KBRA named Yee Cent Wong lead analytical manager for structured finance and Jack Kahan global head of ABS and RMBS.
KBRA is expanding its senior leadership team for Structured Finance with the appointment of Yee Cent Wong as lead analytical manager for structured finance owing to the firm’s continued growth across ABS, CMBS, RMBS and structured credit. Wong will oversee various facets of KBRA’s structured finance effort, including managing analytical efforts across the structured finance platform to further KBRA’s effort in promoting ratings and research, as well as methodological development. Based in New York, she will continue to report to Eric Thompson, global head of structured finance. Wong is returning to the U.S. after four years as KBRA’s co-head of Europe based in Dublin, where she facilitated the rapid expansion of KBRA’s European ratings effort. She previously was an early member of KBRA’s CMBS unit, where she led a team that evaluated credit risks of commercial real estate loans in newly issued CMBS transactions. Prior to joining KBRA, Yee was a senior vice president in Capmark Securities’ capital markets group in charge of structuring and pricing large commercial real estate loans for securitization. Her work at Capmark included syndicating and performing fair market valuation on commercial real estate loans for the firm’s balance sheet.
Kahan has nearly two decades of rating agency experience, nine of which he served as the global head of the RMBS group at KBRA. During that time, he has built a team with senior members averaging 21 years’ experience. The team provides ratings and research across the mortgage securitization landscape including prime, non-QM, second liens, GSE CRTs and esoteric assets such as reverse mortgages and mortgage servicing rights. Kahan will continue to lead RMBS while Edward DeVito and Patrick Gervais will assume the day-to-day operations of the unit. DeVito and Gervais are industry veterans, with 31 and 18 years’ experience, respectively, and have been with the firm since 2017 and 2014.
“Yee and Jack’s vision and dedication to analytical thought leadership and excellence have been instrumental in the development of KBRA’s first-in-class Structured Finance platform,” Eric Thompson, global head of structured finance at KBRA, said. “I look forward to them strengthening KBRA’s mission to provide best-in-class analysis to the investors and the broader structured finance marketplace.”
