Last week, Investment Dealers' Digest, a sister publication to ASR, published its
inaugural "40 Under 40" in investment banking. This list highlighted 40 individuals from across all aspects of investment banking who, along with their teams, best represent the next generation of dealmakers.
The well-rounded collection took notice of the world of structured finance, as several professionals from the industry made the cut.
Mike Wade
Barclays Capital
Head of US Asset Securitization
and Financial Institutions
Anyone who has followed the massive build out of the asset-backed securities market can't be surprised by the fact that Mike Wade made this 40 Under 40 list.
Wade, who joined Barclays Capital back in 1994, garnered the "rising star" moniker when he landed the MD title in 2002, largely due to his ABS work at the firm. Over the last few years, Barclays has always finished as one of the top two firms when it came to underwriting auto and credit card ABS.
Wade played a pivotal role in Barclays' decision to shell out $469 million in June to purchase HomeEq Servicing, a mortgage servicing business, from Wachovia. The third-party servicer managed a portfolio of $43 billion in mortgages, meaning the acquisition was no small accomplishment for Wade and his team, who can now provide term ABS, whole loans, warehouse lending and servicing to its clients.
But Wade wasn't just about M&A in 2006. In March his team helped push out the $1.7 billion American Home Mortgage Investment Trust 2006-1 deal, and the group also worked the $670 million Argent Securities Series 2006-W5 note in May.
Chris Ricciardi
Cohen & Co.
CEO
The moves made by Chris Ricciardi are meticulously watched in the world of structured finance because Ricciardi's name has become synonymous with one of the Street's fastest growing markets, collateral debt obligations, or CDOs, as they are more commonly known.
CDOs can be thought of as the mutual funds of the structured finance world - they are a debt market product with a lot of moving parts packaged inside. It was his understanding of where to source new moving parts - the collateral - that made Ricciardi a rising star in the industry and garnered him the top executive position at Cohen & Co. earlier this year.
Cohen plucked Ricciardi from Merrill Lynch in February where he was a director and head of global structured credit products. Word of the move, first broken by IDD, spread like wildfire due equally to Ricciardi's high ranking and the trends he's been ahead of.
He may be a tad too young to be dubbed a "grandfather" of the CDO market, but in 1999, as head of CDO banking at Prudential Securities, Ricciardi was part of a team that made history by creating the first CDO packed with asset backed securities. Ricciardi and his team moved to CSFB in 2000 and in the three years they were there,
the bank shot to the top of the CDO league tables, primarily based upon the issuance of ABS CDOs.
Ricciardi received an MBA in 1997 from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
John Devaney
United Capital Markets
Founder, CEO
Many of the bankers on this list have carved success out of niche markets, but John Devaney arguably carved out a market.
A graduate of Colorado State University with a BA in Finance and English, Devaney is one of the first to make markets in distressed asset-backed securities (ABS). The UCM team - Devaney, Randy White, Sean Kirk, Evan Kestenberg, Dan Steuer and Adam Laskar - has taken what many in the market considered an enormous gamble by becoming an early pioneer in market making and principal trading in distressed bonds that are structurally (and legally) more complex than other sectors. In the process they've helped transform the industry. Previously, an investor would have to hold the distressed bond until maturity, which usually meant a complete writedown. Today that investor can sell.
According to the firm, over the last twelve months, UCM, acting as principal, has purchased nearly $6 billion dollars of ABS subordinated notes in the secondary marketplace, and averages $4 billion to $6 billion per year.
T. Troy Dixon
Deutsche Bank
Head of Pass-Through
Mortgage Trading
When Deutsche Bank picked up T. Troy Dixon, an MBS trading expert, in March from UBS, it poached a 10-year industry veteran and created a stir in the market.
Dixon was hired to manage the trading and risk associated with Deutsche's $30 billion MBS portfolio. He works with Keith Willard and Cyle Berwanger and reports to Anilesh Ahuja, head of Residential Mortgage Backed Securities, and Jon Kinol, head of Rates Trading for North America.
Dixon, who holds a BA in Economics from the College of the Holy Cross, where he played both varsity football and baseball, was formerly the executive director and head of pass-through trading at UBS. In the 2001-2002 period, Dixon and his team were top ranked traders in the MBS arena.
Mark Davies
Bear Stearns
Head of Global Credit Trading
When Mark Davies graduated with honors in Pure Math and Theoretical Physics from
the University of Exeter in England in 1989, the path to fruitful employment in the credit derivatives market hadn't quite been hacked out. Yet Davies began to work with the team that crafted the original market conventions and ISDA definitions in 1999, efforts that provided a solid foundation for the credit derivatives market, which today stands at a notional $26 trillion. At the wizened age of 38, Davies often finds himself introduced as one of the "founding fathers" of the credit derivatives market.
Following several years at Credit Suisse First Boston, Davies moved over to Bear Stearns in 2003, where he runs the global credit derivative groups, a division that includes all cash bonds as well.
A board member of ISDA and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, Davies is vice-chair of the executive committee of the corporate credit markets division of SIFMA and a member of its main board of directors. But it isn't all derivatives all the time for this Street legend - Davies also works with several New York-based charities in his free time.
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