Barclays Capital celebrated its first-ever lead mandate for an auto loan deal last week, bearing the fruit of last year's hiring away of three bankers from Salomon Smith Barney. AmeriCredit priced $1.6 billion of subprime retail auto loan-backed paper, with Credit Suisse First Boston jointly running the books with Barclays at levels that moved in approximately two basis points from initial guidance.
The hires, all of which occurred last July, included a trio of bankers from Salomon: Thomas Dang, focusing on structuring and analytics, as well as Jay Kim and Mark Sun, bankers in the auto loan and credit card sectors. All are associate directors with the bank. Joseph Astorina was also hired from Fitch to work with both Kim and Sun on auto deals.
"We have made excellent hires over the past six months in the securitization group to bolster our structuring expertise and Barclays
Capital continues to rapidly expand the broader U.S. capital markets effort," said Michael Wade, director in the securitization group.
Barclays has been a strong presence as a co-manager in the auto loan primary sector working on the January blowout deals from Ford, GMAC and Honda. In each of these offerings, Barclays was said to have sold out its allocations quickly and asked for more.
With several first-time mandates in the pipeline for the first half of 2002, "Barclays Capital will leverage our historical strength in credit card and cross-currency ABS while devoting significant resources to the auto sector. Our momentum will increase with several marquee transactions in the first half of the year," Wade added.
By contrast, in 2001, the firm led four deals in the public and private markets, from credit card issuers Advanta, Capital One and Providian. Barclays also led a small private deal for Sterling Jewelers. Barclays finished 2001 with just $2.5 billion of lead-managed supply last year.
In 2000, Barclays led just one deal, $640 million of a 144A deal for Nerva Limited. Prior to that the only Barclays-led offering was $550.2 million of 1998-1 notes for Capital One.
