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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.

Waterfall Asset Management is one of the largest structured product-focused alternative investment managers by assets under management. It is a testament to the firm’s skill, dedication, and innovation that this year it won awards both as issuer – RMBS deal of the year – and as hedge fund investor of the year. Waterfall manages approximately $9.5bn of assets across a variety of co-mingled funds, funds-of-one, separately managed accounts, a publicly-traded REIT, and a private equity fund.

If there was ever a year when the confidence and insight of a first-rate accounting firm was particularly needed, it was 2020. Facing stiff competition from its peers, Deloitte’s depth and breadth of experience and expertise in structured finance was called on and recognised by the market as Accounting Firm of the Year across multiple sectors.

Golub Capital has won the GlobalCapital 2020 awards for Middle Market CLO Manager of the Year and Middle Market CLO Deal of the Year. These awards continue the firm’s long track record of market leadership in middle market CLOs. They also reflect the power and resilience of Golub Capital’s sponsor finance platform through the Covid-19 crisis. The firm has been the top middle market CLO issuer by volume for the past eight years, according to Creditflux data.

When the 2007-8 crisis hit, appetite for analytics using macro forecasts to project tranche-level impacts across structured finance was fairly limited. There were models that could forecast the performance of residential mortgages, but few issuers or investors saw the need to try to determine how, for example, unemployment might affect a specific RMBS tranche.

Space might well be the new frontier in equity investing, with several deals catching the attention of capital markets professionals in the past couple of weeks. But as exciting as investing in space and space technology are, grouping vastly different businesses together under the catch-all term 'space economy' runs the risk of stoking fads or even an equity bubble.

Pundits in the ESG space are already levelling disappointed criticisms at the ECB’s new green monetary policy strategy. But while it may not be perfect, it is important to recognise that the ECB has taken a valuable and important step forward.