Fund Managers

CIFC prices first Euro CLO; hires UK research team

The firm has hired four researchers in London as part of its first major phase of expansion in the European market.

-

CLO specialist CIFC has priced its first European vehicle and hired a team of researchers based in London as it ramps up its capabilities outside the US.

The firm has priced the CIFC European Funding CLO I at €407 million through Deutsche Bank, its first CLO focused on the European market.

The move follows CIFC’s expansion into the European market last year with the hiring of Dan Robinson and Josh Hughes as managing directors in London. The firm also launched a UCITS structured credit fund this year, which now has €85 million of assets under management.

The firm has now made a further four hires to flesh out its UK-based research team, which it says is part of its first phase of expansion in the region.

Rinse Terpstra joins as a senior analyst from Chenavari Investment Managers, where he was a senior analyst working on CLOs. He has 12 years of leveraged-loan and high-yield credit experience across Europe and in Turkey.

Zoltan Paller joins CIFC from UBS as an analyst. At UBS he focused on leveraged finance and direct lending in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and has also held credit roles at Morgan Stanley and Fitch.

Max-Elliot Taylor joins as an analyst from Investcorp Credit Management, where he spent five years as an associate in the credit research team.

Finally, analyst Alessandro Garello Cantoni joins from Merrill Lynch, where he spent five years focused on Italian and Iberian markets as well as leveraged-finance origination across EMEA.

CIFC’s head of European marketing, Joshua Hughes, said: “CIFC has a strong footprint in the US alternative credit space and many of the team in New York have lots of experience themselves working in European markets, but they said when they launched in London that they would commit serious investment to this effort, with a team on the ground.

“These hires, complemented by the recruitment of compliance and administration support, show that the business is serious in its ambitions to establish a credible and meaningful presence in Europe for the long-term.”