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Deloitte & Touche open support unit in London

Deloitte & Touche announced last week that it planned to open an on -the-ground support unit for its securitization software in London. Chris Priskoto, a manager on the U.S. securitization technology practice, has been appointed to lead this effort.

"We are already active in Europe, with clients in six European countries," said Mark Scherer, a principal with Deloitte in New York and leader of Deloitte's securitization technology practice. "Assigning Chris to London to work with our European colleagues to support our clients is a natural progression, and reflects our continued and growing commitment to the European securitization technology marketplace." Scherer said that the systems they offer - ABS Suite and CDO Suite - are already global in nature and include such features as full multi-currency support. They plan to add enhanced synthetic functionality to the CDO Suite software to accommodate requests from European customers.

Scherer said that the group has a number of projects about to start in the U.K. as well as on the Continent in the next few weeks. "Although we serve a wide range of clients, from the proverbial CDO run by two guys and a Bloomberg terminal' to the very largest of global banks, large financial institutions like credit card ABS issuers and CDO trustees respond especially well to our philosophy," said Hillel Caplan, senior manager at Deloitte and CDO Suite global product leader. "In addition to the necessary business functionality, we include features such as role-based user access and detailed user activity logging that support the development of a strong internal control structure.

"We also emphasize knowledge transfer and making clients as self-sufficient as they choose to be. We even give our clients access to our source code in many cases."

Scherer said that in the U.S., seven of the 10 leading issuers of credit card ABS, many of which employ a master trust or master owner trust structure, are already using ABS Suite. He added that in the U.K., a natural migration would be for mortgage master trust programs to tap into this product. There are a lot of similarities between U.S. credit card deals and U.K. mortgage master trusts, he said. He also noted that in the U.S. CDO market, which has a limited number of trustees, Deloitte counts seven of them as clients ranging from the top of the league tables to emerging clients in trustee services.

Europe is beginning to see a fresh wave of new participants getting into the market. Among emerging clients, two that work with Deloitte - MeesPierson Intertrust and BNP Paribas Securities Services - have expanded into collateral administrative services for European CDOs. A spokesperson at MeesPierson Intertrust said that while the company had been active in other areas of European CDOs, it has only begun collateral administrative services since April last year.

"The role we help play is in developing the infrastructure to support an ABS program," said Scherer. He added that they don't just provide a piece of software. "Through our multidisciplinary model, we can help clients develop their infrastructure to support an ABS program through additional consulting services.

We can assist by lowering the barriers to entry - for first-time issuers, it is about getting that first deal off the ground, because you have to get the right infrastructure in place. Our experience helps."

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