Dominion Bond Rating Service is expanding its presence in the EMEA region as well as growing its CDO business with several new hires in those areas.
"The EMEA region is an area of key strategic focus for DBRS," says Huston Loke, assistant group managing director for global structured finance, on their expansion into the region. "Establishing this team will enable us to build on our long track record in North America by serving investors in the region."
The new EMEA region structured finance group will be based in London, and led by Managing Director Apea Koranteng. Before DBRS, Koranteng was most recently global head of structured capital markets at ABN Amro after close to 10 years at Standard & Poor's where he was a managing director focusing on developing and running the different businesses in the EMEA region. Additionally, Michael Mackenzie has been hired as senior vice president responsible for the rating agency's structured finance marketing efforts in the these areas. Mackenzie was formerly at A.M. Best and was formerly a director in S&P's London-based structured finance ratings group.
The rating agency also announced three appointments within its
CDO group.
Jireh Wong has been appointed to head the firm's global CDO strategy reporting to Loke. Wong will be responsible for all the transactions that are rated by the group. Since joining the rating agency in 1998, Wong has led various efforts related to securitization and systems groups, including the development and evolution of DBRS models such as the recently launched DBRS CDO Toolbox. Based in New York, Chui Ng, who was formerly from Standard & Poor's global CDO group, will be responsible for assessing credit derivatives swaps, synthetic CDOs and market value structures. DBRS also hired Ling Yu, who was also previously at S&P rating cash flow, synthetic and hybrid CDOs. At her new position, Yu will have similar responsibilities to Ng and will focus on cash flow and hybrid CDOs as well. "Chui and Ling both bring strong and diverse backgrounds in structured finance, adding greater depth to our growing CDO team," Wong said.
DBRS has also appointed Michael Buzanis as managing director of Canadian structured finance. Buzanis, who also reports to Loke, will be based in the Toronto office. Buzanis joins DBRS from TD Securities where he was vice president and director in its asset securitization group. In this capacity, Buzanis led a broad range of public and private ABS deals across asset classes. He was also involved in residential and commercial mortgage underwriting and had ABS buyside experience at Merchant Private Trust. He was a corporate account manager at Royal Bank of Canada. Both positions were based in Toronto.
DBRS Managing Director Andrew Jones' responsibilities have been expanded to include European as well as U.S. asset-backed commercial paper ratings. Darren Davies has also been promoted to managing director and his responsibilities have been broadened to include business development across all North American and European structured finance products. Davies formerly focused primarily on U.S. ABS and RMBS. Meanwhile, Sean O'Connor has been promoted to senior vice president in the business development group, reporting to Davies.
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