Risk management firm acquired

SAS has acquired Honolulu-based risk management and analytics firm Kamakura Corporation. SAS’ investment decision comes as rising inflation and a potential recession signal turbulence for the global economy, which the firm believes is a time for financial services organisations “large and small” to closely examine liquidity and other risks in their portfolios.

Seventh CAS deal prints

Fannie Mae has priced the US$866m CAS 2022-R07 transaction, marking its seventh CRT offering of the year. The deal securitises a reference pool of about 101,000 single-family mortgages with an unpaid principal balance of US$30.6bn. The joint bookrunners are Nomura and Wells Fargo.

The deal consists of a US$392.8m BBB+/BBB+ rated M1 tranche that priced at one-month SOFR plus 295bp, a US$275.2m BBB/BBB- M2 tranche that priced at SOFR plus 465bp, a US$91.6m BB+/BB- B1 tranche that priced at plus 680bp and a US$106.9m B-/NR B2 tranche that priced at plus 1200bp. All the loans were contracted in July and August of last year.

SPRINT investment for NLU fintech

Claira, the document intelligence fintech, has received strategic investment from Citi’s strategic investing arm, Citi SPRINT, to give a boost to its next-generation document intelligence technology. The bank hopes the investment capital will enhance Claira’s product offering and help accelerate digital transformation through the adoption of the firm’s AI-powered technology. Claira aims to reinvent the document analysis process with its Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology, over the prevalent Natural Language (NLP) approaches. Beginning with municipal prospectuses and CLOs, the new data analysis solution aims to aid the document analysis process for both finance and trading professionals.