Fernando Guerrero, the new head of collateralized debt obligations at ABN AMRO, says he wants to add four to eight CDO staffers distributed between the New York and London offices during the first half of next year. Guerrero recently joined from TD Securities, an active CDO underwriter, where he was head of the structured products group for three years.
Including Guerrero, his team currently consists of eight bankers: six in London and two in New York. With the planned hires for next year, Guerrero is looking at almost doubling his team. The new hires will be structurers, modelers and capital markets bankers. The breakdown for the newly created slots and the division between New York and London has not been decided, he says. But, he says the idea is to build a full spectrum business encompassing synthetic structures, cash flow arbitrage deals and balance sheet transactions. Guerrero adds that there will also be a Japanese component to his group's strategy, arguing that some Japanese bank's balance sheets could benefit from CDO technology.