XL Capital Assurance, a New York-based financial guarantor, has hired two securitization veterans for its consumer asset securitization group. Seleena Baijnauth joins as a senior analyst from J.P. Morgan Securities where she reported to Matt Whallen, v.p. in charge of home equity ABS. Lima Ekram joins as a v.p. from Financial Guarantee Insurance Company (FGIC) where she reported to David Steel, managing director and head of mortgage-backed securities, says Mitch Karig, a spokesman for XL. Both will report to Peggy Wallace, managing director and head of the group. Karig says that Ekram will be managing MBS transactions while Baijnauth will analyze transactions for all asset classes. Both are newly created positions, and Karig says the new hires reflect growth in XL's consumer asset securitization group, currently comprising five people. No additional hires are planned at this time, he adds.
Before working as a financial guarantor in the MBS sector of FGIC, Ekram was a derivatives analyst and portfolio manager at Brown Brothers Harriman and a public finance analyst at Merrill Lynch. At J.P. Morgan, Baijnauth, who also worked at Chase Securities, was a home equity banker. Whallen and Steel did not return calls.