Alessandro Pighi is a managing director in Fitch Ratings’ Structured Finance group based in London, where he heads the EMEA residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) team. Alessandro is responsible for the team’s overall output of ratings and research.
Besides his long tenure at Fitch Ratings, Alessandro has worked in the real estate financing team at Goldman Sachs, in the risk management department of Mediobanca and in the structured finance team at Moody’s.
Alessandro holds a degree in Economics at Bocconi University, Milan.

Amer Siddiqui has a leading market position in asset-backed finance transactions and securitisations, with a particular focus on residential mortgage finance, including residential mortgage-backed securitisation, portfolio sales, covered bonds, and forward-flow and static pool warehouse arrangements. He has led on some of the most high-profile multi-billion pound/euro public and private RMBS securitisations in the last few years, in particular, all the Glenbeigh RMBS transactions, the Chester securitisations, Cheshire securitisations, Rochester Financing, Trinity Square, Together CRE, Oat Hill, Malt Hill, Barley Hill, Avon Finance, all the Jubilee Place and Canada Square Funding securitisations, and Elvet Mortgages, to name a few.

Arjan Verbeek has more than 25 years’ experience in the financial markets in a variety of positions including at Moody’s, Barclays Capital and BNP Paribas. Arjan has extensive knowledge of the securitisation and covered bond markets in many of countries. He was a member of the FSA standing group which established the UK covered bond legislation in 2003 and the establishment of the mortgage ACS framework in Ireland. Most recently Arjan founded and is CEO of Perenna Group, which consists of an asset manager and mortgage bank.

Barbara is a manager in Moody’s EMEA Consumer New Ratings team in London. Before this Barbara held the position of the Team Leader in EMEA RMBS Surveillance. She started in Moody’s in 2002 and has since then covered a large variety of products and markets. Barbara originally comes from the banking industry, where she mainly focused on working with derivative products.
Barbara holds an LLM in Banking and Finance Law from the University of London and a Laurea in International and Diplomatic Sciences from the University of Trieste.

Managing Partner and co-founder of ARA Venn, Gary also heads the firm’s residential mortgage business where the firm has developed investment and funding strategies in the UK, the Netherlands and Spain. With over 22 years of experience in private credit markets, he was formerly co-head of alternative assets and structured credit solutions for Europe at Nomura, and a senior structurer in the European bank solutions team at Goldman Sachs. He started his career as a tax and structured finance lawyer at Linklaters, and has a degree in law from Oxford University.

John founded Landbay, a BTL mortgage lending platform, in 2013. Landbay operates a marketplace model and originates, underwrites, and manages mortgages on behalf of other financial institutions.

John is a Managing Director and is EMEA Head of ABS and Global Co-Head of Covered Bonds at HSBC. John has advised on a wide range of transactions across asset classes but particularly in relation to residential mortgages has extensive experience working with both financial institutions, specialist lenders and financial sponsors on projects ranging from vanilla funding to complex special situations.

John has been heavily involved in various key industry initiatives including co-chairing the ICMA task force on Sustainable Securitisation, as well as being a key industry expert on IBOR transition where he is HSBC’s representative on the FCA’s RFR Bond Market Sub-Group (BMSG).

John has over 19 years of experience in the investment banking sector, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (FCA), holds the Securities Institute Diploma (MSI), and a BA (Hons) from the University of Bristol in Mathematics and Philosophy.

Kathryn is a specialist Asset-Backed Finance and Securitisation partner at Simmons & Simmons LLP. Kathryn has extensive experience advising on all forms of structured finance and securitisation transactions with a particular focus on residential mortgage-backed securitisations (RMBS), consumer loan securitisations (including autos and cards) and SME loan securitisations. Kathryn advises some of the most high-profile market players including originators, banks as arrangers/JLMs and lenders/investors/funds across the full range of transactions from advising start-up originators on new warehouse and forward flow arrangements through to high profile multi-billion portfolio sale transactions such as Chester and Glenbeigh. Kathryn has a market leading practice, as illustrated by her recent work on various private securitisation transactions in growing new asset classes such ESG (solar) and joint-ventures with large OEMs in the TMT space. Kathryn is also a regular panel speaker at securitisation conferences (including the IMN Global ABS), and contributes to various industry initiatives working groups including AFME and AIMA particularly in the ESG space.

Shaun heads up Securitisation at AFME as Managing Director, leading the Association’s work on securitisation regulatory reform.

Shaun has nearly 25 years of experience in the securitisation industry, having most recently worked for Santander as Managing Director, Head of European ABS in Global Debt Financing at Santander’s CIB. He has also worked for Banco Santander in various roles since 2008, all in securitisation, acting as arranger and lender, covering funding, capital management, relevant Prudential Regulation and ESG matters.

Prior to this, he spent ten years at Fitch Ratings, and before that began his career in the British Army where he was a Captain in the Royal Armoured Corps.

Tom Heslop joined the Citi securitisation team in 2010. Tom works on origination, structuring and distribution of a variety of granular transactions types and roles across EMEA and Australia: from purchasing portfolios or providing senior financing to arranging and distributing securitisations publicly and privately, executing deals on most relevant asset classes including equity release mortgages and UK RMBS master trusts to specialist consumer loans and small balance CRE.

Tom studied Mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge.

Tristan is currently Head of EMEA/APAC Structured Finance Syndicate at Bank of America with over 15 years of experience in executing and distributing asset-backed transactions in the primary market across a broad range of asset classes and structures. Prior to joining Bank of America in 2015, Tristan worked in a similar roles focused on securitised products at JP Morgan and Commerzbank. Tristan holds a Bachelors Degree in Economics (Hons) from The University of Warwick.