Awards

Polling for GlobalCapital's Covered Bond Awards 2021 closes at 5:30pm London time on Monday, August 16, so please be sure to cast your firm’s vote if you haven’t already done so. Preliminary data shows that the frontrunners for many awards are in close contention, so every vote stands to make a huge difference.

GlobalCapital is thrilled to announce that the survey for this year’s awards is now open. All market participants are invited to take part.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce that the Covered Bond Awards 2021 survey will open for voting from Thursday. Congratulations to all those who made it to the shortlists.

GlobalCapital is delighted to reveal the winners of its 2021 US Securitization Awards, where we seek to recognize the most notable and innovative deals, banks and market participants of 2020. The vast majority of awards were voted on by the market, from shortlists compiled by GlobalCapital’s editorial team. In compiling the shortlists, we took feedback from the market through a survey, and in direct discussions, studied league tables, submissions and other data. Then, we picked out lists of credible winners for each category, all of which would have been richly deserving of an award.

RMBS deals of the year are often innovative in one form or another. But they typically only boast one or perhaps two fresh features. Investors looking at the Nomura-led Cascade Funding Mortgage Trust 2020-AB1 had to use both hands to count the structural innovations. The $285.8m reverse mortgage transaction from Waterfall Asset Management was the clear winner in 2020, impressing investors, analysts and other issuers with its groundbreaking structure.

We had an abundance of excellent candidates for this award. Yet in a year when the pandemic dominated markets, we wanted to recognise a transaction that not only showed structural flair, creativity and capital markets excellence in solving a problem for a client, but which successfully navigated extremely challenging market conditions at the same time. Congratulations to Fannie Mae and to structuring lead Nomura for Connecticut Avenue Securities-Seasoned B Transaction.

Global Jet Capital spent many years in meeting after meeting and conference after conference explaining to investors a simple truth - that business aviation is its own market entirely. In 2020, the message hit home. The commercial sector remained in disarray even after lockdowns ended. Business jet travel bounded back sharply. Commercial aviation ABS investors were exposed to firms whose very existence was in doubt. Business aviation ABS investors were exposed to wealthy individuals and successful firms in an array of different industries. At the height of the pandemic while commercial ABS hit collateral triggers, Global Jet Capital hit the primary market with a transaction the market overwhelmingly voted ABS deal of the year.

There’s a saying that once is luck, twice is coincidence, and three times is a pattern. While we don’t wish to become the in-house newspaper of Guggenheim Securities, once again, following victories in 2019 and 2020, the firm has exceeded our expectations when it comes to the depth, breadth and quality of its securitization activities, and for that reason, we have chosen to award it Esoteric ABS Bank of the Year.

Analysts have long viewed point of sale (POS) as a potential new frontier for the consumer ABS sector. In July 2020, with concern over the pandemic’s long-term economic impact still rife, Affirm crossed that frontier with a deal that left no doubts about investor confidence.

Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) has always had a culture of intellectual curiosity. Since its foundation in 2011, the search for new challenges and frontiers has led the firm to all corners of securitization. From areas as disparate as single-family rental and commercial real estate NPLs to marketplace lending and solar. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, the firm is active across a wide array of structured finance areas, including ABS consumer lending, CMBS, MBS, and CLOs, as well as esoterics such as aviation, and whole business securitizations.

Mayer Brown’s strategy is to have genuine strength, depth and expertise across all securitization asset classes. The firm employs over 100 lawyers specializing in structured finance, works on well over 250 deals a year and regularly tops the league tables. This ability to combine comprehensive breadth with deep-seated expertise earned it not one but two awards from the market in 2020: best ABS Law Firm and best RMBS Law Firm.

Many CLO managers went into 2020 aggressively positioned, with a high percentage of portfolio assets rated triple-C and on the cusp. When the pandemic hit, a wave of downgrades drove these same managers into bouts of forced selling and severely limited purchases of new assets. But not GoldenTree Asset Management.