European structured credit head lands top global CLO role at Jefferies

Sayed Kadiri
+Tanvi Gupta
+ 1 more

24 November 2023•3 min read

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Jefferies has revamped its CLO origination platform with sources informing 9fin that Laura Coady has been appointed global head of CLO origination. She adds this position to her role as head of European securitised markets in London.

In New York, Anand Sankaranarayanan has been promoted to lead the US CLO origination effort. He replaces Jason Schechter, who has left the bank, sources said.

The step-up to a global CLO role rewards Coady, who has played a central role in building Jefferies' European CLO business and taking it from zero market share when she joined in 2020, to market leader within a couple of years.

Jefferies' European CLO origination effort is led by Luis Leon Carsi and Hugh Upcott Gill, who joined Jefferies around the same time as Coady. All three worked together at Citi before switching over.

Sankaranarayanan has been at Jefferies since April 2013, working across US CLO origination and trading. He was promoted at the start of 2017 to managing director.

The appointments mark a new chapter for Jefferies. The bank created a US CLO platform in 2010 after hiring structured credit specialist Erez Biala. Two years later Schechter joined to work alongside him as the pair shared oversight of global CLO origination and trading.

The US CLO build-out has been a success over 13 years with Jefferies consistently racking up CLO credits over the years (taking roughly 5% of market share for US primary CLO volumes) while other banks and brokers have dipped in and out of CLO operations, or completely exited the business (UBS, Cantor Fitzgerald and Credit Suisse are prime examples).

When Biala left Jefferies in 2016, Schechter took over as the sole head of Jefferies' global CLO operations. The global job title reflected Jefferies' CLO trading effort which spanned US and European CLOs, whereas the primary CLO business was centred almost entirely on US deals.

That balance has since been tipped upside down. This coincides with Coady and her teams' arrival from Citi in June 2020 to build the European CLO platform from scratch.

9fin data shows that the bank claimed second place for arranging new issue European CLOs by volume in 2021, before easily claiming the top spot in 2022. This year the firm is facing competiton from Barclays and BNP Paribas for that title.

Over in the US, Schechter's focus became more US-centric and he was central to partnerships that Jefferies struck up with smaller (and at times, debuting) CLO issuers. Typically in these arrangements, Jefferies would provide warehouse funding and bring in fund managers to buy the equity in the resultant CLOs. These deals would give CLO managers the provisions for several CLO issuances, in exchange of which they would share in the economics of the CLOs with Jefferies and the third-party CLO equity providers.

Jefferies arranged these tie-ups with CLO managers such as Carlson Capital (Jefferies brought in Hildene to invest in CLO equity), CQS (three unnamed CLO equity investors), Par-Four (Davidson Kempner) and TCW (Kennedy Lewis).

Schechter had been at UBS prior to joining Jefferies. He was let go after UBS alleged that Schechter had not properly documented two CLO trades, according to Finra records. In the same account, Schechter disputed the allegations stating the “termination will be subject of an arbitration”. It's unclear how this progressed.

Before UBS, Schechter was at Barclays (2008-2010) having joined after the bank acquired Lehman Brothers' US business. He has also worked at Morgan Stanley and Greenwich Capital Markets.